Susie Orbach

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.

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.

A wanted pregnancy as much as a dreaded pregnancy can play differently than all one's previous imaginings.

Not that it was Twiggy's fault, but the ubiquity of her image created a sense in young women that to be stylish meant to be skinny, flat-chested with an ingenue face and straight hair.

Celebrity culture is something that pains me.

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.

Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.

I'm a therapist and that fascinates people because they think I carry secrets.

The analyst's psyche operates as a kind of... something to hold on to while somebody's going through therapy, if they're deconstructing their own psyche, if that's cracking up in some way, or dissolving.

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.

There is no such thing as a neutral therapist.

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

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.

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

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?

I think it is one of the capacities of human beings, to create style.

A wanted pregnancy as much as a dreaded pregnancy can play differently than all ones previous imaginings.

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

No one leaves a long-term relationship scot-free or without conflict.

Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture.

I'm the sort of person who likes to undo everything.

I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

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

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

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

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

We accept there's an emotional aspect to life. But we're not very developed in our ways of understanding it.

Mothers unconsciously allow more latitude to sons, and open encouragement, and with daughters they treat them as they would treat themselves.

Skinny is only one body type.

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