The Core 4: Embrace Your Body, Own Your Power

Fitness trainer Gaudreau (The Performance Paleo Cookbook) focuses, in this practical and informational guide for women, on health and strength rather than weight loss and dieting. The book’s first part explains “four pillars”: “eat nourishing foods,” “move with intention,” “recharge your energy,” and “empower your mind.” In part two, Gaudreau takes readers through 30 days of challenges (“small, specific actions”) ranging from building arm strength to detoxing from technology. Although she is an avid strength trainer and includes a number of workouts that employ weights, her approach is holistic, addressing, among other things, goal-setting, sleep quality, and mindset changes. Without placing primary emphasis on food, Gaudreau provides shopping lists, meal plans, and a concluding section of recipes based on a whole-foods approach (restrictive diets, she asserts, are ineffective and unsustainable). By the program’s day 30, she predicts, readers will have built lasting habits and will possess a full toolbox of strategies for keeping their bodies healthy and strong. Gaudreau’s encouraging manual, which takes on outdated diet methods that encourage participants to “shrink” (for a decade, she notes, she tried every such diet herself), should encourage many other women to adopt her appealing health and fitness regimen. Agent: Dado Derviskadic, Folio. (July)