A glimpse inside the book.

Chapter 1—Why?

Where do our beliefs come from? We are not born wondering why our legs are short and chubby or why we have a Buddha belly or why it's okay to lay around naked. These, like so many facets of our lives, are learned traits and they are learned from external environments and messages. Messages we receive from our parents and siblings. Messages we receive from our friends. Messages that are pounded into our brains through the media. Messages through music and movies and commercials. Messages from boys and from men, from brothers and from husbands. If we don't have the confidence or the tools to understand those messages are a reflection of the person or the place they are coming from, we begin to believe what is said. The media is hoping that if you see enough commercials about anti-wrinkle cream, you will begin to think you need the cream. If you see enough ads about covering up the grey, you'll think you need to dye your hair. If your husband tells you enough times that you are fat and useless, eventually you begin to believe that you are. It is critical that we learn to control our minds in order to sort through the truth-not let our minds control us. We need to start taking each and every experience in life and use it as a lesson to learn from, instead of allowing ourselves to become a victim of it. This chapter is dedicated to all the women reading this book that can remember the exact moment in time when the journey of self-loathing began.

"I remember my mom used to always say to me, 'Butterflies come in pretty colors and elephants only come in grey.' I knew she meant I was grey."

Interview client #14

Chapter 4—Simple Weight Loss Information

Have you ever noticed when you say the word diet you dream about food. You wake up in the middle of the night listening to Mr. Twinkie singing Ding Dong the Low Fat Witch is Dead. You get up, head to the big, white beast breathing rhythmically in the night waiting for your arrival at its doors. As you arrive, scratching your butt and yawning, you open the doors to see an oasis of gifts begging you to sit down and open each and every one. Before you know it the chocolate cake from dinner that you were just dreaming was a hat, is but a pile of crumbs in your Joe Boxer lap. Now what happens? Do I vomit or do I go to bed? Vomiting takes too much energy and might really wake you up so you just go back to bed. Now what happens to all those calories you just consumed? The same thing that happened to the bowl of popcorn riddled with M & M's you ate last night at 9 p.m. while watching Desperate Housewives. Nothing! There is nothing for them to do but skip merrily down the bloodstream and knock on the closest fat cell door asking for a warm place to curl up and sleep—along with all the other happy fat that was stored from the night before. The women I spoke to found this to be their worst and most common food habit. Eating at night, after dinner, while watching television, too exhausted to make a conscious decision to put the food away. You had a long, hard, stressful day and you deserve this tub of ice-cream, damn it. Problem is you also deserve the consequences. A few moments in the mouth and an eternity on the butt.

Chapter 7—Mothers

"And the sins of the fathers are visited on the children for generations and generation." Unknowingly taking on our parent's unresolved issues can lead to the passing on of dysfunctional habits. Time and time again we are set up to take on our parent's unresolved issues without even knowing it. My father was an alcoholic and his father was an alcoholic and his father was an alcoholic. My mother was fat and her mother was fat and her mother was fat. My father beat my mother and my mother's father beat his wife and my husband beats me.

Many of the women that I interviewed learned their dysfunctional habits from their mothers. They learned to self-loath, to people-please, to be pretty and quiet, to place men before themselves, to place children before themselves, to question their self-worth, to avoid feelings such as anger, fear or sadness and they learned how to diet. Up until about the age of five, most of what children do and think comes from the primitive area of their brain that just knows how to survive.

Chapter 11—Hope

Let's stand up, as a wonderful, wise and competent sector of society, and say, "We are not going to listen to your bullshit anymore! We don't care what you deem as acceptable. I am acceptable. We will not throw our money away to the diet industry any longer. We will take that money and spend it on us. We will tell the grocery stores to stick their fashion magazines right next to Fly Fishing and Horse Quarterly, if not, perhaps somewhere a bit more humbling. We will look at television shows that exploit women through fake hair, fake boobs, fake teeth, fake, fake, fake, and say, 'No thanks, I'll watch something a bit more intelligent.' We will tell the people in our life that judge us based on our external appearance, 'Smell ya later dude.' We will stop buying fat trappers, metabolic enhancers, fat melting creams, eyelid hooks, chin bras, tricep slings, corsets, breakfast in a can, 12 steps to a rock-hard butt, 30 minutes to perfection, the 4 minute workout, the 7 minute workout, the workout with no sweat, fat jigglers, fat zappers, fat suckers, compression suits, push up bras (well, maybe we shouldn't get too hasty), cellulite creams (come on gals!), power suits designed to detox your liver, muscle stimulation machines, Phen/fen, chromium picolinate, fat binders, the ear patch, slimming soaps (aaahahaha), diet magnets, exercise pills in a bottle, weight loss in a bottle, (if you're reading some of these thinking, hmmm, haven't tried that one-please call a therapist)." You get the picture. Now you can understand why it is a $50 billion industry. And we are the people making them rich.

Chapter 13—The Perfect Me

Writing this book has taught me that being content with who you are and what you look like has to begin inside of you. It has taught me that the journey to contentment is a long, difficult and painful trip but the destination is worth the struggle. The destination is one of dignity and understanding. I would like to invite you to be who you are with dignity and with pride. Be short with dignity. Be overweight with dignity. Be boobless with dignity. Be fat with dignity. Be single with dignity. Be a woman with dignity. Without dignity and without pride the journey to contentment will never end and there will never be a "perfect you". You will never enjoy life through your own eyes if you spend your whole life trying to be someone other than who you are. Start living today. Start by recognizing that you are perfect just the way you are. Best selling author, Robert Collier said, "Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out".

"The illusion of perfect would be as follows: waking up in the morning without fear or anxiety about all of the unknowns that the day will hold. To not question or worry about all of the things that I am supposed to know. To be comfortable with allowing myself to live my life as I choose as opposed to the way others think I should live. I would be fit, without the worry of obsession sneaking back into my life, and I would be happy with myself. I would be less afraid of losing control because of a developed stronger sense of trust in myself."

Interview client #5

"I like my mind and even though it's not a perfect body, I still like my body."

Interview client #71