"To lose weight they do physical exercise and diet to a crazy extreme. They continue to suffer in a cycle of successful weight loss, rebounds, dieting, binge eating and anorexia."

Many Chinese would recognize the following scenes: A few male university students knock into a female classmate in the street and rather than offering her a courteous hello, one of them blurts out,"What's with the flab? Are you in love or are you just eating too much food?"

In the university canteen the males notice that a woman is being very picky with what she orders, and one asks her,"Are you counting calories or something?" not realizing this could cause offense.

While women are less inclined to talk to each other that way, they do seem to envy anyone they see who has an ideal body shape. There are also women who are obviously prettier and thinner than many internet celebrities whose ways of keeping trim include inducing vomiting in the toilet.

Health experts such as Li Xueni, chief physician at the Institute of Mental Health, Peking University Sixth Hospital, says the influx of diversified fashion information and the resulting social pressure on women has played a big role in shaping people's attitudes to dieting.

"In recent years the number of people with eating disorders coming to our hospital for treatment has soared," Li wrote in Psychology and Health, a health magazine sold nationally.