Not Tonight Dear, I Feel Fat

“I’m in a sexless marriage. After years of hiding my body and coming up with excuses to avoid sex, I think my husband just gave up. I feel like I have no connection to my body or to him. I want to want it, but I don’t know how to make it happen.”

If you’ve been struggling with body consciousness in the bedroom, your libido probably went south and opened up a darling boutique hotel somewhere near the equator. Low libido is common among the body conscious. If you see sex as an opportunity to be shamed, your body probably responds in three ways: It lowers your desire for sex, it decreases your ability to pick up and act on “erotic cues” (like that flutter in your stomach when you smell your partner’s cologne), and reduces pleasurable sensations when you actually do make love.

And so the avoidance game that we’ve talked about so much begins. You find yourself going to bed earlier or later than your partner so you don’t have to face the possibility of his advances. Or you lie still in bed, pretending you’re asleep, so he won’t touch you.

You start making excuses that sound reasonable: You’re too tired for sex, the kids will walk in on you, you have a lot on your mind. You become defensive. You tell him if he worked as hard as you did he wouldn’t want sex either. Besides, didn’t you just have sex a couple of nights ago? Whatever. He’s a sex maniac. He doesn’t want you, he just wants sex and you’re the closest person around. If he just appreciated you more for all the housework you do. Besides, he’s not even that good of a lover.

These are the kind of thoughts that low-libido women use to form a man moat, foiling the most adept swimmers from reaching the castle. Some of your observations may be true (you probably are fatigued), but they still keep you stuck in a place you’d rather not be. But let’s put you on pause for a moment while we talk about...

For men, intimacy is oxygen. Cut it off and you turn your partner into a sexual asthmatic—chronically coughing and wheezing in his attempt to breathe you in. He’ll experience a tightening of the chest and eventually his lips turn blue (among other organs).

Make no mistake, when you constantly reject your partner’s advances with some version of “I have clothes to fold,” he hears it as “I don’t love you.” Or want you. So go away.

For men, sex equals love. A lack of touch leads to emotional scurvy. When love, which used to flow freely, gets harder to come by, it’s hard not to turn the rejection against yourself. They believe they’re to blame, that they’re no longer attractive, that their manhood is useless, their desire is pointless, and that their needs are unworthy.

If your unwillingness to have sex continues long enough, he’ll grow distant and angry, which then really puts you off sex. But his negativity is an understandable reaction to having love withdrawn. His anger is a manifestation of the hurt that lies underneath. He feels punished for something he didn’t do. The effect of the punishment causes pain; the unjustness causes anger. It’s hard for you to see this, of course, because now you’re reacting to his self-defensive distance and anger, rather than his understandable hurt.

Rejecting his sexual advances makes him suspicious, insecure, inadequate, vulnerable, hurt, resentful, and unloved. And it’s especially easy for him to think you’re cheating on him. The rationale goes something like this: “She has a great body and it turns me on. Yet she claims that she’s too embarrassed about her body to have sex. The same body that gives me raging hard-ons! I think she’s lying and that she’s using it as an excuse because she’s seeing somebody else.”

It isn’t just that the most powerful expression of love got taken away from him. Sex is a proxy for a man’s self-esteem and masculinity. It’s a platform for confidence and virility. There’s not much room for masculinity and virility when you’re reduced to nagging and negotiating for sex, or being the only one initiating it or knowing your partner is merely tolerating it.

Once during the filming of The Sex Inspectors, I sat on a bed with a woman I was advising (don’t worry, we were fully clothed—it wasn’t that kind of show!). The video cameras that we put throughout her house showed how cruelly she rejected her husband’s affections. I said, “Put your arm around me; I want to show you how you reject your husband.” I whacked it away like a horsefly just landed on me and looked away from her. Indignantly, she said, “I do not do that!” I said, “Yes, you do.” She knew I was right. I could see her face softening. I leaned in. “Can I tell you a secret?” She nodded. I cupped my hand around her ear and whispered something. She started bawling. The producer, director, and audio people went nuts because the microphone didn’t pick up what I said. The director stopped the filming to give the woman time to compose herself, took me aside, and asked, “What the hell did you say to make her cry like that?”

My point in bringing all this up isn’t to make you feel guilty; it’s to make you understand the consequences of your withdrawal. Reversing the damage will take some work, and you need to be highly motivated, not by guilt but by love—for the man in your life and your own sense of who you are and what you’re capable of growing into. Nobody should take a vow of sexual poverty when they date or get into a relationship. Especially you.

When shame walks in the door, lust flies out the window. Women with healthy body consciousness treat their natural desires as welcome guests. They open the door, take their coat, hand them a drink, and welcome them into the living room where the fragrance of a gourmet meal wafts in from the kitchen. The message is clear: You are welcome. Mi casa es su casa.

Women with noticeably bad body esteem treat their natural desires as unwelcome guests who muddy the carpets and eat all the pretzels. They stand by the door and say, “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”

What’s causing this low libido? I want you to consider something that may never have occurred to you: Your loss of libido is a coping strategy that your mind uses to protect itself from experiencing shame. What appears to you as a baffling lack of desire is actually a subconscious decision on your part to get rid of it so you don’t experience more hurt.

Basically, you have an internal conflict between your conscious desire (“I want to want to have sex”) and your subconscious unwillingness (“If I have sex, he will see how fat I am, lose his erection, and stop loving me. He’ll make fun of me or fantasize about skinnier women. I don’t want to see the disappointment in his face when he sees my thighs jiggle or my stomach pooch out. I will die of embarrassment”).

