Your Body is Your Life Partner

Not Your Life’s Project.

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?

Trusting your body is a quiet revolution—and one of the most powerful ways to invite ease and vitality into your life.

An older woman with short gray hair, black glasses, and a bright smile standing outdoors in front of a large colorful mural of a woman with her mouth open wide, painted mainly in pink and purple tones.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by all the rules around food and movement?

Is aging bringing up fear about your changing body, worries about your health, or the sense that you’re becoming invisible?

Have you explored Intuitive Eating, but long for support from women who truly understand what midlife feels like?

Are you in recovery from chronic dieting or disordered eating and noticing how health fears and “anti-aging” messages are pulling you back toward old patterns?

As women in midlife and beyond, we’ve spent too much of our lives consumed by worries about weight and trying to follow ever-changing, restrictive rules.

It’s time to reclaim our energy and turn it toward what truly brings us alive.

There is deep power in learning to trust your body again—and in doing that within a supportive circle.

❤️‍🔥 Now is the time to nourish a relationship with your body that’s rooted in care, respect, and even appreciation.

❤️‍🔥 Now is the time to release the grip of dieting and focus on what truly matters to you.

❤️‍🔥 Now is the time to embrace practices that support vitality, ease, and joy.

❤️‍🔥 Now is the time to make space for connection, pleasure, and freedom.

Unapologetic Aging Circle:

Stop trying to fix your body. Untangle from diet culture and ageism—and live this chapter with more confidence and ease.

An 8-week group coaching 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

We begin by untangling the harmful stories you’ve inherited about aging, beauty, and wellness. Together, we’ll challenge the diet culture and ageist messages that keep you stuck—so you can begin to reclaim trust in your body and rewrite the narrative on your own terms.

2ND INGREDIENT

Let’s shift from self-discipline to self-devotion. In this phase, you’ll explore what it means to nourish yourself with food that feels good, move in ways that bring joy, and support your nervous system with calming, grounding practices. These tools help you build a relationship with your body rooted in care, not control.

3RD INGREDIENT

Sustainable change doesn’t come from overhauls—it comes from consistent, doable shifts. You’ll learn practical, everyday tools to challenge harmful messaging and gently replace it with new rhythms of care, compassion, and connection to your aging body.

Special Sauce:

Connect with a circle of inspiring women in midlife and beyond who are ready to uncomplicate their relationship with food, eating, and their bodies—just like you. Together, we foster belonging, accountability, and bold encouragement for living more freely and fully.

What You’ll Experience Inside Unapologetic Aging-

🌿 Weekly 90-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.

📝 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 self-care mindsets

  • 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

💬 Weekly Q&A Sessions with Deb

An open, supportive space to bring questions, explore practices more deeply, and receive compassionate and curious coaching.

🤝 A Private Community Space

Stay connected between sessions with a supportive circle of women who get it—because they’re living it too. (not on social media!)

What will you be learning each week?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • In this final session, we turn to the power of pausing to support healing, regulation, and a deeper connection with your body.
    You’ll learn how small moments of safety and ease—glimmers—along with intentional rest, can help regulate your nervous system in a culture that keeps you pushing and producing.
    We’ll explore how making space for rest is not indulgent but essential, supporting the restorative power of sleep and overall well-being.
    This week reframes pausing and resting as a power move—a way of caring for your body with intention, respect, and trust.

Debra Benfield, a woman with curly dark hair and glasses sitting on a cream-colored couch with a laptop, in a bright room with large windows and white furniture.

Meet Deb

I’m Deb Benfield, a Registered Dietitian/Nutritionist with over 40 years of experience helping people heal their relationship with food, movement, and their bodies. My work is rooted in the belief that your body is not a problem to be solved, and midlife and beyond is not a crisis to be managed.

Through decades of supporting people in recovery from disordered eating, chronic dieting, and body shame, I’ve come to understand how deeply our cultural narratives — especially diet culture and ageism — shape the way we treat ourselves. As I’m moving through my own aging process, I’ve become passionate about helping others reclaim ease, nourishment, and respect for their changing bodies.

I created this small group coaching circle to offer a supportive, shame-free space where you can explore what it means to trust your body through the transitions of midlife and beyond. Together, we’ll practice moving away from punishment and toward care — with curiosity, compassion, and a sense of community.

If you’re tired of battling your body and ready to build a more peaceful, trusting relationship with it, you’re in the right place.

What Participants Like You Are Saying

Before I joined the group with Deb, I was considering another diet plan and also felt a deep sense of exhaustion due to years, decades, of tinkering with my diet and exercise addiction. Coming now into menopause, I feel a strong pull toward healing and seeing diet/wellness culture for what it is. 

