How are you doing this week? Are you more energized? Are you losing some weight? For those of you following the Core Balance Challenge, give yourself a big hug. This shows that you have a motivated heart and a willingness to try new things. Good for you!

For those who are still skeptical, I’d like to share my personal story and some of the reasons why I wrote The Core Balance Diet book. Like many of you, losing weight has been a lifelong challenge that left me very frustrated and confused. At one point in my life, I was as much as 40 pounds overweight—and up until relatively recently I carried 15 to 20 stubborn extra pounds. As a girl growing up in Australia, I never thought about my body. 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 than they were (though I was hardly overweight) and I began to obsess over my size. 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 sticks—like 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 know 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 didn’t know—so I simple ate less, went to the gym early in the mornings, and blamed myself for not being disciplined enough to lose the weight.

Since then, I have learned that I had to look beyond outdated “diet” thinking and pay real attention to what I, as a unique indvidiual, needed to do. I learned to become whole and balanced—to my core—and almost magically that stubborn, resistant weight that had plagued me all those years simply came off. It has never come back.

If it worked for me and hundreds of other men and women, it can work for you, too. Are you ready to take the next step?

- Marcelle