Somewhere along the line, your subconscious decided the best way to protect you from more pain was to reduce or eliminate your desires. Or rather, push them so far down that they seem undetectable. Remember, “subconscious” means below the level of conscious awareness. You’re not aware that you made the decision, but you can certainly see the effects of it.

The solution? Bring your subconscious thoughts to awareness. Understand the decision your subconscious made in order to protect you. Start by reframing your thinking from I want but I can’t to I want but I won’t.

This isn’t some pop psychology/build-it-and-they-will-come nonsense. There’s a big difference between can’t (an inability) and won’t (an unwillingness). I know it doesn’t make sense that you’d be unwilling to do what you desperately want, but you only have to look at the millions of men who struggle with an inability to ejaculate during intercourse to see a parallel. They want to ejaculate. Their penis is rock hard. They’re able to do it when they’re alone, but they just can’t do it when they’re having intercourse. They’re fighting your fight: a conscious desire subverted by a subconscious fear.

If you want your libido to “come back,” you have to consciously “undecide” a subconsciously made decision. You have to stop believing the demonstrably false assumption that your partner is going to be repulsed by what he sees and stop loving you or mortify you with disappointment and ridicule. You have to stop believing that sex is an opportunity to be shamed and start believing it’s a springboard to a stronger emotional connection with the man you love. You have to believe that sex doesn’t cut you up into a million pieces, that, in fact, it makes you whole.

Consciously undoing a subconscious decision is hard work. Luckily, you’re going to be ably assisted with some special tactics proven to lift your libido. To start, it’s important that you stop ignoring a certain sound at your door.

Not only does pronounced body consciousness seem to make your libido disappear, but it also makes you less able to detect it during the rare times it does make an appearance. Women with low body esteem are less likely to pay attention to, accurately identify, and therefore act on the physical sensations of arousal like a quickening pulse, muscle tension, and blood flow. Again, this is because your subconscious is trying to protect you from the anxiety and shame of disrobing.

Sex is the physical expression of your need for emotional intimacy, love, union, and partnership, a tangible way for you to give something of yourself. Typically, the desire for it appears at your door as a loud, insistent knock. Over time, your mind has learned to block its sounds. Occasionally, it opens the door, treats this longing as an unwanted vacuum cleaner salesman, and tells it to go away.

But your body insists so the knocking continues. The mind goes into pretend mode. It thinks, “Knocking, what knocking? It’s the tree branches bumping together.” It’s not long before the body, weakened by a lack of nurturing, knocks softer and softer, to the point that it becomes so faint your mind doesn’t have to ignore it or pretend it isn’t there—it truly doesn’t hear it.

For the most part, the knocking never really goes away. Just because you can’t hear it clearly doesn’t mean it’s not there. Your job is twofold: to be on the lookout for the knocking when it comes and create the environment so that it will.

Body consciousness creates two types of libidinal depressions: low libido or low sensation. With low libido, you don’t want it, you don’t think about it, you don’t fantasize about it, you’re not even receptive to it.

With low sensation, you may think about it, you may want it, you may be receptive to it, but your body doesn’t react the way it used to. It’s a classic case of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” There’s a measurable lack of lubrication, decreased nipple sensitivity, and reduced clitoral and labial sensation or engorgement. There is also a lack of vaginal lengthening, dilation, and arousal.

While low libido/low sensation are clearly linked to emotional causes (stress, depression, watching the city fix potholes), there are physiological culprits, too: surgery, hormonal changes, underactive thyroid, alcohol, pregnancy, medications, and trauma.

None of my recommendations for jump-starting your libido will work if you have such an underlying physical condition. Start eliminating the possibilities by looking in your medicine cabinet. Any drug that affects your hormones, nerves, or blood circulation has the potential to make you able to say “no” to sex in eight different languages. Everyone knows antidepressants can let the air out of the libidinal balloon, but did you know that popular over-the-counter drugs like Tagamet, Zantac, Benadryl, and Aleve have the potential to do it, too? If you suspect there might be a physiological component to your low libido/low sensation, wiggle your index finger and dial your doctor. Otherwise, let’s assume that you’re low libido/low sensation is caused by stress—that you’re so anxious about making love, you’re making your coffee nervous.

A Word about Alcohol

Alcohol mugs libidos. It sneaks up behind you, knocks you to the ground, and steals your valuables. It relieves you of your libido and absconds with your performance. Alcohol metabolizes in the liver, which is also responsible for metabolizing testosterone, a crucial sex hormone. Too much liquor and your liver may start converting your testosterone to estrogen, contributing to a loss of sex drive. Alcohol also dulls the nerves that transmit sensations and decreases the body’s ability to pump blood around the genitals, which is critical to sexual functioning.

Still, I feel your pain. Sex kittens don’t drink milk. It’s hard to imagine a romantic dinner without at least a glass of wine. Advising moderation is fine, but how much is too much? A study at Southern Illinois University showed three and a half drinks for a 150-pound person starts getting in the way. Every measure of arousal the researchers looked at went south after three and a half drinks.

The good news about alcohol is that it tends to relax you and melt away reservation, inhibition, and worry, the absence of which makes for great sex. So yes, alcohol is great for sex, until it isn’t. Stay away from alcohol as much as you can for the next few months. Nobody likes to be “chemically inconvenienced,” but drinking moderately or not at all will be a big help.

