It’s hard to love and accept a body that you feel  has let you down.

It’s hard to love and accept a body that you don’t feel good in, that gives you discomfort, that you don’t think is attractive or beautiful or that doesn’t do what you want it to do.

So when experts and influencers in the body-positive space just blithely declare, “Just love your bodies!  You’re so worthy, just as you are.”, it’s a wonderful sentiment but leaves many wondering, “why can other people just lurve and learn to accept their bodies, but I can’t?”.

In the same way that you wouldn’t force yourself to fall in love with someone else, why would you force loving yourself?

The word love gets tossed around like it’s so simple.  But, what many of us fail to realize is that love is born out of 4 critical things:

Trust

Communication

Respect

Time

When I was a young adult, I used to worry about whether or not I’d find love. Like many, I internalized the false notion that love was contingent on me being thin, and acted accordingly.

I was so panicked that I’d be cast aside to join the ranks of crazy aunt cat ladies around the world that I literally would do anything to avoid that sad and lonely fate.  My unhealthy dieting behaviors came out of fear, scarcity and stress - not at all from love.

Maybe that’s why I was never truly happy, even when I got to my ridiculously unsustainable “goal” weight.  Because I thought fast-tracking to thin would = self-love. It most certainly did not. After all, now that I had “arrived,” I had no idea how to maintain it.  The fear, uncertainty and inevitability of weight gain kept me from ever relaxing, accepting, loving.

When I let go of needing to “love” my body, I was able to figure out how I could actually work with it to feel good.  I replaced “Can I love you? With “Can we communicate better?” I replaced “I accept you warts and all” to “I honor and respect you, despite everything we’ve been through. I replaced “I’ll love you when you look the way I want” to “I’m going to find out how to make you FEEL amazing.”

I recently had my yearly physical.  I used to recoil at the thought of “weighing in.”  Now, it’s a non-issue. Why? Because, I know that weight is just ONE measure of health.  

In fact, what is now clearer to me than ever is the fact that the healthy behaviors and self-care measures I do regularly is directly responsible for my low cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides and glucose levels. This is all true irrespective of my weight.  Make no mistake, the health behaviors I do now make my body and brain feel good and are done out of honor, respect and reverence, not loathing, force or fear.

That has been the key difference in keeping them sustainable and dare I say it, even fun.

So, try shifting your mindset from the need to love your body to the need to revere it, listen to it, honor it and trust it.   

Love and acceptance will follow.

Mindset work is a key foundation in my Eating Empowerment Method.  Learn more about this empowered eating essential and 3 others by watching my free online class, 

The Empowered Eating Method:

End Food Obsession, Eat Mindfully & Find your "feel like myself again" weight.

In this 60-minute Masterclass you’ll learn: 

+ the one piece of information that diet experts will not tell you about weight loss

+ how to eat mindfully and intuitively to stop obsessing and worrying about food all the time    

+ the secrets to regulating your hunger hormones to know instinctively when you're full and stop eating when you're satisfied.

So be sure to nab a space, stock up on your fave snacks and have a plentiful supply of coffee! It’s going to be epic!

Stay tuned for next week for mindset shift #3 on how to shift from focusing on how your body looks to how it feels.

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