The Happy Body

Jerzy Gregorek immigrated to the United States together with his wife, Aniela, from Poland in 1986, as political refugees during the Solidarity Movement. An accomplished athlete, he subsequently won four World Weightlifting Championships and established one world record. In 2000, Jerzy and Aniela founded UCLA s weightlifting team, becoming its head coaches. As co-creator of The Happy Body Program, Jerzy has been mentoring people for more than 30 years, helping them attain a happy and healthy lifestyle. In 1998, Jerzy earned an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review. His poem Family Tree was the winner of Amelia magazine s Charles William Duke Longpoem Award in 1998. In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Jerzy a literature fellowship to support the translation from Polish into English of selected poems by Maurycy Szymel. This culminated in the publication in 2013 of The Shy Hand of a Jew by Cross-Cultural Communications, which the following year published a collection of Jerzy s own poetry, entitled Sacred and Scared. A Healthy Mirror for Change: Nourishing an Appetite for Losing Weight, another volume of poetry, was also published in 2014. This latest book harnesses the power of the discovery of a series of internal dialogues, to help readers achieve important goals in the realm of health and fitness. This is accomplished first by understanding the tension and interplay between the voices of what are termed the Fatalist and the Master within all of us. Readers are then invited to first extend these dialogues into their own lives and subsequently to articulate other key scenarios in their lives that are playing themselves out along similar lines. Ultimately, by importing the critical message into these various scenarios, you enable the voice of the Master within you to triumph. Jerzy lives with his wife and their daughter in Woodside, California.