Diet, Emotional Eating, and Disorders (Child and Adolescent)

Since more and more young girls in China view body image as hugely important, Zhang et al. (2018) aimed to find out what female college students associate with underweight body-image. This study administered questionnaires to 2023 young students from 8 Chinese universities, and recruited another 160 subjects for the qualitative study. Of the 2023 participants, 73% (1484) had taken action to lose weight in the previous six months, while 30.55% (618) were already underweight. Moreover, 1161 young women (57%) expressed their desire to be much thinner. Some girls in the underweight category followed non-scientific diets and forms of physical activity. The problematic thin-ideal (perceiving the BMI of less than 18.5 as ideal) is believed to be influenced by the respondents’ BMI, advice from peers, as well as western culture. The author concludes that western influences leading to the "problematic thin-ideal" and "unhealthy weight-control behavior" have made female college students in China want this underweight body image, which could be detrimental to health.