korean diets

[tl;dr music] two week ago, we did a video about mukbangs and we talked about how some korean superstars are eating obscene amounts of food on camera and not gaining an ounce of weight off of it. this lead to a lot of discussion and comments that had nothing to do with the actual mukbangs but had to do with eating and eating disorders in korea.

korean diets, we also got a question from shivi who asked, "how are eating disorders treated in korea, how are they perceived in korea and if somebody has an eating disorder, is there any way to get them any help?" this is quite the topic. yes. yes it is.

now, one thing i want to say at the beginning is that some of the comments i also saw from people said things like "oh, asian girls are so skinny, i can't tell if they're anorexic or they're just asian" and that really actually makes me feel really upset because my sister is pretty much half of my size she's older than me, but she's like a size 0 to 1 and she's been very very petite her whole life, no eating disorder whatsoever. she's just small.

everyone's was like "you're anorexic", "what's wrong with you?", "you should eat more" she eats just fine, but this really caused a lot of problems for her and even know when she's older and if you say it to her like "are you going to finish your food?" like "oh you should eat more, you're so skinny" it makes her really, really upset because she is totally healthy. she is simply petite. there is a big difference between being petite and having an eating disorder.

and you shouldn't put those two in the same category. so let's start off with some basic stats: as of 2012, 130,000 people in korea were diagnosed with eating disorders. the two main eating disorders in korea are bulimia and anorexia, but the actual study did not differentiate between the two, so we don't know if one is higher than the other. about 80% of them were female while the rest were male and korean women in their 20s are 9 times more likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder then men. in 2010, there was a study conducted in which women were supposed to guess what they thought that they weighed, and very interestingly, 64.1% of them were incorrect about their own weights.

they actually overestimated what it was they thought that they weighed and in reality, they were either the correct weight or underweight. this doesn't just affect adults, it also affects younger students in 2010, another study was conducted in which 2226 students from grades 4 to 7 were surveyed and it found that 7% of them had disturbing eating habits and behaviours. now that last study is a little bit confusing to me because if you think about middle school, high school students in general around the world, it's not like we had the greatest eating habits right, it's like if i had a choice, i'd eat skittles all day.

uh, how much soda did you drink when you were growing up? when i was in high school, no joke, i drank 8 cans of soda a day. i don't know how i didn't explode, but here i am today, i've survived it. north american school lunches, even when they serve it in the cafeteria, is unbelievably unhealthy compared to what we've seen in korean schools now. mm hmm. we're not saying every single meal in korean schools is delicious, but it is certainly quite healthy. lots of vegetables, rice and soup, there's no pizza, no hot dogs, no hamburgers, french fries, no desserts, muffins, no junk food! it's all healthy korean food. yeah.

so i feel like that survey doesn't really distinguish the difference between having a good eating habit and between having an eating disorder. also, another thing that we're confused about is what the perception of healthy is in korea because there's not one universal understanding of it. i remember when we were both teachers, when we had lunch with our co-workers and a lot of them would be surprised that we wouldn't eat a lot of rice and they would say that it's unhealthy for us not to eat rice, rice is very healthy and important and while for us, if we eat rice, it goes directly to our asses. so our bodies metabolize differently than korean people do, so i'm sure the korean perception of health is very different than our perception of health.

now when they talked about the fact that people did have disturbing attitudes and that a lot of people in their twenties had eating disorders, i kinda understand that with my experience with my high school students because a lot of them looked up to k-pop idols. i think because of the images we see in the media like all around the world, i think it makes us want to look a certain way and then that causes us to do a lot of things like dieting. in fact, according to a 2010 study by the korean ministry of health, 1 out of 5 women and 1 out of 10 men are undernourished due to dieting. terrible. that is terrible. they're not healthy diets, they're more like starvation, deprivation diets that they're going through.

yeah. i mean, we've seen a lot of crazy diet trends which we've talked about in another tl;dr as well yes and i've also seen like people that i know when i was still teaching, people would just come with with just a sweet potato and then eat that, and i'm like "that's a really good idea for a snack" and they're like "it's my meal for the day!" and i'm like- "it's not a snack. this is it. this is the day's food." and the problem is it's not a healthy form of dieting. no. i'm not saying that there's anything wrong with going on a diet, we've been on diets before right.

exercising is really important, but there should be a way that i think people are explaining to somebody the science behind how to lose weight without being unhealthy. now one of the problems that we've found is that according to one study, one of the perceptions is that the skinnier you are, the wealthier you are. they can't quite figure out why that perception exists, but the guess is that people are assuming that if you are skinny then you can afford a personal trainer and to go to the gym. so skinniness is a sign of wealth. it's interesting that different societies have different attitudes because i'm pretty sure like in hawaii, the rounder and the fuller you look, it's a sign of wealth.

or like how tanning in north america is a perception of wealth because it means you could travel and while in korea, tanning is avoided because it is more of a sign of like manual labor. yeah, like you're a farmer and you're out in the sun. so all these different kind of perceptions one thing that i have noticed about dieting in korea is that there seems to be different perceptions on how you discuss it with people? so for example, in north america, my co-workers would never say to me "hey, you should lose weight" that would get you like a punch in a the face... or like a chop to the throat you don't just like approach somebody with that. it's a very sensitive topic, while here in korea, we've heard outright like co-workers saying "oh, you should lose some weight"

kind of like "oh, you should cut your hair" or like "hey it's raining outside" yeah, it's very matter-of-fact. and so that concerns me, while like in north america, i think there's a big shift in the attitude of telling people what to eat or people watching their weight too often, like we're trying to make a change towards that obsession i could also say that there is like a lot more acceptance of different body types in north america than i do see here in korean media yeah. i think because we have different body types available. i think there are different body types in korea, but there is not a such a broad like diversity height, this, that, boobs, butt, waist good news is that there is some treatment of eating disorders in korea. there are also a lot of internet cafes online that have vote sides, so if you want to support somebody who is recovering from an eating disorder

they have that community there, but then just like in north america, they have the opposite, which is like the pro-ana cafes where they are helping each other to lose more and more weight in an unhealthy manner they'll even post pictures of themselves and people will say like "here's where you should lose weight", so that's also not good but i know that that exists in both parts of the world. it's not just in korea also, if you are looking for a counsellor, every city has a mental health centre that provides counselling for a little to no cost, but if you are uncomfortable about actually going to the centre yourself, then you can do so anonymously via online forums. and these are the forums that are actually for the mental health centers, it's not just like the anonymous internet forums. so i think that's really great, because it can be very hard to keep your anonymity in korea since you have to

always like, put all your information in. especially because there's still a stigma when it comes to mental health in korea. to be able to do so anonymously online is a great benefit for people that need it. so that's it for now, if you want to know more information about the crazy korean diets, we actually did a video about that a while ago so you could click on that and see the kinds of things that people do for diets here in korea. so we're interested to hear how eating disorders are treated like in your country. is it something that's acknowledged? do people actually know that somebody needs help, and would reach out to help them? or is it something that's not really talked about? do you think that dieting is a major problem? like are people doing it in an unhealthy way? or do you think it's being approached in a manner that's like actually

good for your health, and being balanced? so let us know what you think in the comments section below, we're also going to talk a little bit more about our experiences with eating disorders here in korea in our blog post. so make sure you click the link here and we can have a more or a discussion there as well.