Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.

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?

Today, 'fat' has become not a description of size but a moral category tainted with criticism and contempt.

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.

If I were afraid of wrinkles, I'd probably be hiding in a cupboard, because I have a lot of them.

There are so many young women who tip over into being a facsimile: they don't really inhabit their lives or their bodies.

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