Body shape weighs heavily on women

Rarely achieved

In China, "fat" has become a word that women will do almost anything to avoid being associated with. This is not surprising, given that being slim as a beauty ideal has become the subject of countless newspaper stories, TV commercials and movies, resulting in the almost universal correlation between a slim figure and beauty.

Pan Wenjing, an assistant professor in communication at Renmin University of China, said: "Women are bombarded with images of female celebrities on TV who are almost always well below average weight, which can rarely be achieved in real life. Once they accept this 'thin idea' of ideal beauty, they tend to become much more self-critical about their bodies."

For most Chinese women who spend five hours a day on average on their smartphones, social media platforms have provided outlets for them to discuss body weight.

With a huge number of images available of super-thin actresses and models, women have been focusing attention on a "problem" that is only in their minds.

This trend was underlined in 2016 when scores of women shared photos on Sina Weibo to prove that their waists did not protrude from behind an A4-sized sheet of paper－a "standard" they believed to be the norm.

A man giving his name as Million Zhao, who has nearly 800,000 followers on Sina Weibo and works as a part-time commercial photographer, said that virtually all his female clients ask him to alter their pictures digitally to make them appear skinnier before they are posted online－even those who are already super-thin.

The 30-year-old also engages in "fat talk" with his friends, and sometimes jokes about his rotund belly to his followers on Sina Weibo.

He said, "Different from women, guys my age or younger engage more in 'muscle talk' because they want to be bigger and stronger", while many middle-aged men who have gained weight get caught up in "fat talk", as they "want to lose weight and be heathier rather than prettier."

Denise Martz, a professor of psychology at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, US, said, "Social media is giving women a false sense of how they usually look.

"Often these pictures do not represent how these individuals look in real life without the posing, the filters, the photoshopping and the professional hair and make-up," Martz said.

Pan, the Renmin University researcher, also believes that pictures shared frequently on social media impose peer pressure on women.

"If people around you look thin on WeChat Moments, you are inevitably anxious to fit the general profile of having the 'right look'," she said.

Articles have also gone viral in summer on WeChat Moments, with sensational headlines such as "Good-looking girls never weigh more than 50 kilograms" or "If you don't lose weight in May, you will cry out loud in June".

Shen Zijiao, a psychological consultant at Beijing Normal University, said: "Women don't know what kind of beauty is best for them; they just thumb through their phone screens and get the notions of 'being slender' consciously or unconsciously. They always worry if their bodies are inconsistent with the so-called perfect body shape."

Since women have "internalized the thin ideal" from social media, they develop a negative relationship with their bodies. This often leads them to engage in "fat talk"－resulting in much lower self-esteem, Shen added.

Ye, from Hangzhou, who works as an accountant for Silergy Corp, said more than 90 percent of her colleagues in the finance department are women, ranging in age from the early 20s to late 40s. Some have families, while others are single or just "jump into" romantic relations. But all of them have varying degrees of dissatisfaction with their body shape.

"Every woman in our office is unhappy with at least one part of her body. One of them might say her face is too round, while others are unhappy with their arms when we sit together and gossip," said Ye, who weighs 48 kg but frowns as she looks at the shape of her thighs.

"I have often thought I would be more attractive if my thighs were thinner," she said, adding that one of her colleagues had not eaten dinner for at least two years in order to stay slim.

However, Martz, the Appalachian State University professor, warned that excessive concern can aggravate an impression of poor body shape, cause anxiety and depression, and, more important, could pave the way to eating disorders in extreme cases.

According to the nonprofit US National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, at least 30 million US citizens of all ages, both male and female, have an eating disorder.

An article published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2016 said nearly 20 million people in European countries had eating disorders that cost healthcare systems more than 1 trillion euros ($1.12 trillion) annually.

This is also a growing problem in Asia, and such a trend could prompt the kind of initiatives that have been launched in some Western countries to encourage "body positivity" or ban misleading images and extremely thin models in advertising.

In addition, multinational companies such as Dove and Johnson & Johnson have introduced "body positive" campaigns in an effort to overturn fat-shaming stereotypes that have long been part of mass media advertising.