Philip Lim

Fauzi Rassull, second from left, posing with friends in Singapore. The 20-year-old uses his popular blog, “The Male Bitch,” to share eating tips and talk about weight loss. (Photo: Roslan Rahman, AFP)

Thin Is in for Singapore Despite Anorexia Fears

Fauzi Rassull’s figure is, for many young Singaporeans, to die for.

The slim 20-year-old, a popular blogger among the affluent city-state’s fashionable youngsters, flaunts his 1.73-meter, 60-kilogram frame in glamour shots splashed on his sites.

Followers share tips on eating and Fauzi himself swears by his regimen of two meals a day consisting of bread, instant noodles and salad.

Thanks in part to anti-fat advocates like Fauzi, thin is in among Singaporean teens and young adults, but experts warn that the fad is behind a worrying spike in the number of people developing eating disorders.

“I don’t see myself as thin, I don’t think I’m thin now,” Fauzi insisted, saying he was aiming to cut his weight down to 53 kilograms.

Fauzi’s dream weight would put him below the healthy range of the Body Mass Index system used in many countries to measure fat.

At that weight, Fauzi, who does not hold a regular job and sells ads on his blog, would be risking “nutritional deficiency diseases and osteoporosis” based on the BMI scale of the Singapore Health Promotion Board, a government agency.

Fauzi, whose blog “The Male Bitch” was voted Singapore’s most popular blog for four consecutive weeks in 2009, denies he is encouraging anorexia, which afflicts many Asian youngsters.

“I just want to be skinny and people misinterpret skinny and anorexic,” he said, referring to hate mail he has received from outraged people accusing him of promoting the eating disorder.

Medical studies show anorexia has become an endemic problem in Asian countries, whether in industrial powerhouses such as Japan and South Korea or emerging economies like India.

Singapore is no exception, with the Eating Disorders Program of the Singapore General Hospital reporting five new cases a month. Many other cases are handled by private clinics.

Singapore has a resident population of just 3.64 million, of whom 13.4 percent are between the ages of 15 and 24, the demographic most susceptible to the disorder, according to psychiatrist Ken Ung.

“I think that the eating disorders are sort of a novelty, curiosity, so they are fairly popular to young people,” said Ung, who has studied anorexia for years.

He disapproves of Web sites and blogs such as Fauzi’s due to their influence among the young.

“These sites should be taken down, definitely it is harmful to that small vulnerable minority that will be influenced,” he said.

Popular social networking site Facebook apparently shares the same sentiments.

Fauzi said his 900-strong Facebook group, “Get Thin or Die Trying,” saw a spike in membership before it was taken down by site administrators in April this year. He was also issued a warning and refused permission to start a new Facebook group.

In a copy of the warning sent to Fauzi, Facebook said the site does not allow “groups that are hateful, threatening or obscene.”

But Fauzi, who is also the creator of “The Thinspo Club” on Facebook’s rival social networking site Friendster, said all he was trying to do was gather like-minded individuals to share slimming tips.

Agence France-Presse

Your View

See Result