A Word about Smoking

If you smoke like the catalytic converter just went out on your muffler, you’re going to reduce your sex life to ashes. Nicotine constricts blood vessels, which leads to hardening of the arteries. As your arteries become harder and narrower, they let less blood into your genitals, making it harder to get in the mood, enjoy sex, or achieve orgasm.

Quitting reverses the process, but not without some side effects along the way. It’s not unusual for people who quit to temporarily feel mentally unfocused, sexually unsettled, or suffer a temporary loss of libido. If the problems persist, talk to your doctor about nicotinereplacement therapy to help ease the transition.

Desire tends to express itself naturally. You normally don’t have to think about it because it thinks for you. But for low-libido women, desire is a decision. It’s a conscious intention to discover and learn new ways of keeping sexual energy alive. Obviously, you can’t decide to be aroused, but you can decide to do things that lead to arousal. For example, if you’re tense, you can’t “decide” to relax, but you can “decide” to take deep breaths and consciously relax your muscles, which results in relaxation. Similarly, you can’t “decide” to be sexually aroused, but you can decide to exercise, create an environment conducive to sex, follow the recommendations in this chapter, and set the stage for arousal to appear. Desire is like a flower: sometimes it blooms without effort, and sometimes you have to tend the earth to create the opportunity for the petals to spread.

Imagine going to the gym only when you felt like it. You’d get so out of shape you’d break your nose doing a push-up. To prevent that from happening, most people have a routine—they knock back an energy drink, crank up the music, and do a few warm-ups. Just like women figure out how to get themselves to the gym when they don’t feel like exercising, you’ve got to figure out how to get yourself to bed when you don’t feel like making love. You can’t wait for the feeling to come up. You have to come up with the feeling.

But wait. Why should you come up with the feeling if it doesn’t come up on its own? Isn’t there something wrong with a relationship that requires you to conjure up desire as if you were a medium conjuring spirits in a seance? No, there isn’t. There’s something wrong with your understanding of sexual response. Let me explain.

Sexual response works in different ways for different people. High-libido people don’t have to wait for a thought, a feeling, or a situation to get turned on. They’re basically hormones with feet. They’re so highly attuned to their bodies’ responses that they act on the slightest hint of arousal. They don’t have to bring forth sexual thoughts or fantasies because they come without effort. Low-libido people are the opposite. They tend to wait until they’re flooded with feelings before they act. They interpret the absence of dramatic stirrings as proof they have little or no sexual desire.

But that is a falsehood, a grave misreading of how sexual response works. It’s true that sexual desire is often unbidden. It just appears. But it’s also true that it is bidden. It appears because you called it forth. In other words, you can wait for the feeling or you can come up with the feeling.

Sometimes even basic biological drives need what psychologists call “cuing” to get them to surface to awareness. Take hunger, for example. Sometimes you’re so busy and distracted that you forget to eat. But a cue will remind you. It can come in the form of looking at your watch and realizing you should have eaten hours ago or smelling freshly baked bread. Cues don’t create desire, they remind you of them.

Situational cues act as triggers for an appropriate response. A change in lighting signals the start of a show. A sound effect is the cue for an actor to say his line. A gesture by a conductor signals a new direction in the music. Your partner’s smell may be the cue for sexual stirring.

A cue is a prompt. A stimulus, either consciously or unconsciously perceived, that elicits or signals a type of behavior. It can be artificially set or organically grown. A cue can work accidentally (somebody walking by with a fresh batch of cookies) or on purpose (setting an alarm to remind you to eat). Sex drives can be “cued” in much the same way.

First, you have to understand what prompts a sexual response from you. Is it seeing romantic films? Watching erotic movies? Hearing a deep, resonant, sexually confident male voice? Sniffing an especially appealing aftershave? Picking up on a man’s natural scent? Is it a long-lasting look into a man’s eyes? (If you’re wondering why that can be so powerful, it’s because a look-lock releases phenylethylamine, a chemical that accelerates attraction. Some call this the copulatory gaze.)

Cues trigger a response that brings your desires to conscious awareness. And from there, your self-imposed chastity belt tends to unbuckle naturally. The challenge is to understand what your sexual cues are so they can trigger a response.

Below is a list of common sex cues. This is not a comprehensive list, as every woman is different, but it’s a starting point. If you don’t know whether something is a sexual cue for you, find out. For example, if you’ve never read erotic stories, buy them and see if your panties don’t float to the floor.

You can give your sexual cues more horsepower by providing them with a cue-friendly context. If a cue like reading erotic stories makes you hot, reading it in a crowded subway probably won’t. But reading it alone under a soft light while listening to chill-out music is a horse of a different color. Or a man on a horse of a different color, depending on your erotic preferences.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a cue is not a cue unless it drenches you with desire. You don’t need a downpour; a sprinkle will do. Low-libido women tend to wait until they’re overwhelmed with desire to act on it. This is a mistake, first because you’ll be waiting a long time for a powerful mood to strike, and second because it’s more effective to oxygenate a small spark into a three-foot flame. Look for subtle effects, subdued responses, and understated feelings. Like a certain male body part, arousal starts out flaccid, but with a little massaging, it can grow to impressive lengths.

Once you identify the cues that make your body sit up, point, and yell “Squirrel!” it’s important that you access your sexual memory bank. Specifically, for memories of the best sex you ever had. When was the last time a man kept you in the bedroom so long your family put your face on a milk carton? Play it back in the theater of your mind with a 70 mm camera and an IMAX screen. Where were you? What were you wearing? What were you doing? What was he doing? What were you feeling? What was he saying?

