Do you feel like you 'try so hard to eat healthy all day only to then ruin it in the evening'?
This would have to be one of the most common statements I hear so I want to shed some light on this. For me to understand how I could love myself when there were parts of my body I simply didn’t like, meant I had to change my perspective. To do this I began looking at myself with what I call The Self-Love Scale. This is one of the strategies I used to learn to love and accept myself, and I hope it will help you too.
There are different areas of a person when we speak of self-love, and they can include your physical appearance and your body image, and also your self-worth, the way you behave, the way you treat others and personality. Let’s make up an example here based on only physical traits. Imagine you have a scale and on one end of this scale is the one thing you love most about yourself physically, and on the other end of this scale is the one thing you dislike most about yourself. Every other part of you falls somewhere on this scale in order, depending on how much or little you like those parts. Here’s a fictitious example of what a self-love scale for someone might look like with number 1 as your favourite thing, and number 10 as your least favourite:
But how you look at this part of you that comes in last on your scale is what matters. If you can learn to accept that something must take up this place, much like the last runner in a running race, and see it for what it is and realise it is not as bad as you think, then life becomes that much easier and happier. When you live in a fear-based mind set then naturally all your focus goes on everything you fear – the things you don’t like, the things you wish were different, and the things that are on the bottom of your self-love scale. But when you live with a love-based mind set then you spend more time focusing on all the wonderful things about yourself, and you pay attention to the things on the top of your scale – your favourite parts. Once this happens you no longer feel the need and desire to strive to be something else. You can recognise that the best parts on your scale are much more important than the worst parts. If you can start to see this Self-Love Scale for yourself, ask yourself what would happen if you were to fix the thing you least liked about yourself? If you were to change it to something better, another part must then take up the end spot on your scale. You will never ever get to a point where you are happy, because you will continue forever trying to perfect yourself, when in fact you can’t because something must always take that last place on your scale. If you had 10 runners in a running race, and worked really hard on improving the slowest runner and made him faster, then it doesn’t change the fact that there is still going to be the last place runner, it will just be a different runner – number nine will be bumped back to number 10. If you spend most of your time focusing on the last place thing on your scale, it loses its perspective and in your mind it becomes a lot worse than how others see it. Like a running race again, everyone else sees all 10 runners – the fastest right through to the slowest. Chances are their focus is on who is winning the race. But when your focus becomes fear-based within your own self you lose sight of the whole race and who is winning, simply because you spent the whole race watching the person coming last. It’s not about fixing your least favourite part. It becomes more about perspective when you can understand and grasp the idea of the Self-Love Scale, because when you are living in a fear-based mind set all you focus on are the things you know aren’t good enough – the last place runner in your running race. But when you flip that perspective to a love-based mind set, then instead you focus on the things you love about yourself – the first and second place runners in your running race. Look at your flaws and be grateful for them, because they are the things that make your best bits stand out. Be proud of your flaws because without being proud of them you will never be perfect, because you will always be trying too hard to be something else, trying too hard to be someone who is less perfect than the real you. Go and love your best bits! Kerri van de Loo xx “Current guidelines suggest that overweight and obese individuals lose weight through engaging in lifestyle modifications that involve diet, exercise and behaviour changes”.
The standard way of approaching weight loss to date in the wider and more commonly known parts of society is through using this above method. You don’t need to go far to be confronted with the knowledge that for weight loss to happen you must alter your way of eating and exercising to create a deficit within your body’s energy system to result in a reduction of weight – energy in versus energy out. Alongside this simple method of how weight loss is recommended is the social and emotional pressures placed on any individual to believe that to be healthy you must lose weight, and to look good you must be skinny. This energy deficit theory may in some cases result in successful weight loss, but it is proven only to be short term. 98% of people who lose weight regain that weight, often within a year, and furthermore they gain back more than they actually began with. When you can look at these statistics for what they are, you can recognise that the common theories to date for weight loss are insufficient, unsuccessful and potentially detrimental in the long run to, not only your body, but your emotional and mental wellbeing. If you look deeper into the most common method people choose to adopt when attempting weight loss of diet and exercise, it is full of multiple contradictions, and the long term effects can range from increased food and body preoccupation or obsessions, the damaging effects of cycling through weight loss and weight gain, a distorted view of your body, poor self-esteem and self-respect, the potential of eating disorders, and an overall level of ill-health on many of your body systems and functions. The contradiction in this lies in that people are using this idea for losing weight in a belief it will make them ‘healthier and they will look better’, but unfortunately the long term effects are almost entirely