If you look at most of the promoted paths to health in the past thirty plus years, the general angle is one of negativity towards your body and the desire to fix it, so you can finally look good and be happy. But statistics on dieting have shown that 95% of people who go on a diet will gain all or most of their weight back. While there are myriad reasons for this, from misinformation to unsustainable and restrictive diet regimes, I also believe that the motivation itself is suspect.
Brene Brown, renowned shame and vulnerability researcher, and best-selling author of Daring 
Greatly, talks about the damage done in offices where public shaming and ridicule is used as a management tool to illicit high performance. The results? Workers feel shame, which lowers their confidence, stifles creativity and engagement, reduces productivity, and ultimately causes them to stop caring about their work and even leave their job. Sound like an experience you might have had with a diet?
When looking at what motivates people, research has shown that some combination of sticks and carrots can be effective, but Brene Brown’s research shows us that when the stick (or the carrot) involves high levels of shame, motivation gets disrupted; it damages self-worth, and it’s hard to be motivated when you feel badly about yourself.
But even the idea of sticks and carrots has to do with external motivation factors. I have found with my clients that the most effective path to lasting positive change is through intrinsic motivation. When you’re so clear about cause and effect, in terms of what you eat and how exactly it makes you feel, you become motivated by not wanting to feel bad, and also by wanting to feel good; the healthy choice happens as a by-product of your internal desire. Intrinsic motivation requires you to listen deeply to your body’s signals. The problem is, that if you feel shame around your body, you won’t want to listen to it. You may even feel that your body should be punished for betraying you (that’s usually where extreme or starvation diets come in). Because the motivation to take action is coming from a negative place, you’ll likely want to rebel against yourself, as you’ve turned yourself into the dictator and mean task-master. That backlash will cause bad food and lifestyle choices, which results in more shame, and the cycle starts again.
Luckily, there’s another way! When you start to love your body instead of hate it, you’ll want to take care of it. You’ll feel it deserves to be treated well. You’ll want to nourish it in the best way possible and listen to its needs. So how do you go from shame or self-loathing to self-love?
HERE ARE MY TOP FIVE TIPS TO INCREASE SELF-LOVE:
1- TAKE LOVING ACTION TOWARD YOURSELF. You may think you need to love yourself first in order to take loving action, but actually, taking action to honor yourself will increase self-love. So basically, fake it until you make it! If you buy (or get from your garden) fresh flowers for your home every week, that will make you feel taken care of and honored, which contributes to the building of self-love. Likewise, the consistent action of feeding yourself a healthy breakfast every day that makes you feel good and gives you energy, is a huge act of self-care that builds a positive relationship between you and your body.
2- AFFIRMATIONS. The act of saying and reading affirmations to yourself can feel cheesy or inauthentic, and has been the basis for some great Saturday Night Live skits. But the truth is, if you really listen to what you’re saying to yourself on a regular basis, you might find that it’s alarming and quite abusive. If you look in the mirror and consistently say, “I look horrible,” or “I hate my body,” then you’re setting a neural pathway in your brain that turns into a deep rut for that thought. The purpose of affirmations is to disrupt that ingrained neural pathway with a different option, and to say it enough that it becomes the preferred pathway. For a list of body love affirmations, check out this resource from the late and great Louise Hay: https://www.louisehay.com/love-your-body/. Or create your own! Make sure that your belief aligns with the affirmation though, so you don’t resist it. For instance, if you really feel like you look horrible, then put ‘I’m learning to’ before the affirmation, like “I’m learning to love and appreciate my body.” Or put it in the form of someone else saying something nice to you, like “Hello, beautiful!” Write affirmations on cards that you flip through every morning, or put up little love notes on mirrors or on your phone or computer. Without the active disruption of negative thinking, it will continue on auto-pilot.
3- SPEAK TO YOURSELF AS YOU WOULD A CHILD or a best friend or loved one. Would you ever tell a child, “You’re so stupid! You’re ugly! You’re worthless!” Of course not, that would be cruel. And yet somehow we feel ok saying this to ourselves. In the cases where children have received that feedback on a regular basis, we know that it becomes internalized and detrimental to their psyche. Ask yourself what you would say to a child who felt they were not worthy or ugly? Give yourself that same care and compassion, and start to shift the language that you use towards yourself from negative to positive.
4- GET IN TUNE WITH YOUR BODY. Sometimes when you’re unhappy with your body or your health, you disconnect from your body so you don’t have to deal with it. This means you’re no longer present or mindful about how your body feels. And it’s this connection to how you feel that gives you the impetus for intrinsic motivation. How can you get in tune with your body? Increase mindfulness through meditation or mindfulness exercises (apps like Insight Timer, Calm, and Headspace can help), deep breathing exercises, stretching, yoga, getting a massage, and connecting with nature.
5- BODY GRATITUDE. For as much hate as you may have thrown towards your body, your body has still responded to you with love. Your heart doesn’t skip a beat. Your lungs don’t forget to breathe. If you really want to cultivate self-love, put your hand on your heart, close your eyes, and listen to your heart beat. Think about how many years, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, your heart has been beating for you. Take some time to thank your body for all it has done for you!
Here’s one of my favorite excerpts about body gratitude and love:
“And please remember, your body loves you. It does everything it can to keep you alive and functioning. You can feed it garbage, and it will digest it for you and turn it into energy to fuel your life. You can deprive it of sleep, but still it will get you up and running the next morning. You can drink too much alcohol, and it will process it through your system. It loves you unconditionally and does its best to allow you to live the life you came here to live. The real issue in this relationship is not whether your body loves you, but whether you love your body.” ~Excerpt from Integrative Nutrition by Joshua Rosenthal.
Very rarely do you see promotions for weight loss that stems from an honoring and love of our bodies, and the desire to treat it with the utmost care. But that’s where we need to start coming from in order to reach our health goals and make them last. The shame paradigm doesn’t work, so let’s change it. Choose the path of self-love instead, and watch your health transform!
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