Basically, you want to add oxygen to the spark created by the cue. This is what I mean by desire being a decision. You decide to look for sexual cues. Then you decide to access them in a context where sexual response can flourish, and then you decide to fan it with flashbacks.

Cultivating sexual cues is like cultivating sensuality—by understanding what your body needs and freely offering it, the body pays you back with a higher mood state. Over time, you will gradually experience an increase in your sex drive. As you do, it’ll be time for...

Remember the days when your loins caught fire anytime your partner walked by? Forget about them—they’re getting in the way. See, you’re waiting for a dramatic, overwhelming sense of desire before having sex. High-libido people report dramatic stirrings in their stomachs (among other places) when they get sexually excited, while low-libido people don’t. It’s easy to act on your urges when you get physiological triggers that demand a response. But sexual signals in low-libido women aren’t always that overt. Typically, low-libido women don’t get excited until they have sex. Even when they do feel sexual stirrings, they’re more likely to feel burning coals than raging fires. Start paying attention to subtle feelings and act on them. Wait. Did you just notice your partner’s cologne when he walked by? Don’t keep reading this book; put it down and go kiss him. Don’t wait for the fire; act on the flicker. Ask any fireman—a spark is all you need to turn wood into a spectacle.

Sometimes of course, you don’t even get a flicker to act on. In those cases you have to be willing to...

I’m not talking about having sex to alleviate the guilt you may feel about withdrawing from your partner. Or doing it because you want to avoid more conflict. Or because you want to “take one for the team.” Those are actually noble goals, but they’re not ours.

Our goal is for you to understand that it’s possible to start out not wanting it and end up not getting enough; to experience turning zero arousal into 60 mph sex. To understand that great sex doesn’t always have to start with great desire. The sex itself creates desire.

Almost every woman has experienced a time when she didn’t feel like having sex, “gave in” to their partner, and ended up having the time of their lives. Having sex when you’re not aroused is like eating food when you’re not hungry. Sometimes a sniff of the hot dog makes you want to put the whole thing in your mouth.

Now, let’s not be stupid here. You have the right to refuse sex anytime you want. This isn’t about giving up control of your body. It isn’t about forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do; it’s about letting yourself do something that can take you to a better place. It’s about experimenting with the idea that sex can create desire.

Now, there are certain things that will facilitate your willingness to have sex when you don’t feel like it. Number one is teaching your partner what makes you hotter than lava. This is where all the work you did in Chapter Six comes in. You need to communicate everything you learned in your self-exploration. What specific things can he do to make the journey more pleasurable? Soft, petal-like kisses that grow stronger bit by bit? Where does he start? Behind your ears? How? Do you prefer a massage? Where? He’s got to pay attention to what makes you wanna/gonna and do it well. This, of course, can be problematic, as men often think foreplay means shutting their eyes and bracing for impact. He’s got to become your idea of a great lover, not his. The only way he’ll become that is to tell him how you want your vagina vajazzled. Just remember that while training your guy to deliver what you like is helpful, in the end, your libido, like your orgasm, is yours to manage.

As you experiment with having sex when you don’t feel like it, you will have initial thoughts like, “When will this be over? How long is this going to last? I forgot to call Mom.” That’s fine and to be expected. But in between these thoughts I want you to ask yourself, How can I make this feel better? What can I do that will turn me on more? They’re the same questions you asked yourself in the cultivating sensuality chapter: How can I get more physical pleasure out of what I’m doing? How can I make my body feel better? How can I enhance the physical sensations I’m experiencing?

These questions are critical to your success (defined as moving yourself away from “I don’t feel like doing this” to “I don’t want this to stop”). But they are only half the equation. For what good is asking yourself a question you don’t intend to answer? So, when you ask How can I enhance the physical sensations I’m experiencing? it is not a rhetorical question. Answer it. And follow up with action. If the answer is getting on top, get on top. If the answer is guiding his hand to the area below your clitoris rather than the clitoris itself, guide his hand. Deciding on desire isn’t about making yourself feel desire, it’s about taking actions that lead to desire.

Make it up. Give yourself a pretend answer. You’ll be amazed at how accurate you’ll be. Pretending gives honesty permission to come out and play. If that doesn’t help, try “what iffing” it. For example, you could say, “I don’t know what would make this better, but what if I asked him to hold me in a way that makes me feel safer and protected?” Or “I don’t know what would help me feel more, but what if I moved my pelvis more rhythmically?” Or think about a woman you consider sexy and ask yourself, “What would she ask for?”

Remember, our experiment isn’t to get you to endure a love-making session. It isn’t to white-knuckle your way until his climax. It’s to discover that you have the power to go from cold to hot by making decisions that lead to the heat.

You have the right to say no to sex anytime you want, and he has the obligation to respect that. But you have an obligation, too, and that’s to make sure you don’t reject him cruelly. You can make it easier on him by following my two golden rules of sexual rejection:

As for your partner, he needs to spend a little more time in the Masturbatorium. Sometimes true love requires self-service. He also needs to learn how to handle disappointment. Just like you need to sometimes have sex when you don’t want it, he needs to sometimes keep it zipped when he does. After all, you’re in this thing together. A one-person sacrifice is like a hatchet—you’ll just end up wanting to bury it in your partner’s back.

I know what you’re thinking: What!! Isn’t it enough that I’m willing to have sex when I don’t feel like it? I have to initiate it, too? Actually, you do. Our goal isn’t to respond to desire (anybody can do that); it’s to decide on it. And what better way to practice your decision-making powers than to plan, prepare, and initiate sex? All on your terms, of course. Initiating sex not only forces you to think about what you need to make it enjoyable, but also to get in the habit of giving it to yourself.

