If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.

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

There is no such thing as a neutral therapist.

Bodies are becoming our personal mission to tame, extend and perfect.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.

When I was growing up, one or two girls were beautiful, but it was not an aspiration, right?