A 1992 National Institutes of Health study supports this idea. The report concludes that dieting leads to eating disorders, stress, lowered self-esteem and overeating.

"And this is the reason people end up with eating disorders," argues Bloom, from the institute's cramped office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The Institute was founded by Susie Orbach, who first wrote about this approach in her 1978 book, "Fat is a Feminist Issue." It offers workshops where women practice the"non-dieting" approach. After years of dieting, women practice responding to their natural hunger.

No woman is immune from some type of disordered eating problem, whether it is anorexia or compulsive eating, Bloom says.

photo: Mode magazine

Mode magazine targets larger women.

"If you consider body dissatisfaction and chronic dieting and anxiety around food as constituting an eating disorder, which we do, then we say every woman in America has one," Bloom says.

Terry Poulton rode the diet seesaw for most of her life. In 1982, while a writer for Chatelaine, a Canadian women’s magazine, her editors offered her a deal that at the time she considered "every woman’s dream."

"They tried to put it to me delicately," says Poulton, about the day her editors took her to lunch to tell her she was fat and could stand to lose 65 pounds.