Think of it as throwing yourself a party when you’re not in a good mood. What would you do to make sure you had a good time? What type of music would you play? What kind of drinks would you pour? What type of food would you serve?

It’s the same concept with initiating sex when your libido is low. What do you need to do to make it enjoyable? First on your agenda is understanding when your body best responds to sex. Early in the morning? Late at night? Dusk? Plan around it. What sexual cues can you activate? What moisture-making memories of past sexual encounters will help you look forward to it? And once the action starts, always remember what questions to ask yourself: How can I get more physical pleasure out of what I’m doing? How can I make my body feel better? How can I enhance the physical sensations I’m experiencing?

Initiating sex when you’re not aroused is like agreeing to your partner’s advances when you’re not aroused. It’s the same boat with a different captain. Either way, it’s worth remembering that sex when you’re not horny is like eating when you’re not hungry. You force yourself to eat a few potato chips and the next thing you know you’ve poked a hole in the bottom of the bag and find yourself putting the gas station clerk in a headlock because he ran out of chips.

Try to initiate sex every seven to ten days. Do it as an experiment for you and a gift for him (he’ll see it for what it is—a gesture of love that rescues him from the spiral of rejection he can’t seem to get himself out of). By experiencing the power of calling forth desire, you’ll go from being a low-libido victim to a low-desire victor. And in the process you may be surprised that your partner suddenly starts doing things you’ve been nagging him about. Gestures of love tend to bring out the best in everyone.

Would you do a twenty-minute workout if you knew it would it dramatically improve your sexual desire? Break out your gym clothes, because some breakthrough studies have shown that an exercise I call “20/70” makes women locked, cocked, and ready to rock.

There are stunning new developments in our understanding of how exercise affects female sexual functioning. The findings directly contradict the scientific assumptions of the last forty years and may offer a radically different treatment protocol for women with low sexual desire.

This promising revolution started when a team of researchers led by Dr. Cindy Meston at the University of Texas at Austin discovered, almost by accident, that a specific type of exercise can significantly increase sexual desire even in women with low libido.

For the last forty years, clinicians, researchers, and theorists assumed that the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs erectile response in men, was also responsible for sexual response in women. There was no real empirical evidence for it. They just had no reason to think otherwise. Thus treatment of sexual dysfunction centered around activating the parasympathetic nervous system. For example, anxiety-reduction techniques (breathing, progressive muscle relaxations) activate the parasympathetic while inhibiting the sympathetic nervous system. They facilitate sexual response by decreasing negative thoughts that divert the processing and experiencing of erotic cues, but these techniques do nothing to stimulate arousal.

Dr. Meston questioned the basic if-it’s-true-for-men-it’s-true-for-women assumption and asked a startling question: Could the sympathetic nervous system actually be the mechanism that triggers sexual response in women?

Both systems work in complementary ways to keep the body running properly. For example, the parasympathetic nervous system contracts the urinary bladder while the sympathetic nervous system relaxes it. Sympathetic is responsible for excitement; parasympathetic for relaxation. Sympathetic accelerates the human body while parasympathetic decelerates it. These are important distinctions in the study of sexuality because treatment protocols that activate one system inhibit the other.

What Dr. Meston needed to test her hypothesis was something that would activate the sympathetic nervous system. She chose exercise, which in moderate-to-high intensities generates the amount of sympathetic nervous system activity necessary for testing. So here’s what Dr. Meston’s team did: They outfitted test subjects with a vaginal photoplethysmograph (VPG), a tamponshaped device that illuminates the capillary bed of the vaginal wall and the blood circulating within it. As the amount of blood in the vaginal tissue increases, more light is reflected into the device. VPG is widely used to measure genital sexual arousal.

Test subjects were divided into an exercise and no-exercise group. The exercise group spent twenty minutes on a stationary bike pedaling at 70 percent of their maximum heart rate. Both groups were then shown an erotic film. As you’d expect, both the exercise and non-exercise groups experienced an increase in sexual arousal during the film, characterized by increased genital blood flow, clitoral erection, and increased lubrication. But it was in the exercise group that the VPGs lit up like Christmas trees. The women who exercised had significantly, sometimes dramatically, higher levels of sexual arousal than women who did not, even though they watched the same erotic film.

Now, the natural inclination is to conclude that exercise causes sexual arousal. Not true. Exercise sets the stage for it. Without an erotic stimulus there is no sexual arousal.

Here’s the fascinating part. Exercise, without viewing the erotic film, lit up the VPGs, signaling significant changes in genital blood flow. But when test subjects were asked if they felt sexually aroused the answer was no. Dr. Meston noted that exercise can physiologically prepare your body for sexual activity, but you still need an erotic stimulus, a psychological cue that activates the subjective experience of arousal. In other words, exercise sets the table, but erotic stimuli serve the food.

What makes this study especially significant is that it’s been replicated over and over with the same results across different groups of women, even with women taking antidepressants. Especially notable is a study on women who struggled with low libido. That study represented the first empirical evidence that women with low libido can be sexually aroused through activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

Again, it’s easy to misinterpret these studies and think that exercise increases sexual arousal. It does not. Exercise followed by an erotic stimulus creates arousal.

Many of Dr. Meston’s fellow scientists believe these studies herald a revolution in the treatment of low libido in women. For decades, the prevailing assumption was that the sympathetic nervous system inhibited sexual arousal in women. But now there is strong evidence to the contrary.

