My 5 top tips for ending the battle with your body/weight, for Australian website The New Daily

http://thenewdaily.com.au/life/2014/06/25/women-eating-weight-loss-worst-enemies/

‘The Ministry of Thin’ is a metaphor for the inner policeman that undermines us, and tells us that thinner is better, prettier, happier, sexier…'

 

This week's column for The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/23/does-california-s-college-rape-bill-go-too-far-in-regulating-sex.html

With new US proposals to regulate the physical intimacy between adults, are we in danger of legislating all the joy out of sex?

A bill making its way through the California Assembly is attempting to address the problem of rape on college campuses by mandating “affirmative consent”—a verbal or written yes—before engaging in sexual activity.

 

Debating plans for new sugar tax with Edwina Currie... BBC Radio Ulster this morning

 

https://audioboo.fm/boos/2275229-is-a-sugar-tax-a-good-idea-edwina_currie-commentator-ejwoolf-debate

 

Last night on BBC London

with Simon Lederman, aka Captain Lentil, and wealth fund manager Jonathan Davis

in France, in love... latest column for The Daily Beast, re-discovering the charms of La France Profonde

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/09/discovering-the-charms-of-la-france-profonde.html

 

"Back in Paris at Roland Garros for the French Open tennis tournament. Too soon it’s our final morning: We leave our hotel at dawn and walk along the Left Bank in sparkling sunshine to the Eiffel Tower. No matter how many touristy images, keyrings and cheesy postcards you may have seen, the reality of the Tour Eiffel is breath-taking..

Before we catch our train back to London, there’s one last place to visit. On the Pont des Arts we buy a padlock engraved with our initials, T and E. A few feet away from us, a newly married couple are smiling for photographs; nearby, two men kiss in the early-morning sunshine. (Interestingly, a campaign was last year launched by two American women living in Paris, to ban the spread of the padlocking craze.) Like many thousands of couples before us we attach our ‘love lock’ to the bridge, and throw the key in the Seine…"
 

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”    
- Rumi

Catch up with my latest column for The Daily Beast: women, ageing and the Botox insanity...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/25/nicole-kidman-botox-insanity-why-all-women-lose-out-when-we-obsess-over-stars-faces.html

...how do we learn to love our bodies for what they do, rather than how they look? How can we value ourselves more, not less, as we age? I don’t have the answer (but I’m pretty sure it’s not cosmetic surgery). We need to challenge the external messages and the internal voice which tells us we’re ugly, old or fat. In the words of Naomi Wolf: “She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.”