Marcelle Pick - The Core Balance Diet

At one point in my life, I was as much as 40 pounds overweightand up until relatively recently I carried 15 to 20 stubborn extra pounds. From my early teens until my fifties, I was in a constant battle with my weight fueled by a lot of confusion and self-doubt. As a girl growing up in Australia, I never thought about my body. I ran and played and worked happily; I was healthy and strong and ate regular, home-cooked meals made from food my parents were able to grow, gather, or purchase for our home in the Outback. When I was 10 years old, my family moved to the States, and for the first time in my life I became body-conscious. Girls at school teased me for being bigger then they were (though I was hardly overweight) and I began to obsess over my size. Our diet changed as we began to integrate into American culture, though my mother still cooked for us every day. I was never overweight as a child, but I was never skinny. And boy, did I want to be skinny!

It was the 1960s and all of the cultural icons were stickslike Twiggy. Through high school, I engaged in all the typical skirmishes we women do to lose weight: I starved myself, I ate only grapefruit for a week, I yo-yoed back and forth between fad diets, and I stayed active on the pep team; but I never got really skinny, no matter how hard I tried. During my twenties and thirties, as I started my family, extra pounds crept on and I spent huge amounts of energy trying to lose them. I went on Weight Watchers, measured every ounce of food I ate, and oh-so-slowly lost weight at the agonizing rate of about a half a pound a week. I was stupefied when others in my group who were doing the exact same program would lose two to five in the same time period! It took me a year to lose 15 pounds, and it came right back on the moment I started eating normally again.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have immediately suspected some underlying issues that were getting in the way of my weight loss. But I didnt knowso I simply ate less, went to the gym early in the mornings, and blamed myself for not being disciplined enough to lose the weight. The silver lining to this experience was that I began to tune in to my diet and learn more about the importance of optimal nutrition and eating organically. I also began to explore holistic and then functional medicine. My weight was stable (even though I was heavier than I wanted to be) and I was healthy and full of energy. It was around then that three partners and I began Women to Women, one of the first medical clinics in the States to practice holistic healing for women by women, with a mission to change womens health for the better.

Things percolated along for a decade. My family and the medical clinic were thriving; I had a group of supportive and loving friends; and I was living my dreamalbeit with 15 extra pounds. I was frustrated by my inability to lose this weight. I felt as if I was doing everything right, but nothing really worked for very long. And then, in my late 40s, things went haywire. My body began to rebel. My mother (with whom Id always had a complicated and unresolved relationship) fell ill and eventually passed away. At the same time, I began to undergo premenopausal hormonal shifts and packed on a mysterious additional 20 poundseven though I had not changed a thing in my diet or my exercise patterns. Shocking as it was, I look back now and realize that the sudden weight gain was a kind of gift, because it forced me to finally look beyond outdated diet thinking and pay real attention to what I, as a unique individual, needed to do. It was my wake-up call.

As a medical practitioner who has treated women for almost 30 years, I have seen up close the miraculous transformation that can occur when a woman finally begins to take care of herself on every level. Many of the diet and lifestyle guidelines I have set out for you here have been culled from decades of medical experienceand a few aha momentswith real patients. In these pages you will read some of their stories and share in their successes. During all those years, I strove to be a good example of my own teachings and I was able to design the physically supportive concepts set out in