Unapologetic Aging:
A Therapeutic Book Club
What if you could…
Nourish your body and spirit without rules, restrictions, or apology?
Let go of body shame and reclaim trusting yourself, vitality, and body-respect—alongside women who get it?
Step into this chapter feeling more connected, grounded, and free—together with a community of midlife+ rebels?
What might become possible if you stopped treating your aging body as something to fix and began exploring what it means to live more fully in it?
Join Deb Benfield, M.Ed., RDN/LDN, RYT, author of Unapologetic Aging, for an eight-week facilitated journey through the book.
Together, we'll explore what it means to untangle ourselves from diet culture and ageism, mend our relationships with our bodies, and deepen our commitment to living unapologetically as we age.
Eight weekly online gatherings
🗓️ Tuesdays, October 27 – December 15, 2026
🕚 12 PM ET / 9 AM PT
🎥. Online + recordings available
‍ ‍ This will be an intentionally small group to increase access for all participants.
This is not your typical book club.
You may have read books about body acceptance. You may understand intellectually how diet culture and ageism shape the way you see yourself.
And still, you find yourself standing in front of a mirror, wishing something were different.
Understanding these systems is important. But intellectual understanding doesn't always translate into a different lived experience.
That's why I created this group.
Over eight weeks, we'll use Unapologetic Aging as our guide, moving beyond simply reading the material to exploring how it shows up in our lives, relationships, and bodies.
We'll make space for the complicated feelings that can accompany aging, including grief, anger, curiosity, possibility, and joy.
You won't be asked to love every part of your body, replace every negative thought with a positive affirmation, or pretend aging is always wonderful.
Instead, we'll explore what becomes possible when we stop making our bodies the enemy.
Who is this group for?
This experience will be especially meaningful if:
You're navigating midlife or beyond and find your relationship with your body challenging.
You're so tired of the relentless pressure to optimize, improve, shrink, or reverse your aging body.
You understand the principles of body acceptance but find them difficult to integrate into your everyday life.
You're curious about reclaiming pleasure, connection, and vitality without letting your appearance measure your worth.
You'd appreciate a supportive community of women exploring similar questions.
You don't have to be at a particular place in your body image journey to belong here.
This is a facilitated therapeutic discussion and reflection group, not a substitute for individualized nutrition, psychotherapy, or eating disorder treatment.
Unapologetic Aging:
A Therapeutic Book Club
You've read about body liberation. Now let's explore what it feels like to live it.
An 8-week small group program
This unique program, based on the book Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship With Your Body, transforms meaningful concepts into everyday practices—engaging your mind, heart, and body to support real and lasting change.
The Unapologetic Aging Recipe
1ST INGREDIENT: Untangling
We begin by getting curious about what we’ve been taught. Together, we’ll untangle the messages of diet culture, anti-aging culture, and the body hierarchy from what we actually believe and want for ourselves.
2ND INGREDIENT: Mending
Once we begin to recognize what we’ve internalized, we can tend to the relationship we have with our bodies. Mending isn’t about learning to love every part of ourselves. It’s about cultivating more trust, respect, nourishment, and care for the bodies carrying us through our lives.
3RD INGREDIENT: Practices
Knowing something intellectually isn’t the same as experiencing it in your body. Through gentle, accessible practices, we’ll explore what body respect, presence, pleasure, rest, nourishment, and aliveness can actually feel like—not just what they mean.
Special Sauce: Community
We were never meant to figure all of this out alone. There is something powerful about being in a room with others who are questioning the same messages, sharing their own stories, and practicing another way alongside us. Community reminds us that so much of what we’ve experienced as personal body shame was never simply personal—and gives us a place while we find a way to imagine something different together.
What You’ll Experience Inside Unapologetic Aging-
🌿 Weekly Live 75-Minute Group Coaching Calls
Led by Deb, each session includes guided conversation, space for reflection, and embodied practices to help integrate the week’s focus, with recordings if you can’t make it.
📝 Curated Practices & Reflections
Gentle, thought-provoking exercises based on the practices in Unapologetic Aging, designed to deepen your awareness, spark curiosity, and help you translate ideas into meaningful shifts.
📚 Transformative Content Designed for Midlife and Beyond
Topics include:
Releasing ageist, limiting beliefs
Shifting from diet rules to a self-care mindset
Nourishing your body for energy and vitality—free of diet/wellness mess
Healing body shame and reclaiming respect for your body as your life partner
Finding joy and play in movement
Regulating your nervous system to support ease, presence, and resilience
Each week will include a facilitated conversation, reflection, and opportunities to explore the book's practices.
What we’ll explore together:
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We’ll explore how we’ve been conditioned to view our bodies from the outside in—and how ageism can deepen those critical narratives. Together, we’ll begin to untangle these inherited stories and gently shift from self-surveillance to embodied experience. Through daily practices, we’ll reconnect with what it feels like to live in our bodies rather than judging our bodies. Along the way, we’ll uncover and challenge our internalized ageism that no longer serves us.