We know what exercise does to improve your sex life—it increases blood flow, which improves sensation, lubrication, arousal, and the intensity of orgasm. But exactly how does exercise do that? By strengthening the most important muscle in your body—the heart. Exercise, especially aerobic exercise (anything that elevates the heart rate for a sustained period of time—running, swimming, aerobics, etc.), builds a bigger, stronger heart that can forcefully pump blood and make it circulate faster through the body, including the pelvic region where increased blood flow is critical to arousal. Increased circulation means faster delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the body while speeding up the exit of waste and toxins.

Over time, the walls of the heart grow thicker and stronger, allowing it to pump more blood with less effort. It also increases the number and size of blood vessels in the tissues (including the vaginal walls), thus increasing the blood supply to all parts of the body.

Studies have also shown that exercise is the clitoris’s best friend. Using clitoral color Doppler ultrasound (a technician presses a small handheld device, about the size of a bar of soap, against the clitoris), researchers at Fatih University, Ankara, Turkey, were able to prove that women who exercise had better clitoral blood flow than women who didn’t. During sex, the clitoris increases in length and diameter because blood flow almost doubles during stimulation. Exercise facilitates the doubling. As an aside, if you’re wondering why the clitoris, which is built with the same erectile tissue as the penis, doesn’t get a rigid erection, it’s because unlike the penis, there is no mechanism to trap the blood.

In addition to increasing blood flow (and activating the sympathetic nervous system), exercise has been shown to affect a variety of hormones linked with female sexual arousal—testosterone, cortisol, estrogen, prolactin, and oxytocin.

Exercise isn’t a “good idea” for improving sex; it is the single best thing you can do for it. Without exercise you are endangering the restoration of your love life.

Simply having sex after you finish the 20/70 workout isn’t going to help. You need to prepare an erotic stimulus after the exercise, which will then make you more receptive to sex. Remember, exercise does not cause sexual arousal, it sets the stage for it. It’s the wood in the fireplace waiting for a light. The instrument for ignition doesn’t matter. Erotic stimuli is defined as anything that makes you weak at the knees. It could be a film, a book, a poem, a memory, a picture, or anything else that would light your VPG.

Capitalizing on the 20/70 discovery requires a bit of planning: Schedule a romantic interlude with your partner ahead of time, pick your “erotic stimuli,” do the 20/70 workout, take a quick shower, spend time with the erotic stimuli, and let the games begin.

The type of exercise you do (stationary bike, running, swimming) is irrelevant as long as it produces high levels of activation in the sympathetic nervous system. The studies defined high level as twenty minutes of sustained exercise at 70 percent of your maximum heart rate. To put the level of exertion in perspective, you should be able to carry on a conversation during the exercise. It’s a 7 on the 1–10 scale of difficulty. Still, always consult your doctor before starting any new exercise regimen.

The real challenge isn’t the exertion (it’s moderately easy to do—test subjects were healthy, but not necessarily fit) but making sure that you stay within 70 percent of your heart rate capacity. The studies suggested that anything significantly below it doesn’t produce enough sympathetic nervous system activity, and anything significantly above it may actually inhibit sexual arousal.

The easiest way to determine whether you’re staying within your 70 percent capacity during exercise is to buy a heart monitor. Costs have come down considerably—you can buy them for $50 to $100.

If you don’t want to spend the money, you can make your own calculations with an age-predicted maximum heart rate formula by the American Heart Association:

226 minus your age = maximum heart rate x 70% = target heart rate (beats per minute)

If you’re thirty years old, your heart should beat at 137 beats per minute throughout the exercise. Make sure you maintain the pace by checking your pulse regularly during the exercise. You can feel your pulse by placing your fingers lightly but firmly over the inside of your wrist or on your neck just below the angle of your jaw. Count for ten seconds using your watch and then multiply by six.

Understandably, making love immediately after exercising isn’t a particularly pleasant thought to many women. If you work out at a gym, where are you going to do it—in the locker room? In the car? Smelling like a petting zoo? Obviously, working out at home is advantageous. But what if you prefer—or need—to use the gym? Will the time it takes to get home, shower, and prepare decrease the 20/70’s effectiveness?

The studies tested the presentation of the erotic film at five-, fifteen-, and thirty-minute intervals after the exercise ended. The results held for the fifteen-and thirty-minute intervals. The big question, unanswered by the studies, is how long the sympathetic nervous system activity stays high enough to set the stage for sexual arousal. No one knows, thus the call to study the treatment implications. But it stands to reason that if you’re going to try this route, you should plan a lovemaking session as close to the end of the exercise as you can. Without rushing yourself. Putting pressure on yourself will neutralize the physiologic effect of the exercise.

The 20/70 studies are so promising that they justify experimenting with their findings, even if they cause some inconvenience. At the very least, you should consider a few self-pleasuring sessions after getting back home from a 20/70 workout. Always make sure to preplan your erotic stimuli—a video, a book, an engaging fantasy—anything that makes you, ahem, blink faster than normal. Remember, exercise does not cause sexual arousal—it accelerates it in the presence of a turn-on.

Incorporating the results of these studies into your sex life doesn’t mean that you have to do the 20/70 every day or that you should only have sex after you exercise. The thing about exercising is that the more you do it, the better your blood flow will become, strengthening not only your libido, but also your ability to feel more. Exercise has been proven to rejuvenate nerve endings that heighten sensitivity to touch, all the while revving up your hormones.

