The Feel Good Factory - The Feel Good Factory on Great Sex: Mind-blowing, Earth-moving, Pulse-racing Secrets to Spice Up Your Love Life

Copyright Infinite Ideas Ltd, 2009

First published in 2009 by

Infinite Ideas Limited

36 St Giles

Oxford

OX1 3LD

United Kingdom

www.infideas.com

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of small passages for the purposes of criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the publisher. Requests to the publisher should be addressed to the Permissions Department, Infinite Ideas Limited, 36 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LD, UK, or faxed to +44 (0) 1865 514777.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781906821210

Brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

The publisher would like to thank Marcelle Perks, Helena Frith-Powell and Elisabeth Wilson for their contributions to this book.

Designed by D.R.ink

Typeset by Nicki Averill

Printed and bound in Malta

Contents

Quiz: How smart are you
about sex?

Do you feel your sex life could be taken to
a new level? There are some quick, reliable
and above all easy ways to reignite the fire.

For sex advice to work, you must act
upon it rather than simply read about it,
howeverand thats
far more likely if its
not too intimidating or difficult.

Most of us cant just go back to the teenage years when sex was the focus of our attention because life is just too busy now but we could give our love life a little more attention than its getting at the momentand that may be all it takes.

Feel good now:Throw in an element of surprise: do something slightly different to the last time, each time you make love. After a few weeks, mixing things up becomes second nature and the pay-off will make it worthwhile.

You probably know most of what is written here, but what is odd is how quickly we forget what we know. Just following the very straightforward ideas for improving your sexual confidence will do your sex life untold good. And by improving communication, as recommended in the second section, youll see another huge leap. It doesnt take a lot to get you talking to each other again about what you like and also what you dont like. Then there are a couple of sections to get you moving towards a more fulfilling sex life. At the very least, these ideas can give you a great laugh when things go wrong and can blow your socks off when they go right.

To quote the famous sex novelist Erica Jong: There are things that happen in the dark between two people that make everything that happens in the light all right. With very little effort, you can greatly improve your sex life. And thats going to make everything else in your life work better.

With very little effort,

you can greatly improve

your sex life

Because the most important element in
improving your sex life is tuning in
and turning on to yourself.

Insecurity eats away at desire. Dont let pictures
of the beautiful and famous make you feel
inadequate. The top performers, models and
stars probably feel less confident than you do.

Beautiful women are frequently held up as an ideal and yet celebrities suffer more than you might think. They may seem to have it alllooks, public adoration, moneybut the cult of celebrity often makes them more insecure. Even the most stunning women can have problems feeling confident.

Halle Berry is a former Miss Teen All America, was the runner-up to Miss USA and has been voted into People magazines Most Beautiful People list nine times: oh, and shes also an Oscar winner. Despite all this, she recently announced that she is very insecure about both her physical appearance and her acting. On Femalefirst.com she said, about those who pay her compliments: If they really knew me, theydrealise Im far from secure about my looks.

Knowing that such a successful, talented and good-looking woman is plagued by self-doubt should convince you that beauty is only skin-deep. Theres no point in thinking that you would feel/be sexier if you looked differently; confidence comes from within.

Similarly, Madonna, who is perhaps the most media-savvy female performer ever, has admitted, I think my biggest flaw is my insecurityIm plagued with insecurities 247. In Madonna: An Intimate Biography, J. Randy Taraborrelli quotes dancer Sallim Gauwloos, who appeared in the movie In Bed with Madonna: She was very, very insecure, especially with other women. We would have parties, and there would never be beautiful women invited. Only guys. She would freak out if there was someone in the room more beautiful than her. Clearly, public persona and how stars really feel are two different things. Lesson learnedthe grass is not always greener on the other side.

Many regular women feel intimidated when they see airbrushed, perfect images of women in the media. One survey found only 3% of women are happy with their size and 25% of all women in the UK are on a diet at any one time, although around half of them are not even clinically overweight (Daily Mail, 2003).

We are obsessed with how we look and all this angst is a terrible burden on our sex lives. In Hot Monogamy Dr Patricia Love uses research that shows women who have a negative body image are less interested in making lovemore restricted in their range of sexual activities, and have more difficulty becoming aroused and reaching orgasm.

In the 1950s models weighed 8% less than the average woman, whereas in the 1990s models weighed 23% less, which makes them thinner than 95% of people. The difference between the ideal and the reality has never been further apart. Today theres much more focus on how we look: people pierce and tattoo their bodies, sculpt them with exercise and turn increasingly to cosmetic surgery. All of this is great if it makes you feel confident and empowered, but if you still feel insecure perhaps the answer is to start from the inside and work out.

So the message is: you need to feel sexy to have a better love life. Just think: if you transferred a little of the energy you put into improving your looks into feeling good about yourself and focused instead on improving your love life, the results could be quite transforming.

Only 3% of women are

happy with their size

Boosting your
sexual confidence

So, what is sexual confidence and how do you
get your hands on some of it? If youre uptight
about sex, insecure about your body or just
plain worried that youre not very good at it,
then building up your sexual confidence is a
prerequisite to enjoying yourself.

What factor most affects your ability to have a brilliant sex life? A great body? A fabulous lover? A bendy body? If you have all of them, bully for you! Even so, without one allimportant element, your love life is still likely to be ho-hum rather than fantastic: you must have sexual confidence too.

What might work

If youre feeling more than a little lacklustre about your appearance, its very unlikely that youre enjoying a great sex life. Forget cherchez la femme (or cherchez lhomme for that matter): its more a case of cherchez le diet.

Note: A dramatic weight loss in a long-term partner should always be viewed with terrific suspicion. If your lover loses several kilos and your sex life is less than sparkling, remember their sexual confidence is about to go sky-high and when that happens, thrilling sex is never far awaywith or without you. On the other hand, if youve been feeling less like sex and you have put on a little weight, ask yourself whether being 5 kg lighter would make a difference to your libido. If it would, then diet. With a little willpower, its by far the simplest and quickest way to feel sexually confident, but not if the problem is deeper than weight gain. If you know in your heart that you are not overweight and losing a few pounds wont give you the boost you need, youll have to look deeper.