Update: I am giving away five free signed copies of the book! To enter, and to also view a video preview of the book and check out the Sexy by Nature Q&A, check out this post.

For the Sexy by Nature Facebook page with exclusive tips, discussions, excerpts, and expertise, go here.

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Good morning, ladies. I wrote a book!!

The following post comprises most of the introduction to and the table of contents of Sexy by Nature: The Whole Foods Solution to Radiant Health, Life-Long Sex Appeal and Soaring Confidence. Over the course of the last several weeks, I kept trying to think of all the different ways I wanted to first share with you the book, but I could come up with none better than the thing itself.  I open by asking the question”what is sexy?” (omitted here for now) and the next 303 pages are all about helping you get there.

Or perhaps the better way to put it is this: these 303 pages are all about opening your eyes to the raging fire of sex appeal already radiating from your insides out.

Diet, lifestyle, mindset, pride, and self-love and all crucial tools I deal with in explicit detail.

Through the next several weeks I’ll put up summaries, excerpts from different chapters, and giveaways on a massive scale. It’s available on shelves March 18, and for pre-order any time you like.  If you’ve got ideas about sexy, stories, gripes… I want to hear them. Comments are awesome. I might have a book, but your story is equally as important and likely far more kickass than my own.

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My Story

In the fall of 2009, my jean size dropped from ten to double zero over the course of just three months. I was not the only one who noticed. Approximately once a week, one of my friends drew the short straw and had me over for dinner. She’d lean across the dinner table, hold my hand, let her eyes well up, and tell me (again) that she was concerned I had a problem.

“Screw this!” I scoffed. I laughed, and often. I had never felt better about myself. I had been trying to ditch my love handles for ten years, and finally I had shed them. Hallelujah! Men looked at me differently. Eyes wandered up and down my body, and smiles followed. An old love interest who had spurned me began pursuing me relentlessly. I tried on fancy dresses at the mall and compared myself to supermodels. Life could not have been any better.

I did not understand why my friends thought I had a problem. I did everything the way I was told. My professors made it quite clear that the healthiest thing to be was a vegetarian, so I stopped eating animals. Talk show hosts proclaimed loudly that fat was unhealthy, so I didn’t eat it. Celebrity magazines made it obvious that I had to be thin to be sexy, so I measured my waistline every night. My doctor’s office had a chart with the BMI index on it and smiley faces toward the lower end, so I drove my BMI downward. Medical professionals equated low-calorie diets with better health, so I went to sleep hungry every night. Much as my friends thought I had a problem, I was playing the game the way it was supposed to be played. I followed all the rules. It just so happened to be that I was doing it well enough to win.

I might have felt differently about winning the game if I had listened at all to my own body. I stopped menstruating. I became infertile. I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, hypothyroidism, and hypothalamic amenorrhea. I lost all vestiges of a sex drive. I obsessed over food and constantly felt deprived. I did not eat enough to give me the nutrients I needed. I developed a nasty case of acne, and I worked out hard for at least 90 minutes every day, usually twice a day. That was how I lived. I thought that was what I had to do to in order to win.

Several months later, I packed up and wandered across the globe. I lived in Venice. There, I flirted my way onto Mediterranean yachts. I backpacked around Europe and winked my way into sold-out concerts. I went to school in Taichung, Taiwan. When a bar owner noticed how much more fun his customers had when I danced on top of his bar rather than his usual go-go dancers, he hired me to do it instead. I was brashly confident, daringly open, and thrilled to be so free and alive.

“Winning” was working.

I couldn’t go all the way around the world without coming home with a couple of lessons, however. Most importantly, I learned that how sexy I both felt and was perceived to be had everything to do with my confidence and very little to do with the shape my tiny body. Sure, my figure mattered in the eyes of other people. I looked more stereotypically fit than I used to. But I am willing to bet my life that had I acted the same self-assured, flirtatious way while having fat on my thighs, hips, and anywhere else, I would have received the same awe, had the same fun, and laughed just as joyously with the men and women I met in every location I wandered. Sexy was largely about confidence, and I could no longer ignore the fact that I sacrificed a lot in order to win for reasons that were becoming less and less clear.

