Interactive Essay: The Fight For Our Bodies

Susie Orbach says the slimming industry is a con. Repeated diets are bad for the health and can actually make one fatter. Women should eat what they want, when they want, she explains in this BBC News Interactive Essay.

	:	The Fight For Our Bodies

In the first of a new series called the BBC News Interactive Essay, the writer Susie Orbach sets out her controversial view that dieting is a waste of time and effort.

How the Interactive Essay works

1. Watch and read the multimedia essay

2. Join the debate by e-mailing your views

3. On Monday 21 Jan, Susie Orbach responds to your points

Have you ever been on a diet? If you are a woman and live in the West, then the answer is probably yes.

Did it work? Likely as not, it didn't.

In the six-minute multimedia presentation, Ms Orbach explains why slimming is not only often a waste of time, but also harmful. In extreme cases, it can even be deadly.

Everyone's body, she says, has a natural "set point" weight. Fighting that with a diet can be counterproductive, actually causing the body to gain more weight in the long-term.

Ms Orbach wants to hear your views on the topic:

Are we infatuated with body image today?

Do you feel under pressure to get the "right" body?

Have you lost weight and kept it off?

Can you shrug off the peer-pressure, and be happy with the way you look?

Click on the icon at the top of the page to see the multimedia essay and to e-mail the debate. Ms Orbach will respond to the key issues you raise.

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Who is Susie Orbach? Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, author, activist and expert on eating disorders and women's issues.

She is widely known as a counsellor to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who publicly admitted to suffering from an eating disorder.

Ms Orbach initially made her name as the author of Fat is a Feminist Issue. Published in 1978, the book set out the radical theory that body weight is more a state of mind than a physical condition.

Women had become enslaved to the diet industry and were harming themselves through repeated dieting.

Her latest book, On Eating, is published by Penguin.