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"  Q: Why are you organizing a suit against Weight Watchers International?  A: If dieting worked, you&amp;#039;d only have to do it once. Weight Watchers, like most diet companies, depends on repeat customers. When I went on a Weight Watchers program in the U.K., I was told it had a 97 percent recidivism rate.  Q: But is that the company&amp;#039;s fault? Aren&amp;#039;t dieters responsible for their own choices?   A: I believe that companies have to have social responsibility. Weight Watchers is saying, &amp;quot;We have a solution for you.&amp;quot; But the very solution it offers often promotes compulsive eating. To me, that&amp;#039;s false advertising.  Q: What is &amp;quot;compulsive eating&amp;quot;?   A: The definition is really wide: It&amp;#039;s not eating in response to hunger, but instead eating with regard to a set of rules, which you then break. You might decide not to eat sweets and carbohydrates, and then rebel.  Q: Why do you think that diets should happen just once? I diet every year or so.   A: A diet allows you to lose weight, but it doesn&amp;#039;t allow you to change your eating to sustain your weight loss. Weight Watchers&amp;#039; notion isn&amp;#039;t connected to hunger or satisfaction. And there are very strong arguments that if you continually put your body into starvation mode, your metabolic &amp;quot;set point&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#039;t get reset. Under normal circumstances, if you overeat or undereat, your metabolism slows down or speeds up to keep you at a stable weight. After constant dieting, that set point breaks.  Q: Are you saying that diets set women up to be fat?   A: There&amp;#039;s plenty of evidence that diets may contribute to fat storage. So, yeah. Also, diets contribute to compulsive eating and give a sense that food is &amp;quot;dangerous&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;naughty.&amp;quot; Deprivation creates conditions for rebellion.  Q: Describe your ideal diet company.   A: I&amp;#039;d have an anti-diet company to help women discover their physiological appetite and how to respond to it, and to understand the emotional meanings of fatness and thinness, because a lot of people are fat in their heads but aren&amp;#039;t physically fat.  Q: So if a woman responds to her natural hunger, she&amp;#039;ll reach a healthy weight?   A: Absolutely. Unless she&amp;#039;s dieted for so many years that her set point is muck.  Q: So you consider any eating when not hungry to be problematic?  A: Right. And more problematic is that women are so frightened of food and of their appetites, and they think they&amp;#039;re supposed to always be avoiding food. They don&amp;#039;t actually know what ordinary hunger is.  Q: Isn&amp;#039;t it extreme to label friends who go on a mini ice-cream binge as unhealthy?   A: I think that&amp;#039;s the problem. Why do you need to have a binge? Why not just have ice cream whenever you&amp;#039;re hungry for it? Why does something have to be forbidden to make it great?  Q: How should a healthy woman eat?   A: Put it this way: How should a healthy woman pee? She should pee when she needs to, and not under regulation.  Q: Why is it so hard for women to have a decent relationship with their bodies?   A: Well, we&amp;#039;ve seen a profound assault on women&amp;#039;s bodies over the past 30 years. I mean, my mom was meant to be attractive in her early 20s to get her man. Now, you&amp;#039;ve got to be attractive from the age of 6 until you&amp;#039;re \u2014 how old is Joan Collins? There&amp;#039;s something liberating about the sense that sexuality does not disappear with age, but there&amp;#039;s also something quite crazy about having to conform to certain ideals of beauty.  Q: Do these pressures come from men?   A: I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s men alone. I think something takes root in the culture. Much of this goes back to the marketing and style industries, who make a very strange economic argument that you can somehow sell glamour by reducing everyone down to one size.  Q: What would you like to see in ads?   A: I would like to see gorgeous women in all shapes and sizes, glamorized up as one is for a catwalk, showing clothes more actively, rather than the suggestive, look-at-me kind of thing.  Q: Aren&amp;#039;t models, by definition, supposed to be human hangers?   A: I don&amp;#039;t think that&amp;#039;s true today. Now they&amp;#039;re supposed to be sort of in-your-face and unapproachable at the same time. I&amp;#039;ve worked quite hard on countering this in the Dove campaign.  Q: How should women see themselves?   A: Women today produce themselves as a kind of commodity. We don&amp;#039;t produce goods anymore. We produce our bodies now. It&amp;#039;s almost like a woman&amp;#039;s body is her brand.  Q: Isn&amp;#039;t that just self-expression?   A: Noooo. The brand is no longer the clothes that a woman wears; she wears the clothes on top of the brand of her body, and it has to conform. That&amp;#039;s the problem  Weight Watchers Responds:   &amp;quot;We appreciate Susie Orbach&amp;#039;s desire to educate women that there are no quick fixes in achieving long-term weight loss. But her criticism of us is misguided: Research has found our approach to be effective. In fact, a study published in the International Journal of Obesity found that people who achieved a healthy body weight attending Weight Watchers meetings were much less likely to regain weight than the norm. That&amp;#039;s because Weight Watchers goes beyond counting calories, fat, and fiber; it also helps people change their behaviors, learn how to eat healthier foods, and get more physical activity, all within a supportive environment.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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