This was somewhat bad news because the hidden truth was that I had a confidence problem. Instead of being founded on love and loyalty to my body, my flirty confidence was completely dependent on how I looked. My happiness was, too. When I walked down the street, I met people’s eyes and smiled on the days I felt thin and fit, and I looked down and off to the side on “fat” days. I had no real love, no real confidence, and no real allegiance to my body. I was tethered to how it looked to other people. Compared to image, I cared very little about its health, its inherent worth, or its glorious powers to move, dance, eat, sing, and live. When it came to having a strong and happy relationship with my body, I Failed with a capital F.

What’s more, my poor body was starving.

When I do podcasts these days, people often ask me when I got started on the diet that I proscribe in this book. Even though I changed the basis of my diet to Sexy by Nature foods back in 2009, I now know and inform my listeners that it was not until years afterward that I actually developed the Sexy by Nature approach to wellness. This is because this “diet” is not only about the food you eat, but also, and perhaps more importantly, about the loving and nourishing way you do it.

The birth of a paradigm

It was a long road of research and experience before I figured out exactly what it was I needed other than whole foods in order to be healthy, happy, and free. First, I had to learn my way inside and out of the female reproductive and endocrine systems. Hypothalamic amenorrhea, anterior pituitary gland, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and interleukin-6 became some of several hundred new words in my vocabulary. I studied vitamins, minerals, and foods as they might affect these systems. This was in an effort to cure myself of my low libido, acne, and infertility, but I did not find the trick that would enable me to cure these indicators of poor health while maintaining my low weight and restrictive lifestyle. I began to suspect that relaxing my grip on my image and developing a more natural, intuitive way of eating might be crucial to solving my PCOS and other hormone problems. But I didn’t want to do that. My last desperate lunge at having my cake and eating it too was to experiment with pharmaceutical methods. The drugs I took set in motion eighteen months of panic attacks. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I might have been willing to suffer a low libido in order to be thin, but I would not let myself destroy my mental health. No longer could I do what I had been doing to myself for years. In one liberating yet terrifying week, I threw my rabid body perfectionism out the window and never looked back. I was on my body’s side, and for good.

Around the same time I was learning all these things about my body’s need for nourishment, I started to think about my destructive behaviors on a broader scale. What about all the other women in the world who suffered under the same norms and pressures? What about the pre-teen who starves herself to death, the new mother who is terrified of her post-birth body, or the near 80 percent of young women who have negative body image issues? What about all the beautiful young girls being born into this twisted, restrictive, objectifying culture? Of all the things I did in this time period, the most important is what I did next.

I got angry.

And thus my website and community were born.

And thus this life-changing manifesto was born. Sexy by Nature contains lessons I learned while studying the female body and wandering the globe—lessons that thousands of women have since come to love and internalize and live by. Sexy is not restriction. Sexy is not discipline. Sexy is not thin. Sexy is not meeting someone else’s expectations. Sexy is about fitness and having a strong, shapely feminine figure particular to your own genes and your own nature. Sexy is being excited to be at home in your own body. Sexy is having such a good relationship with your body that no amount of magazine ads taunting you will ever put you at war with yourself again. I am firmly on the side of my body now. I know that being healthy is what makes me sexy. My body is a natural body that needs me to listen to it and love it and nourish it. The more I give it these things, the sexier I am and the better my life gets. The more I give my body love, the more and more my body loves me back. Clear skin. Better sleep. A ravenous libido. A naturally maintained sexy waistline. Positive mental energy. Energy to set the world on fire.

The Sexy by Nature Golden Rule

Your body is a natural body with natural needs, that, when loved properly, loves you right back.

This book is for you because your body has the same natural ability mine has to be sexy and healthy all on its own. It naturally slims itself, naturally heals itself, and naturally generates feelings of peace and happiness. All your body needs is for you to work with it rather than against it. All it needs is the natural nourishment it has been craving all along.

If you play by the Sexy by Nature Golden Rule and love and nourish your natural body, then you will join me on the road of radical, easy, and healthy sex appeal.

The New Rules I outline in Step 1 are about standing up for yourself and your body in the face of everything in the world that tells you otherwise. It can be a challenge for sure. Saying no to processed foods and putting away diet magazines…these are big steps for a lot of us. Revolutions, even. But worth it? Unquestionably. I am with you every step of the way. And in the end, loyalty to living this way is the easiest thing in the world. When you give your body what it needs to be sexy all in its own power—without drugs or doctor’s visits or side effects or degenerative disease—health is not a struggle. Being sexy is not a struggle. Being at home in your own skin is not a struggle. It’s a journey in life and in love, and an electrifyingly sexy one at that.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

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