ABSTRACT
Until recently, anorexia nervosa was largely an obscure illness outside of the developed West. However, it is now becoming a common clinical problem among young females in Hong Kong and other high-income Asian societies such as Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea. At the same time as economic liberalisation led to the deregulation of advertising, anorexia nervosa has also appeared in major cities in lowincome Asian countries such as China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia (Efron, 1997; Vaidyanathan et al., 1998; Waterson, 2000). This new-found pathology, commonly associated with fat rejection, has ironically appeared among young Asian women who are constitutionally slim by Western standards.
