When you eat sensibly and moderately, ride your bike for approximately an hour everyday and are sure that you are a healthy, suitable weight, should you listen to it when people call you fat?

No, of course you shouldn't.

Might it start to irritate and upset you?

Perhaps, if a friend of yours has taken to calling you "fatty", and poking you in the stomach every time she sees you.

What about when someone at work tries to tell you that he is concerned that you might have been putting on a little weight recently?

Perhaps more tolerable, if he hadn't used the method of blowing up his cheeks and saying "Poppy, why is it that every time I see you seem to be fatter and fatter?" at the top of his voice in front of twelve of your workmates first thing on a Monday morning to convey that information.

In what must be one of the most food-obsessed nations in the world, where a common greeting is "ni chi fan le ma?" (have you eaten yet?), in a city such as Beijing where you can hardly turn your head without staring directly at some kind of high-carb, high-calorie baozis, jiaozis or jianbing, (steamed bun, boiled dumpling or fried pancake) and where an average family will get through an industrial sized bottle of cooking oil in a month, maintaining a chopstick-thin physique seems to be nevertheless both desirable and achievable for most Chinese girls.

While Chinese men and women seem to have a much higher bodily awareness than their western counterparts, their concept of what constitutes as overweight is also a lot more unforgiving. On top of this, such a taboo in the West as telling someone they are fat seems to be regarded as a perfectly appropriate and friendly conversation-starter here, as innocent as commenting that they have had a haircut.

But for Western women, who are naturally often a little more curvaceous than the Chinese, and who may well have grown up in cultures where fuller figures are seen as the normal and beautiful female form, the impact of personal comments made by Chinese can range from shocking to completely soul-destroying. Whether you can develop a thick skin and self acceptance enough to deal with such taunts is the make or break factor of whether you can qualify for long-term residency in China. However, for most girls, it seems to be more a question of either shaping yourself up or shipping yourself out.

To be a fat in China is to feel belittled, mocked, ridiculed and subject to overwhelming scrutiny. While Pangzi or Pangpang, two ways of saying "fatty" undeniably carry affectionate undertones, they hardly leave much room for the addressee to maintain his or her dignity.

Chinese men seem to be able to carry extra body baggage better. My old flatmate even told me how her brother spent two months gorging himself on fattening foods with the sole purpose of filling out, in order to make himself look more mature and distinguished to gain acceptance in the business world. For a woman, this would never wash.

More than a twig wider than a branch and you feel physical judgement entering your everyday life. Sales assistants in boutiques look you up and down before they even let you enter their shop and will flatly refuse to let you try particular items of clothing "in case you rip or stretch it". With most clothes only available in miniscule sizes, a routine shopping trip always has the potential of turning into a brutal confidence annihilating session.

If you are meeting with a Chinese friend who you haven't seen for a while, before you can start to catch up, you must wait while they size you up and pronounce whether weight has been lost or gained. And if the verdict is gain, you must learn to accept it graciously, with a nod and a smile, because the bottom line is that they are concerned about your health and their comment is nothing more than an expression of relief that you have not withered away into nothing. As a westerner, with the different cultural slants and stigmas we place on such matters, it is hard not to get in a strop with a friend who says you have become fat. You might well regard the fact that they spend the rest of the evening trying to coax you into eating more food as behaviour that is vindictive and two-faced.

Having lived in Beijing for a year now, I feel I have got through the worst. Having danced with the idea of dangerous dieting, I now acknowledge that for me the Chinese-version of the body beautiful is unobtainable and that the "half an apple and small bowl of rice" diet is neither healthy nor satisfying. On saying that, returning to England for a visit last month, I was shocked to discover that my concept of what is a normal and acceptable figure has changed notably, as I found I was using the Chinese standard of the body beautiful to measure up my own country people's physique. While I refuse to spend my days yearning for an unfeasible waif-like figure, I believe that carefree days of guilt-free chocolate digestives and regarding a size 12 as petite are well and truly gone.