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Review: "Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves" by Amy Ahlers

Review: "Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves" by Amy Ahlers

“I’m too fat (or too skinny, or unattractive) to ever have a relationship (or have friends, or get a job).” “The world is against me (it always was and always will be).” “I will always be poor (or alone, or in a bad relationship, or unemployed...).” Amy Ahlers, the “Wake-Up Call” coach and founder of the Inner Mean Girl Reform School, says that these all-too-common thoughts are the voice of our “Inner Mean Girl,” who sounds surprisingly like the girls who used to lurk in the corridors of our junior high school, making disparaging remarks about us. Even as adults, we can still hear their voices whispering behind our backs, judging us, and finding us wanting. It is their voices, she says, that still make up most of our daily self-talk.

Ahlers, backed up by reports from the National Science Foundation (NSF), says that the average person thinks as many as sixty thousand thoughts a day. Unfortunately, the majority of them are negative and critical. These negative thoughts are the “Big Fat Lies” that contribute to the stress, depression, eating disorders, and even physical illness that plague American women today. Ahlers helps us dispel those lies with her blend of tough talk and compassionate wisdom and outlines a three-step process that can bring the lies into the light for healing, put us in touch with our truth, and lock that truth into our physical selves. She also introduces us to a voice that’s more powerful than that of our Inner Mean Girl — the voice of our Inner Wisdom — and says that listening to that voice can really put our Mean Girl in her place. When she’s out of the way, says Ahlers, we’ll meet our Inner Superstar. “When you fully wake up to your Inner Superstar, you make heads turn when you walk into a room because you are so deeply and fully being you. This connection to our Inner Superstar can become our new reality, our new way of being in the world,” she affirms.

Ahlers’s book won’t bore you with psychological jargon and dry theory. It’s fun to read and filled with coaching, affirmations, inspiring quotations, and stories, yet her understanding and insight are deep and can take you by surprise. She calls her book and its simple yet powerful wake-up call a “joyous, straight-talking Cracker Jack box full of treats with the best possible prize inside: a better life.”

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