was meaning to talk about this one of these days, and since i've just been accused of having an obsession "about fitness and being fat and stuff", i guess now's the appropriate time to speak out.

1. why is it that our society (particularly asian, and particularly singaporean) wants women to be thin? why is it that advertisements always feature stick thin models, and why is it that all our female pop stars (think jolin tsai, fann wong etc) have to look consistently anorexic in order to be popular? where does this inbuilt desire to be thin stem from?

i’ll share something: 4 years ago, i had this gymnastics coach from china who was not only a scarily flexible contortionist, but was also scarily thin. this was the muscular sort of thin, btw, not the grossly flabby and flaccid sort of thin. anyway, this coach of mine used to stress that all of us on the gym team follow her nutrition regime: starvation. i swear, whenever we had successive b div and c div training sessions and she had to train us from 9am to 3pm, we never once saw her eat anything. in fact, the only thing that entered her mouth was water. i remember how horrified she would be whenever a few of us would enter the gymnasium holding plastic bags of burgers and fries, or even drinking from paper cups with "coca cola" labelled conspicuously across them. even remnants of junk food were offensive to her, and she would never allow us to get away with leaving even empty bags of food in front of her. then, there’d be her usual "you’re getting fat and need to lose weight" speeches, followed by an extra set of PT for the victims. i remember having to balance on tip-toes with one leg in a vertical splits position for 10 minutes once after this madwoman determined that the 0.5 kg i had gained was preventing me from executing her routines properly. seriously, i hated her.

i think that in western societies, the ideal body weight of females is a lot healthier than what we asians perceive it to be. maybe it's because women over there get to hide under layers of clothes for most parts of the year? the newspaper once ran this article on local celebrities and their weights, and practically every single one of them (female, 20-somethings) had body mass indexes (BMIs) of 16-18. what’s considered the "healthy" range is 18.5- 25. yet, we have all these people plastered on slimming ads where they relate their "success stories", as such ingraining in us the idea that thin is beautiful.

it doesn’t stop there. the more you think about it, the more you realise that you don’t just want to be thin; you want to be thin thin thin. sumiko tan once wrote that even though she’s probably considered slim, she still harbours the guilty desire of being even thinner than this, and that this new standard of "thin" evolves into something that is continually changing and thus continually sought after. i think that to some extent, all women share this view, including myself. and because of this, we are never content with the way our bodies are, and are on perpetual crusades against the new spots of "flab" that keep appearing in the mirror.

so really, i guess our society as a whole has evolved into one that is "fatophobic" and constantly assaulted by media that perpetuates this. although perhaps the irony is that along with our increasing obsession with being thin has followed the rise of deep-fried fast food empires. so, maybe we're eating more unhealthily, but we're also more conscious of it? and while we harp on about "inner beauty", none of us wants to be faced with the stigma of being the fat girl who's always inadvertently the butt of insensitive jokes.

2. which leads to the next point: exercise. here i need to clarify that i wasn’t always an exercise freak. for the most part of my life, i have sought to be sedentary and laughed at people who go to the gym. but this changed last year when i came to JC and discovered that there exist whole congregations of girls who actually voluntarily exercise on a regular basis (in fact, my first theory on why almost every girl in rj is thin was that all the fat girls are locked up in a broom cupboard so that nobody sees them.) it took me a while to get over this initial shock, but eventually i submitted to the idea that people nowadays tend to exercise to keep fit. and so i started exercising, and soon joined the ranks of those whom i had previously classified as freaks.

to clarify another thing: exercise in itself is not fun. maybe this wasn’t clear in my previous blogs, but after thinking about it for some time, i can confirm that exercise itself isn’t an end, but the means to an end. you exercise to lose weight, you exercise to get toned, you exercise to not fail your napfa—losing weight, getting toned and not failing napfa are all fun; exercise isn’t. it’s just something which you have to do in order to achieve your desired result, and (if you’re lucky) settles into being a past-time which provides a purposeful avenue to channel your energy to. nobody enjoys running on the treadmill, you only run because this running is going to help you become thinner or win a marathon. and in the event that you –do- enjoy running for no reason at all, then you genuinely are some kind of sick freak, and have more to worry about than just your weight.

3. on why us girls tend to obsess about diets and fitness—it's true, but that’s just how we are! guys obsess about sports, cars, and computers, so why can’t girls obsess about how we look? it’s been proven that women’s conversations typically revolve around diet and clothes, but what’s wrong with that? half of us in the world have to fulfil the feminine quota, and what else do you expect us to talk about, newtonian physics???

what do you think?