By the time Joanne Fedler's fortieth birthday loomed, she'd had it with several trouble-makers who'd been wreaking havoc in the kingdom of her heart for too long. It was time to deport them. In what she initially took to be an unrelated impulse, she figured she could also start to care again about how she looked before the fatty deposits on her rear-end fossilized.And that's where the idea behind When Hungry, Eat began. Or so she thought.She started a new eating plan ('a ridiculous euphemism for self-imposed starvation') which took her on a route to a much Greater Hunger - as Lauren van der Post calls it - which had nothing to do with food. What began as a mission to get back into a bikini became a pilgrimage back to faith, which had not been on either her food list or her itinerary.When Hungry, Eat is a celebration of unexpected spiritual wisdom, small portions and the gifts of hunger.

Joanne Fedler is the author of When Hungry, Eat, Secret Mothers' Business and The Dreamcloth. Her books have sold over 350,000 copies worldwide. Of her many awards and scholarships, she is proudest of Asshole of the Month from Hustler magazine in 1995 in response to her work on gender equality.Joanne studied law at Yale on a Fulbright scholarship, and was a law lecturer and a volunteer legal counsellor at People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA) in Johannesburg, South Africa, before setting up and running a legal advocacy centre to end violence against women. She was appointed by the Minister of Justice to sit on a project committee of the Law Commission to design new domestic violence legislation.Some day Joanne hopes to set up a writer's colony, grow her own vegetables and live in a place where she will never be stuck in traffic. She currently lives in Sydney with her husband and two kids.www.joannefedler.com