Extreme diets take toll on health.
By Zora Yan
Being called as “fat pig” by her university classmates, Zhang Zichu adopted various extreme diet plans she found online as she could not stand the discrimination and insult.
While studying at Xiamen University in 2016, Zhang strictly controlled her food intake, eating poached food only for eight months. She might even only eat 500g of poached spinach or an apple with skimmed milk or 50g of corn kernels with a tomato in a meal.
“Sometimes, 10 cherry tomatoes were enough for me to have a meal,” Zhang recalls the torment when she was 21 years old.
Not only controlling what she ate, but Zhang also used “Fairy Tube” she bought online which cost RMB ¥76 (US $10.5) to induce vomiting.
It is a 40cm long rubber tube with a diameter of 2.5cm that she would insert directly from her mouth into her stomach along the esophagus, allowing food to spit out along the tube.
“I used the tube to help me vomit after I eat a large amount of food,” Zhang says.
“The ‘Fairy Tube’ allowed me to enjoy a wide variety of food without worrying about getting fat. I had to start every meal by having some ice cream and drinking water throughout the whole eating process to help vomit all the food easily after every meal,” she adds.
Zhang used the method twice a week during the horrible eight months. She would also do eight to nine hours of exercise in the gym every day.
The extreme diet, the “Fairy Tube” and exercise led her to a loss of 70kg. But for five years, she experienced a lack of menstruation, she also lost a lot of hair and teeth.
Feeling immense pressure in life, Zhang told her mother that she had a desire to end her own life.
Having noticed Zhang’s emotional disturbance, her mother took Zhang to the Peking University Sixth Hospital for treatment in 2019, out of concerns for Zhang’s personal safety.
Zhang was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder with a serious mental health condition, that one would try to keep the weight as low as possible.
Standing at 160cm, Zhang’s weight dropped to 25kg, the lowest point of her life in 2019 from 105kg in 2016. And her heart rate was only 39 beats per minute whilst the normal resting heart rate for adults is between 60 and 100 beats per minute, according to Britain’s National Health Service.
“I felt like I was not a human anymore. I was just like a devil living in this world,” Zhang says.
After three months of hospital supervision, she had three balanced meals a day and took medications such as Olanzapine, Quetiapine, and Prozac, to treat her mental conditions. She gradually recovered.
Also diagnosed with anorexia nervosa was Shao Panpan, who adopted extreme diets she found online in 2023. She weighed only 30kg with a height of 160cm at that time.
Her classmates laughed at her because of her weight, so Shao decided to lose weight when she was in high school in January 2023.
“There is a popular weight loss method called liquid fasting (only drink liquid without sugar for 3 meals) on social media, so I imitated it to achieve my weight loss goal,” Shao says.
She recalled that she quickly lost 2kg in one day, but her weight rebounded easily, so she tried to find other methods on the Internet.
During her online research, she was misled by many “skinny” bloggers on social media, who shared their daily food intake and their slim bodies, making her believe that she could lose weight if she ate less than them.
Shao also regarded her parents who tried to help her regain health as “enemies”.
“I just put food in my mouth and spit it out when my parents were not looking at me,” she says.
In April 2024, after a year of experiencing these extreme diets, Shao lost weight to 30kg. She was unable to concentrate in class, unable to stand, and even experienced urinary and fecal incontinence.
Worried about Shao’s health, her parents brought her to the hospital. She even developed severe pneumonia and she was in critical condition a week after because of her low body weight.
“When I was about to lose my life because of my extreme weight loss, I realized that the methods shared online were actually incorrect,” Shao says.
“The excessive weight loss had caused me great distress because of various side effects it brought, such as irregular menstrual cycles, hair thinning, and mental fatigue,” she adds.
Shao learns from her personal experience that health is the most important thing when it comes to losing weight and urges everyone not to blindly follow extreme diets shared online.
Lecturer Peggy Yip Pui-Sze from the School of Life Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, warns people should not rely on online information regarding extreme diets and notes the information is not clinically and scientifically proven.
“Those who adopt these diets may experience malnutritional, as they do not have a balanced diet and only eat one type of food or avoid certain kinds of food groups,” Pui says.
She says extreme diets might lead to a sharp fall in weight at the beginning, but such diet plans may have detrimental effects on the body.
“There is no shortcut to weight control. Changing unhealthy eating habits in daily life and exercise are required,” she says.
Pui urges those who are experiencing eating disorders to seek help from professionals.
Edited by Molisa Meng
Sub-edited by Carrie Lock