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In this session, we examine how diet culture has shaped the food and eating rules you’ve internalized—and how those rules have fractured your connection with your body.
We’ll name the harm: the guilt, shame, and self-doubt that arise when eating is governed by external control rather than internal cues.
You’ll begin to recognize these limiting beliefs in real time and gently question their authority.
From there, we open space to dismantle what no longer serves you and begin restoring a more compassionate, trusting relationship with your body. -
In this session, we explore how fitness culture reinforces the belief that more is always better—more intensity, more discipline, more effort—and how this “never enough” mindset disconnects us from our bodies.
We’ll examine the pressure to move for optimization, longevity, and “super-aging,” and how these messages can quietly fuel both overexertion and avoidance.
Together, we’ll name the very real pull toward exercise addiction on one end and exercise resistance on the other—both understandable responses to a culture that moralizes movement.
From there, we begin to untangle from rigid expectations and explore a more compassionate, responsive relationship with movement that honors your body, not just performance. -
In this session, we explore how ageism, weight stigma, and our culture’s body hierarchy don’t just shape beliefs—they impact your nervous system.
You’ll gain a foundational understanding of what it means to feel regulated versus dysregulated, and how body shame lives not just in thoughts, but in your body.
We’ll connect the dots between cultural messages about aging and bodies and the activation of stress, vigilance, and disconnection.
From there, you’ll begin to recognize your own nervous system responses and explore gentle ways to support regulation as you untangle from shame and reconnect with your body. -
In this session, we begin actively mending your relationship with your body by reconnecting with its cues—hunger, appetite, and fullness—as signals to listen to rather than control.
We’ll explore the very real and understandable barriers to this reconnection, especially in a culture that has taught you to override your body.
You’ll be introduced to the practice of consent with your own body—learning to notice, honor, and respond rather than push or ignore.
Grounded in self-compassion, this week supports a shift toward body respect that is relational, responsive, and sustainable. -
In this session, we shift toward caring for your body in ways that support vitality in midlife and beyond—without falling into deprivation or restriction.
We’ll explore an additive approach to nourishment, focusing on consistently and adequately meeting your body’s needs rather than trying to control or shrink your body.
Together, we’ll gently untangle from the hype and fear-based messaging of longevity and menopause influencers that can make your body feel like a problem to solve.
This week invites a steadier, more grounded way of nourishing yourself—rooted in respect, sufficiency, and trust. -
In this session, we reimagine movement as a source of embodiment, pleasure, and connection—not a tool for control or self-improvement.
We’ll explore how fitness culture has shaped both over-exercise and exercise resistance, and why both are understandable responses to pressure and perfectionism.
You’ll be invited to experiment with movement that feels more responsive, social, and joyful, rather than prescriptive or performance-driven.
This week is about rediscovering movement as something you can experience in your body—not something you do to it. -
We’ll bring our eight weeks together into your everyday life, exploring how to stay connected to body respect when diet culture, ageism, and old patterns inevitably arise. You’ll identify practices that help you return to yourself, consider what it means to treat your body as your life partner rather than your life’s project, and imagine what you want to make more room for when body shame takes up less of your mental and emotional energy.
Meet Deb
I’m Deb Benfield, a Registered Dietitian, nutrition therapist, body image coach, and author of Unapologetic Aging, with 40+ years of experience helping women heal their relationship with food, movement, and their bodies.
My work is rooted in a simple belief: your body is not a problem to be solved, and midlife and beyond isn’t a crisis to be managed.
Through decades of supporting people recovering from disordered eating, chronic dieting, and body shame, I’ve seen how deeply cultural narratives—especially diet culture and ageism—shape the way we see and treat ourselves. And as I navigate my own aging, I’ve become increasingly passionate about helping women question those messages and find more ease, nourishment, respect, and aliveness in their changing bodies.
I wrote Unapologetic Aging and created this small-group book club because knowing these ideas intellectually isn’t always the same as living them. I wanted to create a supportive, shame-free space where we can explore what it means to put this work into practice—together.
We won’t be working toward loving every part of our bodies or never experiencing body shame again. Instead, we’ll practice meeting ourselves with more curiosity and compassion, moving away from fear and control and toward care, trust, and respect.
If you’re tired of battling your body and curious about what a different relationship with it could feel like, I’d love to have you join us.
What do I receive as a participant?
8 virtual weekly 75-minute group coaching sessions with Deb and the recording
Some modules will include pre-work, some modules will include homework, and all will include content to support each module via Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship with Your Body .
Access to this inspiring group of women
Group Coaching sessions will take place on Tuesdays at
9 am PT/12:00 pm ET via Zoom.
Group size is small to encourage access to the group process.
Investment: $500
Fall 2026 Cohort: October 27-December 15
FAQs
What is the refund policy for this group coaching program?
This is an “I’m all in!” program. No refunds will be offered.
Can I use my health insurance policy to pay for this?
I am not your individual Registered Dietitian/Nutritionist, therefore, you cannot use your health insurance for payment.
You may however use your FSA or HSA card for payment.
