Not enough space to restore from backup

My MacBook Air, version 10.7.4, has been having a few issues lately so I wanted to restore my entire system from my Time Machine backup from yesterday. However, when I restart in Recovery System, navigate to yesterday's backup and click on Macintosh HD to restore to, a notice appears saying "this disk does not have enough disk space to restore your system."
The backup is from my same computer, and in the meantime I have even deleted several GB. So how can a backup be larger than the system it came from? My laptop has 120 GB of storage, (112 taken) and as far as I can tell my backup is 107 GB.
Does anyone know what I can do?

You're saying I should put the backup on another, bigger external drive, erase everything on my computer and restore from the 2nd external drive? Sounds a bit risky, especially if I erase my computer and the problem is with the backup.

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