Grappling with her lifelong phobia of anything slick, cheesy, or remotely claiming to provide self-empowerment, Beth Lisick wakes up on New Year's Day 2006 with an unprecedented feeling. She is finally able to admit to herself that she's grown tired of embracing the same old set of nagging problems year after year.

Beth Lisick has had a lifelong phobia of anything slick, cheesy, or that remotely claims to provide self-empowerment. But on New Year's Day 2006, she wakes up finally able to admit that something has to change. Determined to confront her fears head-on, Beth sets out to fix her life by consulting the multimillion-dollar-earning experts. In Chicago, she gets proactive with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In Atlanta, she struggles to understand why "women are from Venus." She gamely sweats to the oldies on a weeklong Cruise to Lose with Richard Simmons on the high seas of the Caribbean. Throughout this yearlong experiment, Beth tries extremely hard to maintain her wry sense of humor and easygoing nature, even as she starts to fall prey to some of the experts' ideas—ideas she thought she'd spent her whole life rejecting.

"A delightful, Plimptonesque exercise in immersive journalism...sharp, irreverent and endearingly screwed-up."