Based on my work in the group, I actually took a whole week off from exercise (working out) in favor of gentle walking, yoga, and kayaking on a river (mainly floating), so I could really listen to my body as a companion [a wonderful term that I learned in the program]. I have noticed that I'm less sore and achy, and my face looks less stressed out/tense. I realized that taking these breaks is essential for my physical and emotional health.

The most significant result of my experience in the AVBL Group with Deb is my deeper sense of trust in my body.  Ever since I can remember, I have automatically tried to adjust or correlate my eating to my exercise (how much to do to burn off whatever I ate). This "voice" is still there, but I am allowing other parts of me to gently emerge. I am excited and curious to learn more and be guided by these gentler parts of me.

-Amy Nolan

A woman with short dark hair wearing a black and white polka dot headband and pink athletic top, smiling and sitting outdoors at a cafe or restaurant.

I got my money's worth within the first two sessions, and I've been recommending this program to all of my friends. When I signed up, I thought I had a pretty good hold on body liberation and pro-aging. But after the program, I feel so much more free. Deb has created a process to help me befriend my body in a real way throughout the rest of my life. I have a new understanding of what my body really needs, what is just hype I can ignore, and even how to support my children in creating healthy relationships with their bodies. Deb is a trustworthy expert, and she's one of a kind. 

-Annie Schuessler

A woman with short brown hair wearing glasses, a black shirt, and a plaid jacket, leaning forward in a kitchen with white cabinets and green backsplash.

I am beginning to develop some good practices to help me become more body/self-aware and self-compassionate.  I am becoming so much more aware of ageism in our culture and even within me. The practices and boundary setting are helping me stop trying to “control” my body and instead care for myself.

-Martha Hoey

I feel that I have made steps toward healing my long-standing struggle with body image.  The practices I learned have made a huge difference in accepting myself as I am. I feel heard and understood and know that I am not alone.

-Judith Berger

Before joining the program, I felt stuck in grief about the changes in my body, knowing that I did not want to continue dieting and following food rules, but not knowing how to move forward.

I’ve made many significant changes because of this program. Still, the most significant change is that I check with my instincts and wisdom before seeking answers from external sources about my care and well-being.

Now, I have so much more confidence in my right to care for myself. To show up in this body. To claim what is rightfully mine. To be full of myself.

My creative work as a photographer has really blossomed. All that time I used to spend on maintaining my body shape and size is now freed up for me to work deeply. The more I get to know myself, the more authentic my art becomes. 

-Donna Hopkins

A smiling older woman with short gray hair and glasses, wearing a light blue button-up shirt, sitting outdoors on a wooden deck.

Before we started, I couldn’t see that I would ever be friends with my body or have freedom around eating – having already done so much work but something has really clicked – I feel like I am beginning to really make friends with my body and I’m enjoying eating a greater variety of foods, feel so much freer around food and have so much more enjoyment with no judgment.

-Claire Pugh

I can’t say enough about this wonderful woman and this amazing group! If you want to change your relationship with food and have tried everything else, give this a chance. You won’t regret it. I am making great strides in healing my disordered eating and my relationship with my body. She is a kind, warm, nonjudgmental, caring person who genuinely cares for her clients and wants to see them escape the bondage of diet culture. She has changed my life infinitely for the better.

— Shanon Gaddis

Before the program, I felt besieged by messages that I needed to “fix” my changing body. I was already well into rejecting diet culture, but I still felt bad about myself. Deb’s program opened new approaches to me, and I have begun to develop an attuned and compassionate relationship with my body. I am learning to pay attention to and respond to my hunger cues and ground myself in a mindfulness practice. Deb is a wise and patient teacher and has created an environment for rich conversations and heartfelt sharing with my amazing classmates.

-Christina H.

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What do I receive as a participant?

  • 8 virtual weekly 90-minute group coaching sessions with Deb and the recording

  • 8 virtual weekly 60-minute group question and discovery 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 via a private community forum for the length of the program.

  • Group Coaching sessions will take place on Tuesdays at 12:00 pm EST via Zoom. 

  • Question and Discovery sessions will occur on Friday at 12:00 pm EST via Zoom.

    • Group size is small to encourage access to the group process.

  • Investment: $1095 (can be paid in 4 monthly payments with no additional fee)

  • Spring 2026 Cohort: May 19-July 7

A woman with short gray hair is smiling, wearing an orange dress and pearl earrings, standing in front of a colorful mural on a brick wall.

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.