No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.

In my mum's day, you needed to be beautiful for a very short time to catch your man. It didn't start at six and go on until you're 75, right?

No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.

Fat is a way of saying no to powerlessness and self-denial.

I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update.

Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated.

The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.