Body image
The struggle to get in a good body image in ASIA.
Brief Short story: Many Asia young girls will say “I am not fat under American standards”, but I am consider chubby in Asia. She’s approximately 5’1 and 100 pounds give or take. The Asia beauty standard is to keep their body weight within 110 pounds. Well, they would want to have a desire height as well, but a desired height extremely hard to attain. In Asian culture, eating is a form of commitment and affection from the family. Some traditional parents will feed their children a lot of food to show affection. To explain these phenomena comes from their parents’ impoverished lifestyle when they grow up. They wish their children to never to struggle from starvation.
Background: In Asian culture, there are different expectations of a body image for women and men. For men, they often don't need to care too much about their body image. A good men body image comes mainly from being independently affluent, working in a well-renown company. A perfect body image for women is being slim, tall, petite, and cute. These are different from beauty standards from western culture. Focusing on the issue in women, body dissatisfaction can be a problem when they don’t have perfect model dimensions. “Most Asians girls generally showed a considerable degree of convergence towards general population women's negative attitudes to large body size.” To keep a good body image brings a women lot of advantage. For example, job opportunity, chances of promotion, easier sex life, and marry a rich husband and higher confidence level. So for all those reasons, many women will try their best to fight for a good body image. Body image includes physical characteristics: facial features, skin color, height, weight, and body shape looks, good body shape, and overall good impression. These are crucial characteristics that men will look in women across all cultures. In Asian households, the parents will often comment on their daughters’ weight, which will add pressure for young girls work towards a perfect body image. Parents have that habit is because they hope their daughter “marry rich” to a man. In order to walk on that path, their daughters must possess the criteria for rich man desire.
Problems: Many potential problems will arise when asian women start to build a good body image. In leslie johnson’s article, “eating disorder in asia”, he highlights how disasatisfaction with body weight will cause problems such as eating disorder. A study was done in Taiwan using 843 schoolgirls, age 10 to 14 (Wong et al., 2000). They collected data regarding traits such as “body-weight perception, body-weight satisfaction, desired body weight and attempts at intentional weight loss.” They classified the test population into groups: “obese, overweight, acceptable weight, underweight, or severely underweight.” The statistics has down “8.1% of the students classified as severely underweight, 10.4% underweight, 64.3% acceptable weight, 10.8% overweight, and 6.4% obese.” The majority Taiwanese schoolgirls fall under the bracket of 64.3% in acceptable weight. This number is actually quite high compare to the US and Canada. However, they perceive themselves in a higher weight category. The paper has come up with a conclusion that “dissatisfaction with body weight occurs in women in all weight categories” and “The desire for lower body weight also increased with age.”