Loving Yourself Will Help You Lose Weight
I am working with over 9,000 women on their weightloss journey from all over the world in my No B.S. Weightloss Program and Membership. Next week I have 70 of my clients coming in for an event where they work one-on-one with me for 6 days. One of the days, they will work on body image. I have been doing a lot of reading on body image to prepare myself. Most of the clients that I have coming to this event have 50-100 pounds to lose.
The biggest thing standing between them and weightloss is not loving themselves enough. They have judgement about themselves because of their body.
These days, more people are overweight. When I was a kid, there weren’t as many overweight people as there are today. I didn’t have any examples that taught me that even if you’re overweight you can still feel pretty and loved and play sports.
The only message that I got was…
- “You’re fat.”
- “You’re not good enough.”
- “You can’t play with us.”
- “You can’t be seen with us.”
- “You’re bad in sports.”
I help women lose weight in a way that they can do it for the rest of their life, for loving themselves, for not stressing out about food, and learning how to do the things they say they’re going to do because they want to. We don’t lose our weight because we don’t like ourselves. We lose weight when we love ourselves enough to give up eating to avoid our feelings. We lose our weight because it holds us back from experiencing a full life.
I was severely bullied as a child about my weight. I have struggled my whole life with body image and losing weight didn’t fix that. Losing weight gave me a different body to criticize and think wasn’t good enough. I still struggles with body image.
I don’t always wear dresses because I’m so insecure about my legs. When I wear dresses, every time I see my legs, I have to make a decision if I want to hate myself in that moment or not. My legs have been something I’ve been hyper-focused on. I was looking back at the things I was called when I was overweight and there was an emphasis on my lower body: thunder thighs, caboose, etc. If you’re thinking something today, it’s probably a collection of things you heard earlier in life. We develop a sense of who we are from the things that were said to us when we were kids.
When you understand that so much of the way you think now is from the past, that means you now get to decide that those experiences and opinions are wrong. They don’t have to be relevant to your life now. Believing those things said in the past are true is never going to help you feel better about you today. Don’t judge how it should have gone down back in the day. My child-like brain internalized it, but now I have an adult brain and can choose to think about it however I want. You can decide they were wrong, they were mistaken, that their opinions aren’t valid.
For 30 years, I didn’t know any better about my body. I based my opinions about my body on what I was told from others and the media about it. I now deserve the opportunity to spend the next 30 years working on loving my body and developing my own opinions about it. I’d rather spend 30 years learning to have my own back, then to spend the next 30 years basing my opinions about myself on other people’s opinions.
How many times a day are you willing to challenge yourself to think better on your weightloss journey?
Go to bed exhausted everyday believing in yourself. Be tired because you constantly changed the conversation in your head all day long to say better things about yourself. You only get one shot at life, go out strong.
Just because you think something (my legs are big) doesn’t mean it’s true (that’s the sentence that I chose to think right now, do I want to keep thinking it or not?).
“I think my legs are big and I know that it doesn’t feel good to think that and it’s not the end of the world. I wish I didn’t think that. I’m still working on loving myself.” What I allow myself to think and feel today is most important. What if instead of asking people if you look okay in something, you just decide “I do look good.” Keep practicing loving everything.
When you notice your legs are big, you don’t go to Pinterest that second and find an extreme diet. Notice that you had a thought (a thought that you’ve probably had a thousand times) and that thoughts happen and you can work on them. Just because you don’t like something in the moment, doesn’t mean that you have to go find a solution (extreme diet) right then.
Stop thinking that you’re sick, worthless, or hopeless.
You have an opinion of yourself based on your collection of thoughts about your body. We have to change the conversation if we’d like the conversation to change.
Self Image Weightloss Journal Prompt:
- Write about your opinions of your body. All of them.
- Be honest. Is this old baggage from your past? If it is, remind yourself that it is wrong information that has been practiced over time. It’s time to practice new things.
- Even if you don’t believe it right, what are you going to tell yourself?
If you can squeeze a baby out your hoo-hoo, you can suffer a bad thought about yourself. If you’ve make it through bad shit, you can level up your thinking, it’s just a sentence. We all have sentences that we say to ourselves. It’s better to look at them and work on them, than to stuff your face every night over them.
The only way I will ever get used to wearing dresses is to wear dresses and let my brain hyper-fix on my legs, redirect my brain a thousand times, learn how to accept them, and talk differently to myself. Just not wearing dresses is not helping. It is avoiding the conversation in my head.
The same can be applied to having certain foods in your house. Don’t remove food because you’re afraid you’re going to eat it. If you remove it, you aren’t dealing with everything that comes up in your brain when you’re around it. You need to learn to be uncomfortable around it.
I answer questions at the end of my Facebook Live above. Like it? Sign up for my free Losing for Life Kickstart Video Course for more mindset tips and motivation to get started losing weight and Subscribe to my podcast.
