Women, Take Your Power Back

Dr. Phil McGraw's daily doses of no-nonsense advice have made his talk show a huge hit since it first aired in 2002. The show starts its fourth season Wednesday with a focus on empowering women.

"I let the viewer design our show," McGraw tells The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith. "We get a million hits a day on our Web site. A lot of people write us letters and say,'Talk about this, follow this theme.' Women are saying it's a great time to be a woman, a great time to be alive. And we want to know how do we get more out of life, how do we get more excited about what we're doing, how do we get more in our marriage, careers, more in our personal life. So we're addressing a lot of those issues. Obviously, it starts from the inside out."

Today's women are tired of trying to please different masters, working outside the home and taking care of their families, and not knowing what they are supposed to be doing.

"They have to change what they're doing," McGraw says. "We're in a 70 percent double-income society. We have so many women who are taking care of the home and working outside the home. I saw some research not long ago that said the stay-at-home mom works the equivalent in terms of hours and energy of two full-time jobs. So if you got somebody that is working a full-time job, then they're also taking care of all those things. They're going to have to change, start redistributing some things. You got to take care of yourself before you can take care of others."

And to change, women need to think through what they believe. "A big part of it is in rejecting definitions we get from the marketing machine in America," McGraw explains. "We're largely cattle sometimes. I mean, it's like the marketing machine is telling us what to think, what to feel, what to buy and how to identify your self-worth.

"We got to say, 'Wait a minute!' These women setting up these icons on television, most of them are half-anorexic. Twenty-five percent of on-air personalities are below healthy weight. Three percent of the overall society is below healthy weight. That's whom we look to. You can't be that! You don't need to be that! It's not healthy. You got to get real about how you look, how you measure yourself worth."

And it is clear that he is still telling it like it is. His first guest is a 15-year-old girl who's tired of her mother's constant criticism of her weight, especially since her mom is overweight herself.

"You are seeing in her what you hate about yourself," McGraw is seen telling the mother in a preview of his first show.

"We see in others what we don't like in ourselves," McGraw tells Smith. "My dad used to say, 'There is something about that old boy, I just can't stand about me.' I always thought that was a really good quote. This mother clearly is overweight; she is undisciplined; she is not happy about the way she looks. And she's saying everything to her daughter that she says privately to herself. The problem is, that scars that daughter. The most powerful role model we ever have in our lives is the same-sex parent."

The daughter, for her part, is seen reacting negatively to her mother by eating more. McGraw explains, "When I talked to this daughter on the show, she says, 'I rebel against that,' she said, 'that very thing makes me go sneak food and say, how do you like that?'"

Also on his show he shares the story of a woman who's barely alive at just 60 pounds. An anorexic for 16 years, she speaks to McGraw from her hospital bed.

"We don't know if she's going to live," McGraw says. "And again, because somebody when she was 22 years old, a boy dropped her, broke up with her, and said, 'You're fat and ugly, and I don't want to see you.' She was 5'2" and 114 pounds. And since then, her entire life has cascaded out of control."

His show is about women giving away their power and how to take it back again. McGraw says it is one of the most exciting shows he has ever done.

This episode had an audience of 1,000 women, 250 of them were in the studio and 750 were in another location on the Paramount lot and were visited by McGraw and his wife, Robin.

The "Dr. Phil" show and CBSNews.com have the same parent company, Viacom, Inc.