The Fat Offensive

Hong Kong has a fat obsession. Or rather, it has a skinny obsession. Take a look around. If you're reading this somewhere in the city, chances are you can see an advertisement for a slimming product. Every other ad on the MTR, buses, television, and magazines seem to be for products that promise to make you skinny with little or no effort on your behalf. In a recent copy of the city's biggest-selling news weekly "Next" magazine, for example, 110 of the 150 ads were for beauty and slimming products. And most of them feature a smiling, super-slim model-slash-actress, often airbrushed to unachievable perfection. Our city is literally plastered with withi images of “perfect” people - billboards of models to emulate, body shapes to envy. It's like living in a teenager's bedroom.

According to local advertising monitoring company AdmanGo, in 2004 the beauty industry (beauty, slimming, fitness, cosmetics and skincare) spent more on advertising than any other sector, including the behemoth banking and property industries, for the third year in a row. Last year, it spent a staggering HK$5.1 billion on ads. That's $1.4 billion more than in 2003 and $3.2 billion more than in 2001.

"We're not in the business of shaping society's ideals," says the spokesman for beauty company Be A Lady Ltd, Siu Yeu-yuen. "Society says thin is beautiful. All we do is provide a way to achieve it. If you gave me US$100 billion to show fat people are beautiful, it wouldn't work."

In some respects, he has a point. After all, fragile women have been a Chinese ideal - at least among the nobility - for at least 2,500 years. In the Chu-un Chiu period (722BC-481BC), Emperor Chu desired his women so slender that many starved themselves to death to win his favor in the afterlife. A few hundred years later, Empress Fei-yin was revered for being slim enough to "dance on a palm," and 18th-century fictional heroine Lin Daiyu was lovingly described in "Dream of the Red Chamber" as being so thin "she could barely stand the breeze." And then there's the centuries-long tradition of foot- and waist-binding. But the modern media and beauty industry are certainly guilty of perpetuating the idea that thin is beautiful. And we are buying it.

Just look at the vital statistics of Miss Hong Kong contestants over the past 45 years. A study by the Chinese University found that while the average beauty pageant entrant's waist size has not changed much since 1960, the girls are a good few inches taller. Proportionally, our ideal girls are getting thinner. And as our idea of beauty drops in dress sizes, the number of people with eating disorders - anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa - are rising. (Both disorders are psycho-physiological, brought on by the fear of obesity; anorexics starve themselves, bulimics binge on food then immediately purge.) The reported cases of bulimia have increased 10-fold in the past three years and 50-fold in the past decade, says the executive officer for the Hong Kong Eating Disorder Association Philippa Yu. That's a scary statistic, although the actual numbers are still fairly small. "In 2001, we had 15 people come to HEDA for help with bulimia. In 2004, the number had risen to 158," Yu says. "We're certain that for every person that comes in, there are at least 10 people - probably many more - out there bingeing and purging, too ashamed to come for help. And for each of these 10, there are probably a 100 more that are dieting, trying to achieve perfect thinness." If she's right, that makes 158,000 people with eating problems.

Most sufferers are young, female and impressionable - and many are the children of women who are also preoccupied by weight. At the extreme end of the scale are girls like Theresa. In many respects, Theresa is a typical 16-year-old who plasters her room with posters of Faye Wong and complains about her little sister ("She doesn't respect me"). But Theresa is anorexic. She's 168cm tall, and weighs just 30kg. She's frighteningly thin, with facial features that stick out prominently from her sunken skin. Things were worse two months ago, when she weighed just 28kg. Now she attends a psychiatric clinic for people with eating disorders run by the Chinese University in Sha Tin, one of several frontline help groups in the city. It's a busy place - busier, according to a clinic technician, than last year, and the year before that.

In a recent study of 1,192 local women, HEDA found that although 82 percent were normal or underweight for their height, 70 percent wanted to be slimmer. They desired, they told HEDA, to lose 10 pounds in three weeks - an unhealthy target according to medical practitioners. It's that desire to lose weight fast, and the likely failure to do so, that feeds the slimming industry. By holding up images of freakishly slender and tall supermodels as ideals, the media and beauty industry breed feelings of inadequacy among shorter, curvier women, who then become easy targets for the latest slimming drink, miracle pill or magic diet. Even 30 minutes of watching television can change one's ideal body image, according to a much-quoted 1992 US study, "The Elastic Body Image." So it's not hard to imagine what living in our slimming ad-bedecked city can do to a girl.