Stephanie Gaudreau - 30 July

Contents

For Laurie and Ruth,

the two strongest women I know

Contents

I have a vision... a vision that someday little girls will grow up into strong women who love their bodies, know their worth, and take up space without the pressure of diets, the scale, or exercise as punishment.

Building that world starts with you and metoday. By refusing to let your weight measure your worth. By nourishing your body. By letting your intuition guide you. By taking your power back. If you follow the simple (but challenging!) program I offer you in this book, and commit to fiercely and ruthlessly embracing yourself for the next 30 days, I guarantee youll start feeling energetic, active, confident, strong, resilient, and ready to change the world.

Okay, lets back up for a second. I understand you may not be in change-the-world mode yet. In fact, you may not even be in get-out-of-bed mode yet. However, Im going to guess you picked up this book because youre ready to try something different. You may even be ready to question conventional wisdom and make a big, 180-degree turn. Wherever you are, youre ready to act and to start on this path to your best healthand your fullest life.

If youre unhappy with your bodyand most women areyou probably still believe that if you can just make your body perfect, life will be all rainbows and unicorns. Youll be free of the negative thoughts youve battled for years. Your feelings of unworthiness will disappear.

While the never-ending quest to shrink your body and make yourself small is tempting, it leads only to disappointment. It requires focusing on the physical without healing your inner selfthe person who sometimes feels worthless, forgotten, and like shes never enough. And the diet industry is there to kick you when youre down, needling your biggest insecurities, exposing your vulnerabilities, and then swooping in with a solution. Take this pill. Do this 1,200-calorie diet plan. Suffer through exercises you hate.

Well, fuck all that. Women are tired and fed up, and they want off that roller-coaster ride for good.

The path to health is multifaceted, but at its core is the need to nourish yourself both inside and out. This is how to achieve true wellness in mind, body, and spirit. It doesnt mean that life is then perfect. Rather, it means you have the gumption to really live, to do and experience and create. To be big and bold in your own way. And to weather lifes challenges with grace and resilience.

Youve got to take a stand and do things differently if you want to thrive in this world. And Im happy to tell you that thriving means expandingmentally, physically, emotionally. It means getting outside your comfort zone. It means taking action even when youre scared. It means questioning the status quo and doing the work to unlearn the habits that no longer serve you. It means having the confidence to wear whatever you want in publicshorts, a tank top, or a bathing suitand realize you dont have to make anyone else comfortable about your body. It means waking up every day refreshed and ready to tackle whatever comes your way. It means taking care of yourself from a place of respect and compassion. It means having a strong, capable, body; glowing skin, hair, and nails; a positive, uplifted mood; stable energy levels; awesome digestion; few food cravings; and a healthy sex drive (meow).

Before I tell you more about the Core 4 program, I want to tell you about me. When it comes to nutrition, fitness, weight loss, and athletic performance, I have seen it all, heard it all, and tried it all. As a Nutritional Therapy Consultant and fitness coach, I have identified, tested, and fine-tuned the elements of the Core 4. Ive touched millions with my work onlinethrough recipes, podcasts, and fitness tipsand worked directly with thousands of health seekers.

But before I did all that, I was like a lot of women. Pretty much all my life I hated my body, especially my thighs. I hated the fact that I felt so much bigger than other girls. I thought the answer to finding happiness and self-acceptance must be to get smaller. So I became obsessed with controlling my food. I subsisted on Diet Coke, cucumber sandwiches, celery sticks, fat-free cheese, and those green 100-calorie snack packs. I spent more than a decade on an intense quest to lose weight. Its all I thought about. I tried every terrible dieteverything from the cabbage soup diet to just eating as little as possible. My goal with food and exercise was to shrink myself. Every morning Id pinch my inner thighs to see how fat I was.

I was miserable. I struggled to wake up in the morning, chugged caffeine to get me through the day, and couldnt fall asleep at night. I was hypoglycemic, bloated all the time, and constantly in a bad mood, and I would snap at people for no reason. I guess you could call me a hangry bitch because thats how I felt: out of control but clueless about how to stop it. By the time I was in my early thirties, I thought fatigue, digestive problems, irrational moods, and bad skin were just what my life was going to be all about.

In early 2010, friends introduced me to a paleo way of eating. I figured I had nothing left to lose. I started focusing on real, whole foods, like animal protein, veggies, fruit, and healthy fats. And though I ate according to a strict list of foods (for the record, I wasnt eating nearly enough carbs because I thought that would help me lean out), for the first time in years I didnt count calories or obsess about my portions. Within a few months I started to notice some changes. My skin began to clear up. I slept more soundly and woke up refreshed, and I had more energy, but I was still miserable about how my body looked and about my weight, even though I was living in a thin body.

Desperate for change, I started training for off-road triathlons after several years of competitive mountain biking. I ramped up my workouts, I wasnt eating enough, and everything seemed to spiral out of control like a car-crash video playing in slow motion. I stepped on a scale at the end of race season and saw that my weight was at a lifetime low. Yet I still thought I was too heavy. To make things worse, my second marriage was falling apart. The long hours of training gave me the perfect excuse to bike, swim, and run myself to numbness. After a weekend spent racing at Lake Tahoe, I posed for a photo at Eagle Falls. I distinctly remember looking at the photo right after it was taken and thinking Id never looked bigger, sending me into a silent scream. This was my rock bottom.

What I didnt realize thenand what I would slowly come to understand over the next few yearsis that health and happiness arent found on the bathroom scale. Seeing what was missing and where I was stuck is easy looking back. But at the time, when I was sitting in the soup, boiling away, I couldnt get my head above the surface long enough to figure out what those missing pieces were.

Just two short months later, after a friend dared me to do a CrossFit workout in my garage, I joined a gym and learned to lift weights. With my hands on a barbell, I felt at home. I was free to take up more space in a way that felt right for me, not according to societys expectations. I took my power back, and it was intoxicating. For the first time ever, I started focusing on what my body could do instead of what it looked like. Lifting weights changed my mindset. Instead of drifting off in my head and obsessing over my body the way I typically would, I learned to direct my energy and stay present. My confidence blossomed, and I finally felt comfortable in my own skin. I thought about what I wanted to do with my life. I felt... free. Theres something exhilarating about approaching a heavy weight, lifting it, and thinking, Hmm, I wonder what else I can do!