Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek came to the United States from Poland in 1986 as political refugees during the Solidarity Movement. Elite professional weightlifters, they have both won multiple world championships and set world records. While working as trainers in L.A., they became aware that people needed a dramatic change in lifestyle, not simply an hour a day of supervised exercise, to achieve real results. The Happy Body Program grew from this insight, supplying definable goals and a plan to sustain improvement. By coaching the UCLA weightlifting team and observing trained athletes they began to integrate scientific principles to better refine and expand their system. Today The Happy Body Program has helped thousands of people transform their bodies and lives. In working with clients over thirty years, Aniela and Jerzy discovered the power of stories to help change belief systems and habits. It was by addressing feelings, not simply absorbing information, that clients were able to implement the simple but often difficult solutions they faced with diet and exercise. At this point In 1998 Jerzy and Aniela earned MFAs in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Their poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review. Jerzy's 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 him 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. As Aniela and Jerzy engaged in writing their own poetry, translating the poetry of others and deepening their understanding of world events and human suffering, they began to build a bridge between science and art, intelligence and emotion. They introduced a selection of classical music and floral images for relaxation, The Happy Body Ambience, a book of poems called Food for Your Soul, three books of Platonic dialogues, The Master/Fatalist series, to address the invisible emotional dimension that other programs ignore. The Happy Body Workbook engages the reader through a 12-week period of actively working the program, providing concrete and inspirational support in building the desired future day-by-day.
