Body Beautiful

Four decades after the publication of her groundbreaking book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, the psychotherapist Susie Orbach reveals how she overcame her own struggles with dieting, and why it’s more important than ever to celebrate the female form in all its varied guises.

- Lydia Slater

IT’S ASTONISHING that it is four decades since Fat is a Feminist Issue was first published. Even then, at primary school, I was dimly aware of its significance; I remember my willowy mother and her friends discussing it as they lunched on their Limmits low-calorie biscuits.

Written by Susie Orbach, the psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, this insightful book examined society’s ingrained attitudes to women’s bodies and unpicked the psychological reasons why we might choose to binge, or purge, or eat when we’re not hungry, or starve when we are. It asked the reader to question why being fat was socially unacceptable and why physically diminishing oneself through auto-starvation had become the modern happy-ever-after fairytale. “It felt almost arbitrary that we got into skinniness in the 1960s,” Orbach says when we talk on the phone. “Not long before that, Sophia Loren had been the beauty ideal, and you could find tablets in chemists to help you put weight on.”

Orbach was spurred to write FiFi, as she calls her book, by her own struggles with food. “I dieted a couple of times a year, and if you diet, then you binge,” she says. “But it was very mild by today’s standards. Now it’s normal for people to have a crazy routine.”