You Loving and Accepting Yourself to Your Weight Goal

I used to spend way too much time thinking about how much I weighed, what I ate, what I wasn’t eating, and what I should be eating. It was exhausting and such a distraction from enjoying my life.

Through my weight loss journey, I’ve found the opportunity to learn on so many levels. I’ve learned about the way that I think, the way that I feel, the way I act, and I’ve learned that I had been avoiding living an intentional life by buffering with food and watching way too much Netflix.

Through my weight loss journey, I’ve learned and am continuing to learn to have much better integrity with myself and live an intentional life.

It took me a long time to see that I was approaching weight loss with an attitude of resistance, resentment, frustration and self-loathing. The frustration was evident, but the self-loathing was hidden. And I think that it may have been, at least in part, due to all the years of thinking this time I would lose the weight and then failing. And being oh so annoyed with myself!

I’m now aware of how important it is to help my clients approach weight loss from a place of love, care, allowing and compassion.

Loving and accepting yourself does not look like this…

• You being resentful of the deprivation and you hating your body. You avoiding emotion, and using sheer will power to do what you think you should, to eat what you think you should, you feeling as though you can’t control yourself, as if you are grasping to stay on a diet.
• You being in a hurry to lose weight.
• You scared to allow yourself to have any pleasure.
• You wanting to do anything you can to lose weight as quickly as possible so that you can like yourself.

There is no allowing in this scenario. It’s all just sheer control willpower. And it’s almost like you don’t let yourself know your desires. And you may be afraid that if you’re not doing this, if you’re not restricting and hyper vigilant of what you’re eating and how you’re being, that you’ll swing to the other side.

And on that other side you may find yourself eating whatever you want and not restricting at all.

You may call it pleasure. You may call it treating yourself. But it’s anything but. You may be eating behind your own back. You may not even know why you’re eating what you’re eating. You may not be enjoying your food but you’re eating it anyway. You’re not weighing yourself. You’re not paying attention to your body at all. You may even think that your body doesn’t matter, that you shouldn’t pay attention to any of it and you should just eat whatever you want.

All of this is the opposite of self-care, the opposite of self-love.

The right way to lose weight, the right way to find self-love, is right in the middle of these two extremes…

It is a life of balance. It’s where you are balancing your desire to have discipline and be in control of your life but also love yourself madly. And that’s one of the differences between the wrong way and the right way to manage your weight. The right way is filled with love and the wrong way isn’t.

That’s why the weight loss process that I teach is structured in a way that allows you to make your own decisions about the fuel that you put into your body. The way that you will know if you’re doing weight-loss, or any kind of eating management correctly, is if you feel love towards yourself.

And you can feel this love and acceptance of yourself because you’re willing and wanting to invest in you. You feel good about writing down what you’re eating, you’re not afraid to acknowledge what you’re eating, because you’re not judging it. You’re not afraid to weigh yourself. You’re not afraid to start exploring how you feel about your body.

You’re willing to start loving it for what it is. An amazing human body that is taking care of you. When you love your body, you want to put healthy energising food into it.

And you’re willing to invest time in learning how to allow your emotions instead of eating your way through them. You’ll be able to observe yourself without judgment. You’ll stay committed and disciplined with love, not with punishment. You’ll recognise when it’s challenging and know that that’s okay. You will feel discomfort, of course, when you’re going through this process because that’s what life is. But discomfort with an under-foundation of love is very different than the discomfort with the under-foundation of self-loathing and punishment and shame.

Take a pen and paper and write down what you think about your relationship with yourself, with food, with eating. Get it all out of your head and down onto paper. Don’t be judgmental of what comes up. Just get it all down. Then you can start to explore your thoughts and feelings one by one. Once you have a clear understanding of where you are, you can start to think about how you might like to move forward. I would love to hear how you get on.