Abstract
This chapter asks ‘who is the late twentieth-century self?’ and argues that the construction of this individual is reflected in the increasing interest in a range of eating-related behaviours; the emphasis on such behaviours increases as eating becomes the ideal vehicle to control this new self-controlling, reflexive and intra-active self. The emphasis on either the presence or absence of self-control is also found in the use of escape theory to explain disinhibition. This perspective has been applied to both the overeating characteristic of dieters and the more extreme form of binge eating found in bulimics and describes overeating as a consequence of ‘a motivated shift to low levels of self awareness’. Examination of psychological theories of diet suggests a shift in their model of the individual from a passive responder to external events, to one who interacts with these events to a late twentieth-century individual who is reflexive and intra-active.