Hi everyone; this isn’t a privilege, but an idea that a good friend of mine and I were thinking of after we came across the show Supersize vs. Superskinny. I’m sure you’re familiar for it, but for those of you who aren’t, it’s a UK-based television program that takes a seriously underweight person and a person considered to be “obese” and forces them to swap diets for a week while in a feeding clinic. The result, without fail, is always a skinny person being faced a considerable portion of food, while the fat person sips nothing but a cup of tea for two of the three meals of the day. If you’re not mortified, let me tell you a little tale.

As you’re all aware, what you eat and what your body look like never really quite pleasantly correlate as much as this show thinks. As a thin friend and I were watching it, we knew this quite well. Why? Because I’ve had a very bad relationship with food ever since I was a child due to the world I live in, and I legitimately can’t make myself eat any more than most of these Superskinnys on the vast majority of days. Typically, if I top 900 calories (by which I mean hit 901) I have a panic attack and spend the rest of the night on the treadmill. Still fat. My thin friend, however, eats… well…she could put many, if not all, of the 300, 400, and 500 pound participants on this show to shame. And she knew this.

During the show, one of the things they did in earlier seasons was to face both participants with the true sum of what a week’s worth of their food looks like. The show illustrates it really poorly by throwing all of this food into a large tube and mixing it together in a very unappetizing fashion, and thankfully, they’ve stopped this in the most recent seasons due to it being an outrageous waste of food. The idea of all of this, however, was to show that the fat person has out of control eating and eats more in a meal than this thin person does in the week.

She and I are considering doing a model of this experiment where we both collect a week’s worth of our food that we eat generally, while not trying to lose or gain weight, and photograph it to compare. A rough estimate shows her already clocking in 4x the amount of calories I do numerically after three days, so we’re expecting some funny results. How do you explain that, Dr. Christian?