Slimming: truth vs myth

Hong Kong Today
ISSUES
ISSUES
Monday, November 6, 2006
S having a roundish body figure a sin? To play the role of a
chubby (豐滿的) woman in the drama series To Grow with Love
(肥田囍事), actress Myolie Wu Hang-yee (胡杏兒) had to gain much
weight. Upon completion of production of the series, Myolie
immediately started a slimming programme to get rid of those additional pounds. The prevailing belief that “slim is beautiful” has led
many people to go on slimming programmes at the expense of their
health.
Myolie’s “stunt” of increasing her weight from 110 pounds to 152
pounds has attracted much attention. In one of the scenes in the drama
I
series, actor Andy Hui (許志安) had to carry Myolie in his arms and
throw her up in the air. The actor had to do it a few times to get it right.
Afterwards, reporters asked Hui whether he would choose a chubby girl as a girlfriend in real life. He said: “It doesn’t matter if she is fat
or thin. Being on the chubby side is in fact a sign of good fortune.
What’s important is the personality. Two people must be able to get
along to maintain a good relationship.”
Right after shooting for the series had completed, Myolie started to
take off the weight she had gained. She said the programme has helped
her shed more than 20 pounds so far.
1. Health comes first
THE most important purpose of slimming is to
stay healthy. Slimming by means that will harm
your health defeats the very purpose of the exercise.
5. Do not misuse medication
RELIANCE on medication to achieve slimming effects is
not advisable. Many so-called “slimming drugs” cause
serious side effects.
6. Correct eating habits
2. Understand the causes of the condition
of being overweight
TO shed excessive weight effectively, one must
first find out the cause of being overweight.
Consulting doctors or dieticians will help.
3. Avoid radical means
EXCESSIVE fasting (禁食) or exercising
will cause the body to break down. Take
things one step at a time.
4. Cultivate healthy habits
The misguided perception that “slim is beautiful” is one
that needs changing, writes Chow Suk Ping
MANY people see slimming as a oneoff exercise. As a result, they gain
back weight quickly after their programme is finished. To maintain
healthy body weight, you must live
healthily. Making healthy habits part
of your life is the best way to avoid
falling back into the overweight trap
again.
TO control your body weight in a healthy manner takes
discipline and planning. A good starting point is to find out
the amount of calories you need with reference to your
age and health condition. Correspond that with the calorie
values of various food items to design your menu. You
should also take three meals daily at regular hours, and
have a balanced diet.
WEIGHT
WEIGHT
Slimming advice
7. Exercise properly
EXERCISING is good for the body because it helps to burn
off excess fat, increase the rate of metabolism and relax
the mind. However, you must do it regularly. A 30-minute
session two or three times a week will do.
8. Determination (決心) and perseverance (毅力)
THE most common reason why slimming efforts fail is
the lack of determination and discipline to keep going.
With proper eating and exercising habits, everybody can
have a healthy and well-proportioned body, as long as
you keep at it.
Translated by Lon Yan
Slimming: truth vs myth
IN Hong Kong, many people subscribe to the view that
being slim is beautiful. To maintain their preferred body
image, many artistes are constantly on slimming programmes. Slimming has also become fashionable among
young people. Let’s look at some “facts” about slimming.
See if you can separate the truth from the myths.
1. Standing helps to burn fat. Therefore, stand as much as
you can and avoid sitting down. Also, you can gain
weight by sleeping, so sleep as little as possible.
2. If you are overweight (過重), slimming will solve all the
problems for you. So try as hard as you can to lose
weight.
3. Excessive dieting may lead to bulimia nervosa (暴食症).
4. Most eating disorders are caused by excessive dieting
(過度節食).
5. Nicknames like “porkchop” or “pig’s belly” are just
harmless jokes.
Cases of eating disorders
Case 1 : Years of excessive dieting have severely
affected the health of a 17-year-old girl. Her body’s
development has been severely
curtailed. As a result, she is only
1.45 metres tall, weighing less
than 24 kilograms. She is so weak
that she is unable to stand on her own. For
a long time, she avoided sitting down and cut
back on her sleep, believing falsely that these
practices would help her lose weight. Her
obsession (頑念) with dieting has also damaged
her relationship with other family members.
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6. Beauty is all about how you look. Therefore being fat will
lead to a loss of confidence.
7. Losing weight by doing exercises, such as ball games and
jogging, is healthier than relying on medication (藥物).
8. If you think you are fat, you should avoid going to places
where you have to expose your body. Stay away from
the beach or swimming pools because people may laugh
at you.
9. Young people must start keeping fit when they are in secondary school. Do everything it takes to keep a beautiful
body shape.
10. Slimming programmes that claim to help people shed 12
kilograms in a month are harmful to health even if they
work.
11. In choosing your partner, body shape is not a consideration. What is important is that your personalities must
be compatible (合拍) with each other.
Case 2 : A young girl does not want to be the only “fat” person in
the family, so she forces other family members to consume highcalorie food. She prepares sandwiches saturated with butter and
stuffed with luncheon meat as breakfast for her family, and makes
sure that her younger brother eats multiple meals a day.
Hong Kong girls are image-conscious
A SURVEY has found that girls in Hong Kong start to become concerned about their body image at an average age of 13.1 years. This is
one of the factors leading to widespread unhealthy dieting and slimming practices.
The survey by Dove and Harvard interviewed 100 girls between
the ages of 15 and 17 in regions including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea
and Singapore. Here are some of the results:
(1) Hong Kong girls are more conscious about their self-image than
Questions to ponder
“A GIRL’S sense of self is fragile (易受破壞的) and
impressionable (易受人影響的). She needs positive role models and encouraging messages to
strengthen her self-respect and sense of selfworth. Our society presents girls with relentless
images of ’ideal’ female faces and bodies and little else. This does nothing to foster self-esteem
(自尊). We need to show girls the diversity of true
beauty and help them to discover their own
unique beauty and take pride and pleasure in it.”
After reading the above observation from Dr
Nancy Etcoff, Ph.D, professor at Harvard University and director of the Program in Aesthetics and
Well Being at the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry, think about these
questions:
What are some of the factors that affect people’s ideas about
their self-image?
What can we do to help people develop a proper concept of
self-image?
Should being beautiful be the only yardstick for measuring selfworth? If not, what other things are important?
their counterparts in other places in the region. The one thing
they want to change the most is their body weight.
(2) 96 percent of Hong Kong girls want to change their body image.
48 percent hope to change their weight and height, 43 percent
want to be slimmer, with 23 percent trying to achieve their goal
by dieting.
(3) 97 percent of those interviewed said they would avoid certain
activities out of concern about their body image.
(4) According to figures from the Hong Kong Eating Disorders Association (香港進食失調康復會), of the 684 cases of eating disorder
recorded between 2000 and 2005 in Hong Kong, more than 60
percent were bulimia nervosa (暴食症), and about 30 percent
were anorexia nervosa (厭食症). The average age of onset was
between 15 and 19. Those who are on a diet are five to eight times
more likely to develop eating disorders.
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