7 Simple Steps to a Healthier You: A Busy Woman's Guide ... (ISBN 0736913351)

A good read!:
In 7 Simple Steps to a Healthier You, writer Dawn Hall offers the reader a quick and simple guide for living a healthier, more balanced life. With heart, empathy and encouragement, she challenges us to stop making excuses to avoid exercising, eating right, taking time for ourselves, and spiritual reflection. And then she invites us to join her in discovering a healthier, more balanced life. This book is the result of the author's own personal journey of being "born a weight watcher" and the "largest in her class" to mastering her challenge to stay healthy while leading an active, busy life. In 7 Simple Steps, Hall shares our concerns that it is not easy to live a healthy life and ignore all the excuses that ring out in our heads and sabotage our hard work. Hall provides, instead, easy-to-manage strategies to shape our thinking and choices for a lifetime rather than just a short-term weight reducing diet. She encourages a comprehensive, lifetime approach that includes visualizing a satisfied life, introspection to understand what gets in the way of living healthy, and prayer to achieve lasting results. In Step One, we begin on the roadmap for success with a thought-provoking question. "Was there a point in time when you stopped caring for yourself?" Through the next six steps, Hall invites us care for ourselves more and change our relationship with food, eat intentionally by keeping it smart and simple, exercise, de-clutter our life, get spiritually fit, and commit to a new lifestyle. To help the reader reinforce these concepts, Hall provides a template for building a "Personal Plan for a Healthier Me." Through self-reflection and committing thoughts and intentions to paper, the reader ends up with their own, customized Plan. What distinguishes this book from other diet books or self-help books is the author's own journey and what seems to be her sincere desire to broaden the definition of overall health--not just be focused on losing weight. It is about changing our perspective in order to change long-held habits with intention. Armchair Interviews says: The power in this book comes from its simplicity and understanding of women and their conflicting priorities and roles. What is obvious is that Hall "gets it" and that it takes more than good intentions or willpower. The measure of a truly healthy life comes from how you feel physically, spiritually and emotionally.