Note: this program is currently undergoing a major update, and will be offline until Jan 4 2010. You can still register, but won’t receive anything until Jan 4 2010. I do apologise for any inconvenience.

Our culture teaches women from the time we’re very young that our bodies must look a certain way, or we’re just not good enough. That’s despite all our other achievements and skills and talents and is even more important than our very being.

Of course the ‘certain way’ our bodies must look – what Naomi Woolf calls “The Official Body” -  changes depending on the media or modelling world ‘darling of the moment’. What we do know for sure though is that since the late 1960s, the official look has been very thin; and this has caused massive body image distortions across our culture. Vast numbers of girls and women are suffering, and thousands are dying, because of our focus on diets and perfect thin-ness.

The story goes: if you’re not thin, you’d better be trying to get thin, or you’re not good enough.

And if you’re not trying to get thin, you’ll be encouraged, expected even, to be trying to get thin, by every newspaper, magazine, dozens of TV shows, thousands of books, and every time you step outside your door, by advertising for the latest greatest program, pill, potion, or lotion that will finally beat your body into thin submission.

If you have self-worth of steel, your body image can stay healthy under this onslaught. But the truth is for most of us, that’s just not the case – negative body image is a worse problem right now than it ever has been.

Studies tell us that diets cannot work.

Starvation has always been the greatest threat to human survival, bar none, and every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies resist calorie restriction like your life depended on it. Because it has for most of our history, and for hundreds of millions of people living on the planet this very minute, it still does.

It’s not your “weak” will power that causes you to switch from a reasonably rational person to one who can’t think of anything but the chocolate, breads, pastas, pizza, cheeses, cream, chips and other foods on your latest diet’s “forbidden” list; it is every cell in your body demanding to survive. Those cells don’t know the difference between you choosing to change the size and shape of your body, and a sudden catastrophic collapse of your food supply. To your cells it’s the same thing: a threat to your survival. To sign up now, scroll to the bottom of the page.

Humans are a BodyMind

Scientists like Dr Candace Pert have known for decades that our bodies store our emotions in our bodies, not in our brains. When your mind chooses to restrict your calorie intake, your body responds by dredging up every memory of food you’ve ever enjoyed and filling your mind with the picture, smell, taste and texture of it – until you feel like you’re going crazy!

Of course that could just be my experience of calorie restriction, it might even be your experience. But science once again tells us this is exactly what’s going on, from the famous Minnesota Starvation Study. Despite the weight loss industry’s best efforts to convince you that you’re weak-willed, it’s just not true.

Not only that, but when you do eventually stop dieting you will likely gain more weight than you lost, because:

• you lost muscle when you were trying to lose fat – it just happens
• your body slowed down your metabolism when you reduced your calorie intake, a hard-wired energy-saving strategy to get you through the starvation period coming up
• your body’s set-point may also be hard-wired. Your body will be the size it wants to be, regardless of what you think you want your body’s size to be. The most you can hope to achieve is about ten pounds/5 kilos up or down from that hard-coded set point.

Unless of course you build more lean muscle and keep really active; or become a real couch or keyboard potato and eat processed food loaded with sugar and synthetic chemicals that your body can’t process, so stores safely away in your fat cells. You’ll end up a bit smaller than your genetically-coded set point, or much bigger.

So you might as well give up the dieting thing.

Give Up or What?

But I’m betting that you’re online searching for an answer you’re going to like a lot better than the one you’ve just read in the sentence above. Because you either consciously know that’s true, or your experience with dieting has shown you that’s true, and you think it’s your fault.

Well it is your fault, but not because of any character flaws you have; it’s because you’re in a human body.

Likely you’ve spent so long trying to beat that body into thin submission, and failing, that you really hate it now; your body image is at an all-time low. You can’t stand to look at your body, you hate buying clothes, you can’t stand anyone else to look at your body either.

And you’re feeling pretty desperate to find an answer to the misery of living in the body you hate.

You know that if you can just find the answer, you’ll finally be able to do the things you’ve always wanted to do, go to the places you’ve always wanted to go, be the person you’ve always wanted to be.

Fortunately though, that body is only part of the story, because it’s part of the human body-mind. And that body mind can do incredible things!

Mostly what it’s been doing up until now has been to protect you from death by starvation and probably it’s physically bigger than it was before you started to think you must make it smaller and thinner. On the side, you’ve probably developed lower self-worth, dislike (or stronger) of your body or specific parts of it, and have put much of your life on hold until you are “worthy” to live it, as measured by your body size.

In short, you’ve developed a poor body image, probably have disordered eating patterns, and your self-esteem and self-worth are lower than ever.

There is an answer…

… that is completely achieveable and completely within your power to get. In just 10 short days, taking just 5 minutes a day (and 20 minutes on the first day), you can begin to turn your life around. You can start developing a new respect, affection, appreciation, even love, for your body. You can unshackle yourself from the limitations you’ve been living with, improve your self-esteem, and unhook your self-worth from the way you look.

Best of all, the program is completely free when you sign up below. It is contained within a secure membership area as well, where you can comment on every day’s content and ask lots of questions. And only other people also doing the program can see those comments and questions. And of course, I personally answer your questions as well.

Every day for ten days you’ll receive an email that links right over to the site, and you will need your user name and password to sign in to it. There are absolutely NO strings attached. Yes I’ll offer you some other programs, but this program, as it stands is completely, absolutely free. I run workshops with similar content and for that I charge $220. This is completely free.

I should say that the series is aimed at women, because of all the people I’ve worked with who have had body image issues, only one has been a man. So if you’re a man reading this, please forgive me, I openly confess I don’t have the same understanding of your issues as I have of women’s issues. But the tools and exercises will probably help you too, so please do sign up.

In my clinical practice I work with girls and women who seem happy and carefree, but who are plagued by destructive life-limiting thoughts and beliefs about their bodies. It’s so painful for them, and I know how they feel because I used to be stuck in the same painful patterns.

I know the information in this course can help you move into a happier relationship with your body, and a happier way of really living your life.

Just fill in the form below, and click the send button. Then check your email for a confirmation message from me, and we’ll be away! If for some reason you don’t receive an email please let me know on the contact button above, and I will see what’s happening – perhaps the email is trapped in a spam filter? I will do my best to help you solve the problem.

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