How To Improve Your Sex Life With Lucy Beresford

Lucy Beresford is a broadcaster, writer and psychotherapist. She hosts a weekly phone-in Sex and Relationships show on LBC Radio, and is part of the press panel reviewing the newspapers on Sky News. 

Passionate about helping people enjoy better relationships, she's the author of the international best-seller Happy Relationships: at home work and play.

My passion is to enable people to have the best relationships that they can, not just with other people but with themselves as well. If you have a great relationship with yourself then it improves your ability to have fantastic relationships with other people.

There are lots of ways in which people might have drifted apart. It could be because of pressures at work, having children or looking after elderly parents. But if you can make time for the couple, so that you’re doing something spontaneous or perhaps reconnecting with the things you used to love doing when you first met - those can be really good ways of spicing up your life together.

The one thing that negatively affect people’s sex life is self-confidence. So much of what happens in the bedroom actually takes place in your head and therefore if you can be in the right mindset and you can feel fully confident about what you look like and your abilities, that is the one thing that is going to really help your sex life.

Relationships. *laughs*

The most common question that I’m asked is: “how can I find love?”, and really the only answer to that is you have to go out there and be love. You have to be the change that you want to be. If you’re loving and you can show yourself love, then love will come to you.

Diet affects sex drive enormously not least because what we see with eating disorders is that it really plays havoc with their libido.  You can eat very successfully to improve your sex life to make you feel more vital or alive and also just to give yourself that extra vitality by eating lots of vegetables and fruit so that you know everything your eating is nutritious and you’re loving your body at the same time.

The interesting thing about pineapple is that it’s very sweet so when you ingest it, by definition, as your urine is secreted and your sweat is secreted, there will be elements of that and what the research has suggested is that it will make your genital area and even your sperm taste sweeter as a result. It would kind of neutralise some of the other flavours of sperm that might be off putting.

Some people really struggle to orgasm and because sex kind of happens in your head as much as it happens in the bedroom, you need to get yourself into a very relaxed state so that you feel very confident. There are also other techniques in terms of having orgasmic orgasms; some of it is to do with communication with your partner so that you feel relaxed about asking them to do certain things and some of it is also about knowing how you yourself can bring yourself to orgasm and that’s of course masturbation. If you try and masturbate perhaps even once a day, you can really get in touch with what makes your body tick and that can be a brilliant way of improving your ability to have orgasms.

The amazing thing about sex is that what works for some people doesn’t always work for other people. I love talking dirty but it would be awkward if I was in a relationship with someone that didn’t like it because that can actually be a real turn off so the key is find out in advance maybe slip in a few words here and there – perhaps even when you’re on the first date just to see how they respond and then in the moment, let rip...

Ok, so my favourite technique is to make sure that there’s a little bit of ice-cream around because the combination of having a hot mouth followed by a quick little mouthful of ice-cream and that cold sensation on the penis is a real excitement for the person that you’re giving oral sex to. It’s that hot-cold combination and also perhaps the surprise element as well.