Are you an apple or a pear? Most women understand intuitively whether their bodies tend to store fat around their waists (forming an apple shape) or lower down around their hips, thighs, and buttocks (forming a pear shape). But few of us understand the dramatic impact body shape has on our current health and risk of future disease. Every aspect of a woman's life is affected by her shape, including her ability to lose weight, her fertility, severity of menopausal symptoms, response to birth control pills and hormone replacement, emotional volatility, body image, and long-term risks of breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and other disorders.

My revolutionary new book, Apples & Pears: The Body Shape Solution for Weight Loss and Wellness, reexamines women's health issues from the perspective of body shape, and provides simple, workable plans for women of all ages, shapes, and sizes to help them get slimmer and become healthier. Offered here are five tips to help you get familiar with the body shape model and start using it to take charge of your weight and your health.

Apples & Pears: The Body Shape Solution for Weight Loss and Wellness is available from Amazon.com. For additional information about body shape and downloadable forms, visit www.applesandpears.org.

1. Stop comparing yourself with others. In many ways, apple- and pear-shaped women are as different from each other as women are from men. The diet that helped your best friend drop 20 pounds in a month might not have any effect on you, and body shape may be the reason. All fat is not created equal - thighs and tummies give up their fat at different rates and for different reasons. When you learn about the needs of your particular body shape, weight loss and health become much easier.

2. Know your shape. Body shape is a more powerful predictor of your overall health than weight. To determine your shape, first measure around your waist to get your waist circumference. Next, measure around the widest part of your lower body to get your hip circumference. Divide the first number by the second to get your waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). If your WHR is 0.80 or less, you are a "pear." If your WHR is greater than 0.80, you are an "apple."

3. Bring a tape measure to the doctor's office. Medical research shows that apple-shaped women have an increased risk of heart disease, the metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and breast and endometrial cancer. Pear-shaped women have an increased risk of osteoporosis, varicose veins, eating disorders, and low self-esteem. Most doctors are aware of the body shape connection, but they don't generally use it when assessing patients. Ask your doctor to confirm your measurements. Then the two of you can work together to form a body shape health plan, which includes testing for specific disease markers, assessing your unique health risks, and monitoring for shape-specific disorders.

4. Adopt a shape-friendly diet for weight loss and wellness. Fat in the pear zone - around the hips, thighs, and buttocks - acts like a fat magnet. Any fat in your diet will be more likely to be stored easily as body fat. Therefore, dietary recommendations for pear-shaped women include foods low in fat, with plenty of calcium (to help prevent osteoporosis) and very little salt, to help avoid the development of varicose veins. Fat in the apple zone - around the waist - tends to allow some fats to be released into the bloodstream, where they can contribute to heart disease and other metabolic problems. Apple-shaped women should eat a diet that contains moderate amounts of healthy fats from olive or canola oil, and which is high in fiber-rich complex carbohydrates. This means an abundance of fruits and vegetables, and substituting brown-colored whole grain foods for white, processed foods - think brown rice and whole-wheat bread instead of white rice and white bread.

5. Release guilt - your body shape is not your fault. We are all born with a genetic propensity to have a particular body shape. Full-figured pear-shaped women will never have slender thighs, and apple-shaped women will never have washboard abs - it is simply not possible, no matter how much they exercise or diet. Plus, there are some very real body shape changes that occur during pregnancy and menopause, many of which are permanent. This means that you did nothing to create your particular disease risks or shape characteristics. This is not to say that we should all just give in to the bloat. But rather than beating ourselves up over our unfashionable hips or wide waists, we should celebrate the positive aspects of our shapes and recognize certain body shape changes as normal, while still maintaining healthy shape-specific eating and exercise habits.

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