How Thin is Too Thin?

At the risk of ruffling some feathers and perhaps coming across as a little obnoxious, the one-compound-word answer to the question of “How thin is too thin?” is “model-thin!” There, I said it. Those supermodels you see strutting their stuff, or rather strutting “the clothes designers’ stuff,” are just simply way too thin. For the modelling industry they may be just the right degree of thin, but for anybody who has any interest in maintaining a healthy body and mind, that degree of skinniness is just way too much. Even those models themselves don’t stay that thin throughout their entire lives – heck not even throughout a period of about two months or longer. Most stick-thin models essentially prepare for their modelling gigs by going on crash diets and “eating cardboard” as one model put it. Another model even admitted to carrying out some bulimic tendencies by eating to curb her hunger-induced craving for some nourishment, after which she stuck her finger down her throat to throw it all up again – yuck!

This type of behaviour is just not healthy, so too the state of your body if your model-thin appearance is sustained over some time. For models themselves, it’s perhaps only something they sometimes feel they have to put themselves through as part of their professionalism in the job they do, but you just simply cannot sustain it and it’s just not healthy over the long term. That’s why a lot of models look completely different on those occasions when you might perhaps bump into them away from the ramp or outside of the glossy magazine pages. It’s also why modelling careers don’t last forever. At some point in your life, if your body gets used to being tricked into having to settle for a little bit of nourishment, it will find a way to extract as much as it can out of whatever little you eat. So on your quest to lose some weight, you could perhaps be replacing solid, sizable meals with weight loss shakes, but this shouldn’t go on forever. Meal replacement supplements are good at doing their job, but they aren’t meant to be used forever.

Once you’ve managed to drop your weight down to the desired size, being careful not to fall into the trap of believing that one can never be too thin, it becomes about regulating and maintaining your weight. This is best achieved through exercise and perhaps introducing some supplements geared towards the production of energy into your diet. Sports supplements work best in this instance because many of them, like perhaps a breakfast energy bar, can be safely incorporated into the daily diet of someone who has committed to elevated levels of physical activity – something you would naturally do if you wanted to maintain the weight that you’ve managed to drop down to in a sustainable way.

As much as we choose to ignore it, our gut (quite literally) tells us precisely how thin too thin is by way of letting us know when we’re hungry and when we’re full as well. Otherwise if you want a medically-backed way of knowing how thin too thin is for you specifically, a simple pop in to your GP’s office will do the trick, via a simple Body Mass Index (BMI) analysis.