Some fat women of color resist dominant beauty standards by creating intersectional frameworks for accepting fat women of all identities. Bullying is a common occurrence in schools, and yet when it comes to bullying body size, the adults tolerate if not perpetuate this type of bullying. Reminiscing about her time there in the Times Educational Supplement 30 years later, Orbach described the course as "concerning contemporary ideas, feminism, history – all things that were just right for me. Some feminists, such as Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, believed that removing traits of "femaleness", such as feminine curves, was necessary for admittance to a male-dominated society. She doesen't advocate going on diets and she encourages women to find their own weight and not be defined by the media.

Although these are imagined cases, they tell a truth about the daily struggles, ruminations and experience of being a therapist. If we weren’t continually assaulted by the merchants of body hatred, we would not be as vulnerable to the assaults. Fat Is A Feminist Issue offered women a way to understand their struggles, as well as a way to manage these, and resist society’s message telling them to starve themselves. The impact of this kind of decision on the mother and baby extends beyond the actual pregnancy and birth; quite unintentionally, the woman's ability to breastfeed and nurture her newborn is clouded by her concerns about her own appearance and appetite. According to Sandra Lee Bartsky, because fashion operates on a thin ideal, the media becomes an outlet through which gender performance is strictly limited and may influence who is allowed to take up space and how much.Scholars such as Ashley Kraus and Amara Miller have also commented on how the term body positivity is often seen to mean individual body acceptance and as such, does nothing towards dismantling power structures which directly affect non-hegemonic bodies. For the first time, fat feminism was officially supported by the National Organization for Women when the organization adopted an anti-size discrimination stance and started a body image task force.

Squeezed between identity politics and intersectionality: A critique of 'thin privilege' in Fat Studies". But despite the fact that one size does not fit all, the desire to conform and to see reflected back in our mirrors an approximation of what we see on billboards, magazines and screens is compelling.These would simply fade away if more time was spent preoccupied with calorie counting and working out countless times a week. Banning women from the sumo ring: centuries-old tradition, straight-up sexism or something more complex? But through the combined recent efforts of feminism and fat activism, society’s attitudes towards fat people — and fat women, in particular — are slowly starting to change. Susie Orbach's seminal work, now established as a worldwide classic, shows how fat is not about food, but rather about politics, defiance, protection, sex, strength, assertion, anger, love. Dieting, the interfering with one's appetite to ensure that one is not eating too much, functions as a sort of guarantee that one is on the correct path.

The 1970s saw the rise of women’s magazines and the popularisation of make-up and cosmetic activities. Susie Orbach's pioneering work isn't just the first to expose the links between sexual politics and female dieting; it remains the classic work on the subject . Hourly vigilance is yet to come but the notion of a body ready and available for reconstruction is firmly planted.The intersections of being large and being a woman is at the heart of fat feminism because discrimination and prejudice often occur as a result of gender and body type. We are not following societal expectations because we are refusing to be good (where ‘good’ in this case means ‘thin’).