Family-based treatment is at the core of recovery from eating disorders, as parents of sufferers must learn how to teach their children to eat properly and doctors find that family plays a role in triggering the diseases.

In some cases, adolescent sufferers have lived under the tight control of their parents for years and some were abused during childhood, experts say.

"For example, if children have long been living in families that leave little room for their own identity or autonomy, they may rebel when reaching puberty," says Chen Jue, director of the Eating Disorders Treatment Center of Shanghai Mental Health Center.

"Unable to rebel in other ways, they find they can control whether or not they eat. Eating becomes their biggest resistance and they turn the disease into a fight with their parents," she says.

"In other cases with poor parent-child relations, children use means of starving themselves to take revenge, hoping their parents will feel guilty when seeing their skinny bodies," Chen says.

That explains why even the standard treatment for eating disorders involves multidisciplinary treatment, including professionals in nutrition, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, international medicine and social work. The patient's family is always at the core, according to doctors.

Treatment includes talks with the patient alone and with the family to help parents find the reason for the onset of the disease and make changes.

A university student from Shanghai who went to a school elsewhere says that one reason she was afflicted by anorexia accompanied by amenorrhea two years ago was because her mother kept asking her to lose weight.

"Each time I returned home, the first thing blurted from my mother's mouth was 'How much do you weigh now?', which made me tremble. I stopped going home for family gatherings during festivals," says the woman using the alias "Little A".

Family support is crucial in treatment. Parents observe how their child begins to recover the normal order of eating supervised by doctors and nurses in a hospital and continue the practice once they go home.

Chen says that patients have a fixed timetable for eating each day during hospitalization. They have three meals and two snacks each day.

"Patients sit at the same table to eat. Medical workers won't mention anything about eating while they're dining so they don't feel extra pressure," Chen says. "But if they fail to finish the food, nurses will give them nutrients equivalent to that of the leftover food."