The shape we're in

Thirty years ago, Susie Orbach identified fat as a feminist issue and went on to become the world’s most famous psychotherapist when she treated Diana, Princess of Wales. Today, as she tells Janice Turner, “body distress” is no longer an illness suffered by the few, but a Western epidemic.

Such was the revolutionary vigour of Fat Is A Feminist Issue when it was first published in 1978 that, for a moment, the screwed-up relationship between women and food looked like it could be resolved. In Susie Orbach’s urgent, crusading prose, all was illuminated: diets don’t work because they lead only to bingeing; we eat compulsively to try to soothe inner hurts; or we get fat as a subconscious rebellion, to opt out of how society insists we look and behave.

It became an instant classic, a student bookshelf staple, and Susie’s theories entered the mainstream in a thousand self-help bibles. Yet today, women and food are more embattled than ever.

Obesity and food disorders – which stem, Susie believes, from one root cause, the perversion of our natural appetites – are epidemic, while female body-loathing now begins in primary school, extending even into the retirement home. “I did not expect to be still writing about this three decades on,” Susie, 62, says.

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Read an extract from Bodies by Susie Orbach’s on page 159 of the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly, out now with Therese Rein on the cover.