The great news is that you don’t have to exercise for very long to get the benefits. The 20/70 workout takes twenty minutes. That’s less time than watching a sitcom. Hell, you’ve waited in line longer than that!

If 20/70 seems daunting, work up to it over the course of a month by starting with a “5/50 workout” —five minutes at 50 percent of your heart rate—and gradually increase the time and the intensity.

You don’t have to exercise so hard that you crawl home into a fetal position every night to get the benefits. In fact, there’s a growing body of evidence that exercising too much is detrimental to your sex life. For example, studies show that moderate exercise increases circulating androgens (sex hormones like testosterone, androstadienone, and dehydroepiandrosterone), but intense exercise decreases them.

My guess is that you don’t like exercising, in great part, because you pushed yourself too hard for too long. Well, now you know you don’t have to. But the bigger reason for your resistance might just be because you’ve been exercising for all the wrong reasons. Despite everything you hear to the contrary...

Weight loss is the single worst motivation for exercise. It virtually guarantees that you will come to hate it and that you will eventually stop. To understand why, let’s examine a peculiar contradiction. On the one hand, researchers have known for years that women who exercise have a better body image than women who don’t. That’s because exercise provides the basic building blocks of body confidence: competence, agency, and mastery. As you get faster, stronger, and learn new skills, you get a renewed sense of wonder and admiration of what your body is capable of doing. In fact, studies show that even between women of similar weight and shape, the women who exercise feel a lot better about their bodies than women who don’t.

On the other hand, researchers noticed something unusual and unexpected: for many women, exercise worsened their body image. When they dug a little deeper, researchers discovered that exercise’s effect on body image depends on your motivation for doing it. If you exercise to stay healthy and fit, your body image will most likely improve. If you exercise to lose weight, it most likely won’t. Since many women have unachievable supermodel-weight-loss goals, they are bound to fail. Exercise as a tool for weight loss reminds them of how dissatisfied they are with their bodies. In fact, it creates more dissatisfaction because exercise as a weight-loss tool sucks you into that cycle of self-loathing we talked about earlier: Try, fail, shame. Try, fail, guilt. Try, fail, despair.

Now, it’s ridiculous to think that weight control won’t be part of your motivation for exercise. Of course it will. But instead of seeing weight loss as a primary goal, see it as secondary consequence. Otherwise, exercise goes from being a stress-buster to a stress-maker.

So, before deciding on an exercise regimen, get clear on your motivation. You can easily tell if weight loss is your primary goal if you say things like, “Well, I’m going to have to hit the gym extra hard tomorrow” after eating a rich meal. The proper response to eating a rich meal is to enjoy it, not to punish yourself with exercise.

The primary benefit to exercise is health and fitness, not weight loss. Yes, exercise produces weight loss, but that is a by-product, not its purpose. You should work out to maintain optimal health, to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. You should work out to get a sense of accomplishment, for a higher quality of life, for fun, to gain mastery and confidence, to build muscle, to increase energy levels, to strengthen your heart, improve circulation, prevent back pain, strengthen bones, improve posture, strengthen tissue around the joints, decrease risk for disease, improve mental functioning, increase confidence and self-esteem, improve sleep, increase resistance to fatigue, and reduce blood pressure.

In short, you should exercise to promote an overall sense of well-being. Which, as you know, promotes good sex, which promotes well-being. Exercise pops you into this powerful reinforcement cycle.

Although the 20/70 workout doesn’t require a high level of fitness, the idea of a moderate-to-intense twenty-minute workout can feel a little daunting to the committed couch potato. But then, any exercise is probably unappealing. Sofa spuds, I ask you to push the pause button on your resistance long enough to hear why exercise is so important to your sexual health.

It’s worth remembering that there is only one thing more powerful than body image in determining women’s sexual functioning—an overall sense of well-being. Recall the reinforcement cycle—well-being produces good sex, which contributes to well-being. Exercise inserts you into this reinforcement cycle by reducing stress, depression, and anxiety and by increasing blood flow to the genitals. It is the single fastest way to affect the psychology of well-being and the physiology of sexual arousal at the same time. It is so critical to your success that it behooves you to commit to an exercise plan that you can stick to, no matter what level of effort you exert.

The only exercise that matters is the exercise you’re willing to do. So, this guide isn’t so much about picking an exercise and showing you how to perform it, but about forming an exercise habit. Discipline and willpower will only take you through the first few weeks of an exercise program. Habit, on the other hand, is forever.

No amount of motivation is going to overcome resistance to a hated exercise. Pick something you like, or at the very least, something you don’t dislike. Never associate a habit with pain, only with pleasure. If it’s at all possible, pick an exercise you can do outdoors. Some studies suggest that outdoor exercise can be as effective as antidepressants in treating mild to moderate depression and anxiety.

Familiarity breeds contempt. Doing the same exercise day after day is a recipe for resignation. If you run on Monday, go to the gym on Tuesday, swim on Wednesday, do aerobics on Thursday. Variety is a prophylactic to quitting.

Don’t exercise for an hour. Don’t even do twenty minutes. Start with five minutes the first few days, adding thirty seconds every day until you get to ten minutes. Then use the same scale to get to fifteen and twenty minutes. Pain doesn’t build habits; pleasure does. If you don’t feel good after exercising, back off, you’re doing too much. Success starts with the lowest intensity possible and gradually moves up.

Habits need daily reinforcement. You don’t get in the cigarette habit by smoking twice a week. You don’t get in the coffee habit by drinking it every few days. The only way to create an exercise habit is to condition it deeply enough to switch the behavior to autopilot. The best way to do that is to set a thirty-day challenge. Exercise every day, preferably at the same time. The more consistent the action, the more likely it will turn into a habit.

