By Hong Liang (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-13 08:00

Hi, boys and girls, it's no longer that cool to talk about dieting and staying thin.

As you may know, we are facing a global food crisis. The threat of a shortage in the supply of rice and some other essential foods seems real enough. The United Nations, among other august international agencies, has warned about "social unrest on an unprecedented scale" if the crisis is allowed to worsen.

So, stop preaching the gospel of dieting. You're not going to be so callous as to tell your starving neighbor that skipping meals will make him or her look good. Food crisis or not, the obsession with thinness is beginning to be challenged in some trendy circles. It's about time.

Advertisements that glorify and glamorize the emaciated look of skinny models for fashion houses and health clinics have become a subject of debate in France. A young woman weighting 170 pounds recently won a title in a beauty contest in London. Just a year ago, contestants of her size would never have a chance of passing through the initial screening process.

Deep down at the back of our minds, we all know that the obsession for staying thin can lead to serious behavioral problems. Eating disorder is not only health threatening, it can ruin the patient's social life. I don't know if any man would enjoy an evening out with a skinny, celery-stick-munching woman who is permanently preoccupied with watching her own waistline.

But judging by the avalanche of ads pushing diet pills and weight-loss programs on TV every evening, there is obviously no shortage of women who genuinely believe that they can't be too thin. Some of those ads make claims that sound downright absurd.

I often wonder what kind of a sucker would want to buy a portable sauna that looks like nothing more than an oversized plastic bag in which the user is supposed to make steam by boiling water on a stove. Nothing would have tempted me to have myself tugged into that contraption like those pretty-face models in the ad.

Indeed, the whole dieting craze spun out of control in the 1990s when food prices dropped to rock bottom levels. It looked like a counter-culture in the age of plenty when people in developed and developing countries indulged in all forms of excesses.

Hong Kong at that time enjoyed the dubious reputation of being a giant casino where rampant speculation by people in all walks of life pushed asset prices to improbable levels. Young professionals in the 20s drove expensive German cars and frequented posh hostess clubs where an evening of karaoke could easily set you back $2,000.

A high-class restaurant in an office tower in the financial district was nicknamed the "canteen" by the salary men and women in the many stockbrokerage houses and investment banks in that district. Although lunch at that eatery cost at least $50 per person, it was still considered cheap by patrons who had become accustomed to making a fast buck in the stock market.

In that environment of easy money and cheap foods, staying thin required a high level of self- discipline. Thinness was initially a badge of honor that distinguished the persons of intellect and culture from the hoard of money grabbers who were willing to make a fast buck by camping overnight outside developers' sales offices to be among the first in line to buy apartments for quick resale. But I still can't understand how being skinny eventually evolved into a prerequisite for beauty.

Those who have continued to be overly obsessed with their weight, please take note of this: the price of rice in the international market has more than doubled since the beginning of the year.

E-mail: jamesleung@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/13/2008 page8)