When I was a child, I was severely bullied about my weight and from that, I developed self-hate. How could I be loveable? How can others love me when I was so overweight? These were the thoughts that stuck in the back of my mind for way too long.
I would look in the mirror at my rolls hanging out over my size 20 pants and cry. I hid in baggy shirts to hide the rolls. I avoided having my picture taken because I was so embarrassed and ashamed at how I looked.
I fully believed that I would be loved and accepted by others, and I would love myself ONCE I lost all the weight.
Well, I lost a lot of weight many times and still never loved myself.
It went from hating my fat rolls to hating the look of my loose skin. It was never good enough!
Guess what, I gained the weight back every time because of my judgemental thoughts. Those thoughts had me running to my favourite foods to feel better.
What I learned was the most significant thing standing between me, and permanent weight loss was loving myself exactly the way I was.
Loving yourself doesn’t mean you don’t work on losing weight; what it means is you love yourself along the way to losing weight.
Learning that when you love yourself enough, you are kind and compassionate to yourself and those feelings never lead you to need to eat.
There was no way you can stop turning to food if you keep beating yourself up because the feelings that came up when you are judgemental to yourself is usually feelings of sadness and defeat. Those feelings will NEVER lead you to take the actions that are needed to lose weight.
Loving yourself is what is so crucial to making lasting changes.
When you make changes from the place of self-love, that is you respecting yourself enough to say I deserve to do what is best for myself.
When you beat yourself up, it creates suffering, you disrespect yourself and how would you ever make healthy choices from that place.
When you pick on your body, find faults in things you do and rely on other people’s opinions on how you look that never works.
What will totally change everything for you is learning that when you stop picking on your body, stop finding fault in the things you do, stop looking to other people’s opinions on how you look and decide you are good enough right now!
You need to make this shift because, yes, you can lose physical weight, but if you don’t lose the mental weight, it won’t matter the size of your body because you still have the old body thoughts.
You have to change the way you talk and think about yourself so that you can love yourself and have the self-confidence that you have been searching for way too long.
For me, this was the point where I lost 100 pounds over ten years now.
So ask yourself what is the relationship you want with yourself? Do you want a loving, kind, compassionate relationship, or do you want a negative, judgemental relationship?
The relationship with yourself is the most important one you have.
If you are ready to have that loving relationship, don’t be afraid to have a conversation with yourself when you notice you are hard on yourself. When you notice you are hard on yourself, you get to say to yourself, nope, not going to do that anymore. From here, you get to decide whatever you want to think about yourself consciously.
You are worth it!
Karen
Certified Weight and Confidence Coach
P.S.
If you are ready to get the tools and support to change your inner dialogue so that you lose the weight for the last time, end emotional eating, have the self-confidence and self-esteem and get more of what you want from your life then click here to schedule a call so that we can chat.
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