The purpose of this study is to look at compulsive eaters' attitudes toward their feelings and also to study general attitudes toward fat and thinness in our society. This work was stimulated by Susie Orbach's (1978) reformulation of why women eat compulsively. Before reviewing her theory in detail, it seems useful to look at how overeating has been studied in the past. It is important to keep in mind that while Orbach is concerned with overeating, she is less concerned with overweight per ce (obesity), but rather with eating not related to physiological hunger. Thus obese individuals would be seen as a subset of compulsive eaters, with the other group consisting of those people who are at their normal weight but maintain this weight only through obsessing about their weight and dieting in general.