I'm leaving uni this August - I'm moving back to London as my MA has finished - so it won't really be practical for me to carry on the group. Luckily, the women involved in the Sussex group are totally amazing and are carrying it on without me! But I want to start up a group, in London, along the same lines, to continue my recovery and facillitate other women's.

But... London is a much bigger place than Sussex Uni... so I need help! I want to make the group completely free, and as such need a venue which is either low cost or no cost. I also need a venue with good transport links (central if possible...) and which is suitable for the group, i.e. has plenty of chairs and is pretty private.

Have any of you guys started groups in London before? Would any of you be interested in joining the group? Got any ideas about venues? Comment below!

The event is being held at the Brighthelm Centre, North Road, Brighton (v. easy to get to from Brighton mainline station).

I'll be there, but if anyone else wants to come email Bob Withers (bob.withers@ntlworld.com) for ticket information. Tickets are £5. Comment if you're coming - let's meet up!

Effect on my mental health:

So far, the affect has been negligible, oddly. Perhaps I haven't done enough time-wise to get to the buzzy stage, although I have felt good after the runs and I've felt good about my committment to it. I've also enjoyed the actual running. Despite this, I've been feeling very low and have had some suicidal thoughts, although that's hardly rare - I have them most days. I think while I feel liberated by the running, I feel trapped by my eating, which has always been a problem for me. Eating is just so complicated and surrounded by emotion it's like trying to find sense in a Daily Mail article.

At the moment I've got the night to myself as S (my boyfriend) is going out to the pub with a friend. I'm trying desperately to work out in my head what to buy for dinner. I've already overeaten several times today, and feel pretty dreadful, but I know I'll be hungry again in the evening. Part of me just wants to have something bingey that I know I will feel bad about, but it'll mean that for at least a short time I'll feel good. Part of me wants to eat nothing at all, as if that could ever be some kind of answer.

I always wondered about the different ways people deal with addiction. Cigarettes, alcohol, drugs - to give them up you have to give them up forever. But food? You have to reconnect with your actual hunger and somehow live by it. It's a nightmarish task. Imagine asking an alcoholic to make sure they drank just three small glasses a day. Or a junkie to have 3 small hits, and 2 spliffs, but nothing else. I know Susie Orbach's methods are the right way to eat, but I feel like I'm just too messed up to manage them - my eating habits are so f***ed that I would have to give up my job, my life, and concentrate on nothing but resolving my eating for months and months and maybe even years before I could eat properly again. It doesn't seem a fair choice.

Anyway, sorry for being all depressive today! New Battlestar Galactica is out tonight, so I am looking forward to that. I've also recently done a poll with some friends about body size and the psychology around that, so I'll be sharing that in another article soon. Hope you all have great weekends :)

When, Where: Tonight at 6pm in the New Theater

If you think you're one of those know-it-all smartypants, then you have your chance to prove your chops today. The first round of testing for the team to represent the LSE at the University Challenge will take place this evening in the Underground. If you're interested, register by emailing su.gensec@lse.ac.uk

When, Where: Tonight at 6pm in the Underground

Now I know the idea of sitting in the Hong Kong theater discussing sex might not be the most erotic thing that you can think of, but just imagine the amount of psychological trauma that an evenings discussion with psychoanalysts Darian Leader and Susie Orbach can relieve (or uncover!). And seriously, your difficulty confronting intimacy obviously suggests some suppressed feelings about your mother and/or father.

When, Where: Tuesday at 6:30pm in the Hong Kong Theater

Summary - Fat is not about food.  Fat is about protection, mothering, sex, strength, assertion and love.  Fat is a response to the way you are seen by your husband, your mother, your boss, and yourself.  You can change that response by learning the difference between "mouth hunger" and "stomach hunger", by seeing weight loss as a good thing rather than a punishment, and by realizing that food is not your enemy.  Author Orbach says that most women respond to her program by maintaining or even gaining weight at first, as they learn to accept and like themselves - that's okay.  And that's just the beginning of this astonishingly effective new approach to weight loss through satisfaction.

My thoughts -

I did not read this book because I am a compulsive eater, or because I think I am fat, or because I have any other issue with food.  I read this book because I am a feminst, and I think it is important for me to expose myself to any and all feminist literature I can find, even when on the surface I don't think it'll apply to me.  Except in this case, I found it sort of did apply to me, indirectly, simply because I am a woman trying to get by unscathed by our anti-woman culture.  Orbach's thesis is that having a weight problem and/or a compulsive eating problem is a response to the culture and social structure in which women are placed.  And even though the book was first published in 1978, I sadly found myself agreeing with pretty much all of what she had to say, even now 30 years later.  Much of the support she used for her thesis is standard feminist thinking, taken for granted by women in today's day and age, but surprisingly it does still apply.  Just because women today know they are basically second class citizens does not change the fact that it is still true, and that being second class citizens still affects every single decision we make in the world - including what we eat, how much we eat, how we eat it, and when we eat it.  Orbach also spent a chapter drawing parallels between compulsive overeating and anorexia nervosa - while many people would argue that these are two separate, completely opposite disorders that have nothing in common, Orbach argues that they are two sides of the same coin.  Both are a response to the culture that women live in, with one being a rejection of that culture and the other being an overexaggeration and obsession with that culture.  I'd really recomend reading this book if you are fat, a feminist, both, or neither.  It is smart and enlightening and another one of those feminist pieces that you hope will not be necessary in today's world, but unfortunately it is, so it's worth reading. 

Para fazer o download, em formato PDF, use o midia independente.org ou o 4shared.