You look so fat!

You look so fat! Seriously how did you put on so much weight without even realising? Look at you! Your clothes are too tight, you look terrible in those jeans. How did you let this happen to yourself? You are lazy and clearly you eat too much! You are disgusting.

Would you say these these to your best friend? Would you put up with a work colleague talking to you like this? It’s abusive, it’s mean and it’s demeaning. Yet I have to be honest, I have said all these things and worse to myself over the years.

Body bashing always came naturally to me, and I think it does to a lot of women out there. At 14 I was on diets, my girlfriend and I took diet pills, and went through stages were we barely ate enough to sustain our bodies and let them develop and grow the way they needed to. I remember hating my breasts as they grew larger than my friends, and I recall my friends wishing theirs would grow faster and bigger.

I shared a post with my readers recently titled “Let’s face it I’m simply amazing” if you haven’t read it I recommend you do. In this article I spoke about how we ‘talk to ourselves’ and encouraged and challenged the readers to make a list of positives and negatives about themselves.

My mum read this post and she said to me that it was a great idea, but that it was too hard for her to name positives about herself. My response to her was ‘of course it’s hard”! She has been putting herself down for over 60 years. This negative self talk isn’t going to go away because she reads one blog post. Changing the way we see ourselves is challenging, it is one of the hardest things to do. It takes time to see ourselves as beautiful, intelligent, strong women if we have grown up believing we are not those things.

I will tell you what I told my mum, if you want to change, you have to be willing to put in the work. You have to accept it will take time. But it gets easier every single day and there is no pressure to rush through this process, take your time, work at it each day and I guarantee you will begin to see yourself as beautiful.

They way we talk to ourselves has a huge impact on how we see ourselves, how we care for ourselves and the way we interact with others. Your body is beautiful, no matter what size you are, and if you don’t love your body now, you are still not going to love it when you are thinner, or curvier, or more toned, or even if you get breast implants. Because the truth is loving our body doesn’t come from the way it looks on the outside, it comes from the way we see ourselves and the way we talk to ourselves.

Have you noticed that the friends you have who you judged as having ‘great body‘ are still putting themselves down? Women you aspire to have a body like are saying they are fat, or saying they need cosmetic surgery. This is because you are never going to love your body without actually learning to love yourself first. You have to keep in mind that what your body is hearing everything that your mind is telling it. If you constantly put yourself body down, you are never going to be able to love the skin you’re in.

I am not saying go ahead and never exercise and just gain loads of weight as that wouldn’t be a healthy choice. Exercise and fuelling your body with nourishment is key to feeling good about yourself because it fuels your mind as well as your body. Going for a walk, or a swim is always going to leave you feeling good as exercise produces the feel good chemicals in our brain. But just like we should fuel our body with food and we should move our bodies with exercise, we also need to excise and fuel our mind with positive thoughts.

As I mentioned in my “Let’s face it I’m simply amazing” blog post, one way to get doing this is to start listing our positives. Things we like about ourselves. In that post I talk about listing things we like about our body, our mind and things we feel good about accomplishing. The more we remind ourselves to do this, at least once a day, the more we will become accustomed to thinking and speaking to ourselves with ‘helpful thoughts‘. Remember as I said above, your body is listening to every comment you mind makes. So make those comments positive and soon you will be living and feeling full of positivity. You will learn to treat your body with love and feel good about the way you look. Even if it seems impossible today, and even tomorrow, I guarantee that if at least once a day for the next two weeks you remind yourself of all the positives about yourself, you will start to find it much easier to compliment yourself and receive compliments from others.

Life is too short for body bashing, our world is too beautiful to go through life being negative and self hating, there is enough heartbreak in the world without being at war with who we are or how we look. Embrace who you are and learn to love how you look. If you haven’t read “Let’s face it I’m simply amazing” I would advise you to. Take the challenge to learn to love who you are! I fully acknowledge it will feel strange, uncomfortable and even really silly at first. If you have spent many years putting yourself down you will face resistance from your mind when you begin this practice. But fight it! It is time you fight for you! So push past the weirdness of it and start complimenting yourself. Write a list of your positives, even if your list only has one thing, just start! Baby steps are fine, after all you are re-training your mind. Be kind to yourself.

Here is my challenge for this week.

Write a list, be it on your phone, paper, or computer. Write at least one thing you like about your body, if you can write more then do so, but if you can’t that is fine.
Leave yourself a reminder to read that list once a day, adding to it if you feel you can. If you are not ready to add to it that is OK.
Feel free to add a positive regarding achievements, or anything you feel you are good at (i.e.- drawing, reading, gardening, even cleaning).
By the end of the first week, I want you to look at yourself in the mirror and give yourself one compliment. No matter how strange it feels I want you to do it, and I want you to be proud of yourself for doing it!
Be kind to yourself, treat yourself to an extra long shower one day, or buy yourself a really good book. Maybe book your nails to be done, or cook a special meal. Whatever it is, just make a conscious effort to acknowledge you deserve to be treated nicely.
Be proud of yourself for doing these steps!