She told me that she usually orders a bowl of water on the side of her meal, into which she has to dip every morsel of food before it enters her mouth. “To wash off the excess oil,” she said. She told me that she steps on a scale weekly, and her weight is openly critiqued. And she told me how her agents would be upset if they knew she was here, having tea and scones with me.
Suddenly I was aware of just how insensitive I was, touting the goodness of the clotted cream I’d smeared on my scone. Things were a lot different when I first met Ting, then an opera student and aspiring singer. She was one of those “how does she do it?” girls, who could tear through a chicken fried steak and still look fabulous. Genetically blessed enough to have escaped the awkward bouts of adolescent development, only to end up in Hong Kong—the land of size 00 (boys, a double-zero is one size smaller than a zero).
Ting is probably a size 0. “Acceptable,” according to her agents, who are packaging her to be the next singing sensation. But they’ve got issues with her weight distribution. “Apparently, my body is fine, but they want my face skinnier,” Ting recounted, staring at the last scone on the plate. What she revealed next disturbed me to the core: “They want me to botox my cheeks, so that the muscles degenerate and look more sunken in.”
The twisted reasoning so follows: as people chew their food, they are actually working out the muscles in their cheeks and beefing up their face. The more you chew, the fatter the face looks. “Gum is a big no-no,” said Ting. And if you strategically inject the paralytic serum into your cheekbones, at precisely the areas where your jaw muscles chew, you prevent the chubby-face dilemma and sport a leaner, gaunt jaw line. Eat all you want, so long as you don’t chew, you won’t gain a pound on the face.
Altogether now: WTF?!
When you step outside the demarcations of the food world, the terrain is a much pricklier one. No applause sounds when the roasted pork shoulder enters the room. Just the faint grumble of hungry stomachs attached to the lollipop heads of stoic young girls with botox-ed cheeks slowly going into atrophy. Let’s face it: with the flux of weight-loss advertising plastered on every minibus, our town is hardly one that projects a positive message about eating habits.