Be nice (especially to yourself!)

21^st July 2017

Grateful for where I’m at, excited about where I’m going.

Yesterday was just another day that proved how important it is to get to your meetings each week - that support from everyone makes a massive difference, especially when you’re struggling!  When you’re not struggling you’ll be there to help everyone else with your enthusiasm, success and knowledge.

Think for a moment, what would you do if you found someone bruised and battered?  You wouldn’t give them another slap for good measure would you!  No you’d show them compassion and try to help them and this is the attitude you need to show towards yourself when you slip up in your efforts to lose weight.

Imagine you meet up with a mate for coffee and you end up in Maccy D’s, they order big mac and fries, then when they’ve finished they go and order a Chocolate muffin, eat the lot, lick their lips and smile!   Then they say, ‘damn, I shouldn’t have eaten that, I’ve messed my week up now’.  Do you look at them and say, ‘Yeah you have, you’re disgusting, you ought to be ashamed of yourself eating like that you pig!  That’s why you ain’t ever gonna lose any weight!”  Or do you say, ‘Was it good, you ready to draw a line now and get back on track tomorrow?”

I’m guessing you would say the nicer response, I hope you would anyway, if you said the first, you wouldn’t be my friend anymore!  I’m guessing though if you’d been talking to yourself in your own head, would you have shown so much compassion?  Would you have given yourself a hard time, I know so many members that would and it’s my mission to get them to stop doing that. 

Stop criticizing yourself. Look for your strengths instead of your flaws. Why not write yourself a list of your strengths, food might be a weakness but you’ll have strengths.  Oh and if you do still occasionally criticise yourself? Don’t criticise yourself for criticising yourself! You’re trying to undo a lifetime of habits, so be very, very patient with yourself. It’s going to take time.

Showing yourself compassion could be the missing ingredient in your weight loss efforts you know, none of us react positively to negativity!

Just read this few lines out loud;

“I’m such a sorry loser.”
“I shouldn’t have put all that weight on in the first place.”
“What’s the point? I’ll never lose weight.”

Don’t sound good does it, lowers your mood almost instantly, made me feel flat, now we don’t usually say these things out loud, but we think them and our subconscious hears loud and clear and it makes us feel awful which usually makes us look for something to eat!

WAKE UP CALL!  We all overeat and indulge, heck food tastes damn good, it’s everywhere, temptation that is as well as food, we’re designed to want to eat, we’re bought up to want to eat, eating is enjoyable. 

So stop beating yourself up for overeating - it makes you human, welcome to the club, there’s like 7 billion of us!

Healthy isn’t a weight, it’s not a diet, it’s not about killing it at the gym 7 days a week or eating clean 24/7 (which is super boring by the way), most importantly, healthy looks different for everyone.

Don’t define yourself on how well you stick to the ‘plan’ define yourself on the choices you make that celebrate your BeYOUtiful, your individuality and your life.

Feeling guilty and beating yourself up causes even more stress and negativity, this won’t help you get anywhere, if you’re going to have a food fest, enjoy it, don’t beat yourself up over it.

Now thankfully my meetings last night helped to keep me on track, I hadn’t got my tea planned like I said I would (does that make me useless?  NO! It makes me busy and tired!), I know if I hadn’t had the conversation we had in that meeting I would’ve come home and overindulged, I may have come home via the chippy (would that have made me a failure?  NO!  It would have made me someone who couldn’t be bothered to cook tea and gave into temptation – it happens!)  Instead because we’d all had a good chat, we’d agreed that we were gonna get on it, I’d made one of my members promise she wouldn’t have a maccy’s for tea because she hadn’t seen the results on the scales she wanted, because we both knew that wasn’t going to make her feel better, she would’ve been eating it for the wrong reason.   I drove home thinking, ‘right what can I have for tea, I’ve told all those ladies to stay on track, I’ve got to as well’.  I had the most delicious tuna melt, mmm and went to bed feeling good.

Here’s to another day of healthy & happy, be kind to yourself BeYOUtiful, be your own best friend, support and love all the way.