Ng’s struggles with body image started from a very young age. “I was a premature baby,” she says, and explained that her small size from birth resulted in many “people [commenting] on my ‘smallness’. Their labels quickly became an inherent part of my identity.”

This led to Ng developing anorexia before she was even old enough to be considered a teenager. “It’s very important to remember that eating disorders don’t develop overnight,” Ng says, adding that there are three main factors that can lead to disordered eating: social, biological and psychological; however, “there can [also] be triggers.” 

At 16 years old, Ng would experience what she calls her “death day”, which served as a much-needed wake-up call. “Basically, my general practitioner told me: ‘if you don’t eat, you’ll die’. Looking back, my ‘death day’ [marked the beginning of] my recovery”. 

Armed with a strong will to live, Ng started her recovery journey surrounded by friends and family, but quickly felt at odds with the prevalent local mindset that regarded mental health, body image and eating disorders as taboo.

Being born in Canada and growing up in Hong Kong but in an international environment opened Ng up to cultures where conversations about these issues were taking place. Among others, she had seen that there was a “stronger understanding in the US that eating disorders affect a person’s physical, physiological, emotional, and social health.” Therefore, treatments were more comprehensive. 

Unfortunately, with Hong Kong’s culture being so different, she found it a challenge to have her struggles be truly understood. 

“In the West, hospitals usually prepare ‘recovery packages’: you [are encouraged to] find a therapist, a psychiatrist, a nutritionist, a group of peers to talk to and more. Here in Hong Kong, I had to create this team myself. I tried out a lot of different specialists, but many didn’t match with what I needed. 

“Especially in the early [stages] of my recovery, there was a big cultural mismatch between what I was [struggling with] and what specialists in Hong Kong could offer.” 

Even as a teenager, she was acutely aware of the role culture played in shaping mental health experiences—and Body Banter was created to address it.

It cannot be denied that beauty standards, relationship with food and societal expectations of women in particular are vastly different between Asia and the West, and this difference needs to be recognised and addressed by professionals. People are “culturally shaped”, she says, and understanding one’s social, cultural and historical background is crucial to any recovery process. 

In Hong Kong there exists another challenge: the conflicting values between how affection is traditionally expressed through food and modern beauty standards. 

“We see this in how our grandmothers try to feed us as much as they can, perhaps [due to] their experiences with periods of food scarcity, but at the same time they tell us that we have gained weight and that we will never find a good husband if we gain weight,” Ng says. 

Ng’s wish for Body Banter is to break down these societal taboos by introducing new concepts around body image and mental health. She also wants to give Hong Kong teenagers the vocabulary they need, in English or Cantonese, to express their feelings and struggles. 

“From my perspective, many of us in Hong Kong find it difficult to talk about body image topics, not only because we don’t have the specific words about this topic that are easily accessible to us, but also because it can feel uncomfortable or unacceptable to bring these topics into everyday conversations,” she explains. 

Transcending her own story, Ng is leading Body Banter to better counter the new trends and challenges that emerged during the pandemic and were exacerbated by social media. 

Mind HK reports that the lockdowns, social isolation, and relentless anxiety and fear related to Covid-19 might have triggered unhealthy eating habits that individuals experiencing an eating disorder may use as a way to manage stress and feel more in control.

This led, for example, to the increase of orthorexia, which refers to the unhealthy obsession with eating “healthy”. It is also often associated with excessive exercise and affects both men and women equally.

“There are a lot of taboos we want to address in Hong Kong,” Ng says, who studied psychology at both Duke University and Columbia University in the US. “For instance, many people assume that individuals with larger bodies don’t experience eating disorders, or that men are less likely to suffer from eating disorders, which can lead to people being misdiagnosed [with having] other mental or physical health conditions, or being undiagnosed entirely.”

Read more: In the buff: male body image and the motivation behind shaping up

In fact, it is estimated by the National Eating Disorders Association that one in three people in the US today experiencing disordered eating is male. Such estimations do not exist in Hong Kong yet. 

Body image and mental health are ongoing journeys with moving targets that evolve as we grow older, and Ng’s advice for young adults facing this lifelong challenge is to take it slow: “Don’t rush into writing your own story: it takes a long time to look back at your emotions and process them. Recovery takes a long time, and it’s full of layers. Be kind to yourself.”

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