Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GERALYN B. COOPERSMITH, MA, CSCS, is an exercise physiologist with sixteen years of professional fitness experience. Coopersmith is the Senior Manager of the Equinox Fitness Training Institute. She has written articles for and been featured in Elle, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Family Circle, Cosmopolitan, and other popular magazines. She is currently the resident fitness expert on the Fine Living Channel's lifestyle makeover show, Simplify Your Life.

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"No one understands what it means to be fit and female better than Geralyn Coopersmith. Her work has brought results to women nationwide."
-Carol Espel, MS, National Director of Group Fitness for Equinox Fitness Clubs
 
"Every woman should read Geralyn's book."
-Michael Boyle, author of Functional Training for Sports
 
"Coopersmith leads the reader to new levels of self-awareness and the ability to make educated choices. Underlying her hip, upbeat tone is a sound background in exercise physiology and a strong desire to help women improve their lifestyles."
-Joan Pagano, author of Strength Training for Women
 
Ever wonder why some women look great with very little effort while others exercise and diet obsessively with disappointing results? The fact is, when it comes to getting in shape, all women are not created equal. We've all heard about apples and pears, but there's lots more to women's bodies than just that. If you've been frustrated by fad diets and the workout of the month that never seems to work, you need a program designed specifically for your unique body type.
 
In Fit + Female, Geralyn Coopersmith, a top fitness expert and certified personal trainer, ditches the one-size-fits-all approach to getting in shape and helps you determine which type you are. Then you get a nutrition and exercise plan that's tailored for your needs, not just generic, off-the-rack advice. If you want to get back into that clingy little number that now hugs all the wrong places, this is the realistic, scientific how-to for you!

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Fit and Female

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

An Epidemic of Self-Hatred

Maggie

Most women would kill to look like Maggie. Arguably the most fit woman in the gym, Maggie is a runner, a biker, and a serious weight lifter. At five feet three inches, she weighs about 100 pounds, has 12 percent body fat, and is pretty and petite. She has amazing definition in her torso, a small round bottom, and sinewy, well-defined arms. It's hard to believe she's a mom in her early forties. She is a true athlete, capable of doing virtually anything I throw at her.

To look at her, no one would imagine that Maggie actually hates her body. As her personal trainer, though, I know the truth. During our training sessions, she constantly complains about her "fat thighs" and her "lard ass." At first, I thought these statements were Maggie's way of fishing for compliments, but over time I realized that she was actually serious. In fact, Maggie is so dissatisfied with her appearance that she recently decided to have liposuction on her legs.

When she told me this in confidence, I was dumbfounded. For the life of me, I couldn't imagine: (1) what kind of doctor would agree to do this procedure on someone who looks like her, and (2) where the heck he plans on sucking out the fat from!!-there's nothing there that I can see.

It's moments like this where, as a fitness professional, I feel as if I live in a world gone mad. Here is this beautifully toned creature, yet no amount of evidence can convince her that she has a fabulous body.

Unfortunately, Maggie is not alone. Not by a long shot. Sadly, there is a virtual epidemic of female body bashing in this country. We live in a society where most women are unhappy with the bodies they have-regardless of what they look like. In fact, in one study, a unbelievable 90 percent of the women surveyed said they were dissatisfied with their appearance.

Consider these other sobering statistics:

75 percent of normal-weight women think they are overweight.

90 percent of women overestimate their body size.

70 percent of women between the ages of thirty and seventy said that they wished they were thinner.

Seven out of ten U.S. women are "on a diet" at any given time.

89 percent of all plastic surgery is performed on women.

No wonder the diet industry generates a staggering $50 billion annually! Perhaps most disturbing of all-despite this amount of money spent on weight loss-47 million women in this country are currently overweight, and diet failure rates are as high as 95 percent!

The Culture of Unhappiness

The Barbie Body

Why are so many women so unhappy with their bodies? Why are so many of us trying to change ourselves?

After fifteen years as a certified personal trainer and an exercise physiologist, I can tell you that one of the main reasons that women are disappointed by their appearance is that they have a distorted concept of what a healthy, "normal" female body is supposed to look like in the first place.

Every day, I meet with female clients to discuss their fitness goals. Almost all of the women I speak to tell me that they are working out not for the many health benefits but rather to alter something about their appearance. Whenever I ask specifically what it is that my client would like to change about her body, invariably she begins to describe the "Barbie Body." She tells me that she wants to be longer, leaner, with thin legs, a small waist, and large, buoyant breasts. In fact, I have never had a client say that she wanted to be shorter, bulkier, with thick legs and a round middle and small (or saggy) breasts. It's just not the ideal that most of us have internalized.

Nearly every woman I have ever met wants to look like an unnatural (and virtually unattainable) standard, a standard that most of us have internalized to the point that we believe it to be a desirable and realistic goal. In other words, the person most women believe they should strive to be is usually someone they could never realistically expect to become. Like it or not, though, the Barbie Body is a part of our collective female psyche.

Most of us grew up with Barbie. We changed her outfits and marveled at her perfect blond hair, her large nippleless breasts, her inconceivably small waist, and, of course, those long, long legs. Barbie has no body fat, no lumps, no bumps, no bulges, no unsightly veins-she is pure plastic perfection. We began to believe (either consciously or subconsciously) that this was what we would look like when we became women.

However, normal female physiology being what it is, most of us ended up looking dramatically different than Barbie. In other words, we ended up looking like, well-real women. We developed normal body fat on our legs, thighs, and/or tummies. Our legs were too short, our breasts weren't big enough-or perhaps they were too big. Bottom line, no matter how puberty affected our bodies, it's a safe bet that we didn't magically transform into the Barbie doll that we always thought we would become. Over time, because of the chasm between our fantasy and our reality, most of us began to feel increasingly frustrated with our appearance and even hostile toward the bodies that we inhabit.

Certainly, on a logical level, most women understand that Barbie's anatomy has little to do with reality. Just look around. There isn't a whole lot of real-world evidence for the notion that women actually do look like Barbie. Yet on a deeper level, most of us, in our heart of hearts, still yearn to look that way. There's slim chance of that.

The fact is, Barbie's dimensions have so little to do with reality that a woman would have just as much chance of turning into Tinkerbell, Minnie Mouse, or Betty Boop. Consider the following statistics:

If Barbie were a flesh-and-blood woman, she would be at least five feet nine inches and would weigh only 110 pounds.

According to the Met Life Ideal Height and Weight Tables, the normal weight range for a five-foot, nine-inch woman is actually 129 to 170 pounds.

The Met Life Ideal Height and Weight Tables list 110 pounds as an appropriate weight for a small-framed woman under five feet two inches.

The average American woman is actually five feet four inches tall and weighs 140 pounds.

If Barbie were a real person, her bust-waist-hip measurements would be 39-18-33.

The average American woman's measurements are 35-28-38.

In a recent study, a group of scientists created a computer-generated model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions. According to their analysis, based on those proportions, Barbie's back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body. Moreover, a torso of that size would be too narrow to contain more than half of a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. Their conclusion: an individual with Barbie's dimensions would likely suffer from chronic diarrhea-and would ultimately die from malnutrition. Not a very pretty picture at all.

Yet for most of us, the Barbie Body still represents the gold standard of womanly beauty. It is a lie that most women believe (on some deeper level) to be a truth-a form of collective insanity. Unfortunately, the vast chasm...