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Posted on 09/17/2002 5:05:01 AM PDT by yankeedame

Western guilt leads to eating disorders, claims "Fat Is A Feminist" author

By Susan Flockhart

"Fat Is A Feminist Issue" author Susie Orbach has identified two main reasons for the Western world's obesity crisis ... a sense of guilt and the diet industry.

Orbach is now looking for ways to take legal action against Weight Watchers, similar to that faced by the tobacco industry in America.

'We want to show that that organisation knows a huge proportion of diets fail,' she told the Sunday Herald. 'Its profits depend upon that, and the recidivism rate is absolutely crucial to them.'

Orbach's new lobbying organisation, AnyBody, is waiting for the results of last year's Size UK survey, which is expected to show the average body is now much larger than 25 years ago.

She believes obesity statistics in the West express our unconscious guilt over our consumption of the world's resources.

'When people are eating compulsively and are very, very obese, it's not that they're actually recognising their needs and meeting them,' said Orbach, who sparked a major debate over women's self-image with the publication of "Fat Is A Feminist Issue" almost 25 years ago.

'They are, in fact, denying those needs. I think there is something so profoundly difficult about the divide in the world between the north and the south that we all carry as individuals. You could say there is a political point in all of this -- there's some kind of denial of what's really going on in the world.

'If you want to measure a culture's engagement with globalism, go look at the level of eating problems. It's probably a better indicator than economic ones. In cultures in which a small group of people are allowed to be Westernised the immediate thing is that they try to create a Western body.'

Orbach, well known for her therapy techniques -- Princess Diana was a regular visitor at her practice -- believes the food and beauty industries work 'hand in glove' to encourage women's insecurities. 'You have very, very successful industries which are about reprocessing the fat, or the bodies of people, and about creating the sense that people are not right and that they can fix them. All these industries need to be put in a completely different balance.'

The weapons AnyBody plans to use against these industries are the same ones the big companies use to promote their products ... advertising and marketing.

'We're talking to creative advertisers who will offer their services to help us construct some ads that will try subtly to broaden the aesthetic, because I think that's crucial,' said the author. 'Marketing works. People wouldn't spend a large percentage of the product price on marketing if it didn't work, and those creatives really do understand something about how to construct imagery, and often it isn't used for good.'

Orbach believes we now have a dysfunctional relationship with food and continuous dieting is partly to blame for the rise in obesity because we lose touch with normal bodily mechanisms that regulate eating.

'Our girls are raised by a generation of mothers who've been so assaulted by this themselves that, from very early in their lives, their appetites might have been watched, curtailed and managed rather than simply developed,' she said.

'It's as though we've distorted the mechanism that would allow us to eat in a straightforward, engaged and enjoyable way. So food becomes an arena in which you're either depriving yourself or rebelling, and that really messes up your metabolism.'

She insists that babies are absorbing their mothers' anxieties along with their milk. For this reason, health visitors should look out for eating problems in the way they do for post-natal depression. Schools should encourage 'emotional literacy', so that 'children have language to speak about what's troubling them, to have their emotions accepted, so that they don't use this mechanism -- whether it's food or drugs or whatever -- as a way to handle distress.'

In Orbach's latest book, "On Eating", she aims to help people break destructive patterns such as dieting, comfort eating and bingeing. Instead, Orbach argues people should tune into the body's natural signals. They should eat only when hungry, eat food they really want, and stop eating when they are full.

Off-her-chump bump.

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