How It Works

My clients put their desire to lose weight on hold so that they can learn their essential steps to empowering and sustainable self-care. Learning these steps is also efficient – they create the necessary foundation for maintaining weight that is lost in the future. But, most importantly, women who take their essential steps increase their energy, reduce their stress, get more enjoyment out of life, and improve their overall health!

What We’ve Been Taught Leads to Failure

DIETS DON’T WORK. Women have been taught that “taking care of you” means shedding pounds. But, this approach doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves - which also means most of us can’t maintain it.

If your only goal is to lose weight, you’ll never develop a positive, lifelong relationship with the very behaviors (like exercising and sensible eating) that are essential to maintaining a healthy weight. And when we’re not eating well or working out, we miss out on the incredible sense of well-being and many health benefits they offer.

Oprah understands this. She announced in the January 2009 issue of O Magazine that she’s going to stop trying to be thin, and instead spend her valuable energy learning how to care for her WHOLE self so she can feel better, stronger and healthier.

And the scientific research backs this up. New studies show that weight loss efforts lead to failure. Most women gain back the weight they lose in just two years. If that doesn’t convince you, think about your own weight loss efforts over the past 20-40 years: Have you been successful keeping it off?

Most women in midlife have spent 20 to 30 years of their adult lives cycling through diet and exercise programs, eventually giving up when results don’t match expectations. The most unfortunate part of the diet/exercise cycle is that it  causes many women to loathe their bodies and feel that they have failed INSTEAD OF recognizing that they were set up to fail. The aim of this cyclical paradigm has been to produce consumer behavior, not sustainable lifestyles.

I’ve spent my entire career developing a women-specific motivation/behavior approach that leads to lifestyle changes that are desired and sustained. The S.M.A.R.T. principles below reflect the model I developed. They will help you appreciate instead of resent your body. This approach will empower you to take small steps in some areas and huge leaps in others based on what works in your life, today.

S.M.A.R.T. Self-Care for Women

Sustainable: Begin with the end in mind. Our core goal is to make essential behaviors like physical activity and self-care lifelong habits. An important reason most weight-loss programs don’t work is that they don’t address the underlying barriers women have to making their own self-care a daily priority. Most programs also mandate you to tackle diet and exercise at the same time, when these are two very different and difficult things to do. Most of us are just too busy to overhaul both at the same time.

I take a sequential approach. I believe that we should only learn one behavior change at time. Let’s be realistic. It takes a great deal of attention and energy to learn how to integrate one behavior into our lives. Why would we try and learn how to sustain more than one behavior at a time?! We should make sure each lifestyle change really sticks before we add on another one.

Me: Become comfortable saying “I deserve to feel good.” This isn’t just about finding time to move your body; it’s also about allowing yourself to curl up on the couch with a great book, or fit in a long phone call with an old friend. Too many women prioritize their work and families above their own needs, because they just don’t value themselves enough.

I help you deeply internalize the concept of “smart self-care,” so you can take yourself off the back burner and stop compromising your daily well-being and long-term health.  

Active Lifestyle: Make relaxing, convenient and pleasure-based physical movement an integral part of your life. No one sticks with a workout they don’t like or have time to do. I’ll help you find hidden opportunities for activity throughout your day and experiment with workouts you’ll actually like. When you implement my “consistency than quantity” strategy, you’ll see lasting motivation and results.

Reject False Advertising: Replace unrealistic goals with ones that will lead to long-term results. You know by now that constantly hating your body and beating yourself up for failing to meet impossible cultural standards doesn’t work and even gets in the way. We’ll work together to set realistic goals that you can easily attain and sustain. Do you want to spend the next 30-60 years loathing your body or do you want to start taking care of it?

Tailored: Choose a program that’s customized for your life. My research strongly suggests that women are more likely to sustain their lifestyle changes if they fit into and ENHANCE their lives, so I tailor my coaching to work with each clients’ unique situation and preferences. We’ll practice time-management, communication and relationship strategies to empower you to meet your goals and rediscover a deep trust in yourself.

Now that you understand the results you can expect by working with me, go to the Success Stories page to hear about how specific clients have benefited.