opposite. The idea that only a slim person can be healthy is not true in any sense, and in fact, many overweight people have a much higher rate of essential nutrient consumption, meaning that they often eat better choices of food. Likewise, many overweight people actually exercise much more often and more frequently than their slimmer counterparts. Both of these reasons are because we are taught that if you eat better and exercise more you will lose weight, so a large number of people who believe they are overweight do both of these principals well to try and achieve that desired effect. However, because the reality falls very short on this assumption on how to lose weight, more and more people are developing severely distorted views of their body’s, other people’s body’s, and what they think they should look like. It is incredibly sad that the cultural way of many people is to place the value of a person on the size and shape they are. The size and shape of a person has absolutely no indication of who that person is, the worthiness and attractiveness of that person, how that person lives their life, and further more shows very little idea about their health and wellbeing. Overtime there has become this stream-lined view of the ideal body, and along with this ideal is a huge percentage of the population fighting emotional, mental and physical battles to fit within this narrow margin of idealism. Unfortunately though, the method majority of people are using in an attempt to reach this ideal body shape and size is through purely diet and exercise, and as explained above, this contradicts the very thing you are attempting to achieve. Relying solely on diet and exercise to achieve this desired body shape and size will always leave a person falling short of their goal, and it is not because they may never be able to achieve it, it is because within their mind they will never be able to achieve it. In too many overweight people a distortion of their body has been created through many failed attempts at previously trying to lose weight that they can no longer appreciate the real version of their body. Quite simply, the will continue to believe their body isn’t good enough, regardless of what size and shape they reach. When a person goes through multiple attempts at trying to lose weight, it is not because they need to eat better or exercise more. Please don’t misinterpret what I mean here – food and exercise is hugely valuable to the health of a person. But it is not what must change when a person wishes to achieve the body shape and size that society has instructed to be the ideal version. If you break food and exercise down into why they are important for your body, the links to weight loss are always secondary, or even further removed. For example, to have a healthy diet one key point is to eat lots of fresh and raw vegetables, and the reason for this is so you can receive the essential nutrients your body needs to supply every cell in your body with optimum nourishment. Another point for a healthy diet is to reduce processed and refined carbohydrates, and a couple of the reasons being that these foods can damage the health of your gut resulting in inflammation through your body, they can spike insulin levels too much, and they offer very little nutrients for your body. When you exercise you build muscle which increases your metabolic rate, it also helps to increase blood flow and this, along with sweating and puffing, helps to remove toxins from your body. Exercise also is responsible for producing feel-good hormones, such as endorphins and serotonin, which help you feel happy and positive. So the reasons for eating lots of vegetables, reducing refined and processed carbohydrates and exercising are not directly linked to losing weight. In fact, there isn’t much of a direct relevance at all. The reason you do them is to help your body become healthy. As a result of lining up all the healthy necessities for your body, such as these mentioned, your body then can have the ability to let go of any unneeded body fat because it is in optimal health. When people strive so hard to eat and exercise for weight loss they skip the essential health necessities needed, such as a healthy gut, optimum nourishment, and feel-good hormones, to name only a few. Once you can look at the idea of weight loss with this understanding you will realise that following diets that promise quick weight loss, or restricting calories in and increasing energy out, can’t sustain a healthy body and mind, and the result must inevitably always be regaining of the lost weight. For lifelong weight loss, or to be that small 2% that succeed at losing weight, you need to remove all focus off weight and put it all on to health. Within health it encompasses the full wellbeing of both your mind and your body, because without a healthy mind, you will never be able to appreciate or accept when your body really is in a place of being healthy and ‘okay’, therefore still continue to fight for that ‘ideal’ body (that actually doesn’t exist!). Eating healthy foods and exercising regularly is important for a healthy body, but it is only a small part of the weight loss picture. Weight loss is a society and cultural issue, wherein the idea of the ideal body and the need to be skinny to be healthy is so programmed into most people’s minds that there seems to be this inability to see that it is an inaccurate and insufficient truth to the real cause of obesity. Start beginning with your self-worth and naturally your body will follow with the desire to want to be healthy. Nothing else matters. Size, shape and body proportions is not the issue. Only the health of your mind and body matter. Please break free from the current mind set on how to lose weight. If it was entirely accurate then there really would be very little people struggling to lose weight in this world. Furthermore, the fact that 98% of people regain weight shows that something is not right, and that something significantly important is missing from this weight loss mentality. Here’s to a healthy mind and body! Kerri x |
Kerri van de Loo - Mindfulness coach, Personal Trainer, Nutrition Coach & SELF-LOVE COACH:Join our Online Wellness Club here: https://www.bodyessence.co.nz/wellness-club.html Categories
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