The latest science in habit formation shows that almost all habits have an event trigger. For example, having an alcoholic drink is a trigger for many smokers to pull out a cigarette. A shower might be a trigger for you to brush your teeth. Triggers work subconsciously to condition a behavior. The dinner bell rings and Pavlov’s dog salivates. A morning exercise trigger might be a cup of coffee. Drink it and immediately grab your exercise gear and head out the door. Do it consciously for a sustained period of time and your subconscious will take over—you won’t have to think about picking up your gym bag after you finish your cup. Triggers, like habits, take time to form. Do it every day if you want it to stick.

An event trigger isn’t going to do you much good if you exercise at different times. Are you more likely to follow through in the mornings, at lunch, or in the evening? Set a consistent time and follow it.

Seeing your progress will motivate to keep you going, enhance your body image, and increase the chance for success. Log your progress right away, as soon as you’re done working out. Don’t put it off. Don’t make it complicated—just the date and what you did. Over time you’re going to be amazed at your progress. When you go from five minutes of exercise a day to twenty, for example, a real sense of pride and accomplishment takes over.

Talk up your exercise to family, friends, and coworkers. Peer pressure helps form habits.

If you wake up at five a.m. only to realize you can’t find your sneakers, you might decide to go back to bed. Habit experts call obstacles like this “friction.” They make habits more difficult to take hold. So, get your gear ready before bed so you can zoom out of the house without thinking about it.

There is one last benefit of exercise I haven’t mentioned. It doesn’t just set the stage for you to feel desire; it also makes you feel more desirable. One study found that women who exercised two to three times a week felt more sexually desirable than women who didn’t. Move. Be active. Exercise. Your sex life is worth it. Your well-being is worth it. You are worth it.

Why Working Out with Your Partner May Sexually Arouse You

Neuroscientists at the University California at Berkeley recently made a breakthrough discovery: Sniffing a compound of male sweat called androstadienone causes hormonal, physiological, and psychological changes in women that result in sexual arousal.

Sweat has been the main focus of research on human pheromones. For example, we’ve known for years that male underarm sweat improves women’s moods and affects their secretion of luteinizing hormone, which helps stimulate ovulation. Androstadienone is a derivative of testosterone that is found in all body secretions, but it is in especially high concentrations in male sweat.

In the most recent trials, women were asked to take twenty sniffs from a bottle containing androstadienone. Don’t worry, they didn’t gag. It smelled vaguely of musk. When compared to sniffing a control odor (yeast), the women who sniffed androstadienone reported significantly higher sexual arousal. Researchers also noted an increased physiological response, including blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing. These results were consistent with previous studies, but they also discovered a tantalizing new development—androstadienone has the power to elevate hormone levels. In this case cortisol, which is associated with alertness and stress. In fact, it remained elevated for a full hour after the sniff test.

So what does all this mean for you? The treatment applications for this discovery are unclear, but it will not hurt for you to work out with your partner and be conscious of sniffing his armpits (I suggest you do it when nobody’s watching). Don’t sniff when the smell is so bad it could peel the skin off a battleship. Do it when it smells good. Sweat is naturally odorless. It only begins to smell when bacteria that live on the skin digest sweat and excrete waste. That’s why sweat smells clean in the beginning and slowly turns into mustard gas. By the way, he doesn’t have to sweat enough to water a lawn; even a dab will do. Be sure to sniff his armpits when you’re making out, having foreplay, or making love. The research is solid and beyond question: androstadienone changes mood and increases both sexual arousal (blood flow, lubrication) and physiological arousal (blood pressure, heartbeat). This doesn’t mean taking a few sniffs of his pits will make your ankles float to the ceiling. They won’t make you yell, “Take me like a vitamin!” The effects are far more subtle. What it does mean is that you have one more proven way to arouse yourself, and that, in combination with everything else we’ve talked about, will increase your libido.

Over time, body consciousness can flatten desire like a recycled can. When sex becomes a reminder of your perceived deficits, your subconscious often lowers your libido to avoid the source of shame.

Body anxiety can also lower your ability to experience pleasurable sensations. Disruptive thoughts can put an oven mitt over nerve receptors, decreasing your ability to fully experience sensations or even recognize erotic cues.

Psychological, physiological, and contextual factors work in concert to create the desire for sex. It isn’t one technique or the other that spells success. And it certainly isn’t one at the expense of the other, either. For example, increased blood flow to the genitals will help but not if you’re stressed, fatigued, or distracted. At the same time, being relaxed, focused, and willing won’t work without enough blood flow. There are few black-and-white answers to sexual arousal, but there are lots of colorful contributions. Exercise is at the head of the list because it accelerates arousal (in the presence of erotic stimuli), maintains it through resolution, and builds capacity for it in the future.

Raising your libido can seem like raising the Titanic—an exciting proposition undermined by a lack of manpower, knowledge, and equipment. But decisions led the search party to find the Titanic and the right decisions will raise it off the sea floor. It’s the same with your sunken libido. Decisions will raise it. By deciding to strike into the mood instead of waiting for the mood to strike, by deciding to capitalize on a spark with “flicker stage” sex, by deciding to exercise, by deciding to initiate sex, by deciding to use sexual cues, by deciding to ask yourself questions like, “How can I make this more physically arousing for me?” during lovemaking, you will discover just how much power you have to create a sex life worthy of your relationship.