WHEN people meet Susie Orbach they expect her to be fat. She isn't. ''They are terribly disappointed when they discover that,'' says the 47-year-old psychotherapist and author of the 70s feminist bible Fat Is a Feminist Issue.
It was Orbach who told women they didn't have to be slim just because men expected it, because magazines said they should, because models and women in television advertisements were held up as the ideal. Their bodies were their own and what they looked like, what they ate, were part of having control of their own lives.
It sounds fairly run-of-the-mill now - though, sadly, it's a message women are still under pressure to ignore. But in the 70s it was revolutionary stuff. Orbach helped women understand why they weren't in control of their bodies and their lives and to take back that control. There is no doubt, Susie Orbach changed lives.
''It is still a live issue,'' she says from London. ''It unleashed a whole problem out of the cupboard and the problem I wrote about has not disappeared. I think it is very insidious what is happening to attitudes towards girl's bodies. We will be living with that problem for a long time.'' Orbach has done a great deal since the book she calls FIFI was published, though she concedes it is that book for which she is still best known outside her home country, Britain, and some parts of Europe.
She is still helping women - and men - take control. She practises as a therapist from her large home in London's Hampstead four days a week, supervises the work of other therapists, travels throughout Britain and in Europe and the US speaking to ''whoever asks me'' and writes a fortnightly column for the Guardian newspaper.
It is those columns, which aim to ''lift the level of emotional literacy'', that she has compiled for her latest book - her seventh - What's really going on here? Making sense of our emotional lives.