Love Yourself Now
Here is your first exercise in the 31 Days of Loving Yourself Thin series. You will need a mirror and a notebook. I find it’s easier to look in a wall-mounted mirror, but you could also use a large hand mirror, whatever allows you to see yourself (head and shoulders) fully.
Go to the mirror, look yourself directly in the eyes, and repeat the following: “I love you exactly as you are now. I love you no matter how much you weigh, or how you look. I am here for you.”
Repeat this 10 times. I hope that you begin to feel that you are speaking to a close friend, but you could end up feeling any number of things. After doing this exercise, write your thoughts and feelings in your notebook. You might have great resistance to your words and be having thoughts such as, “no way, you don’t deserve it, look at how far you let yourself go!”, or “I’ll love you once you lose weight, but not now!”, or even “yeah right, this is dumb”. If so, write them all down.
Of course, if you have positive thoughts that flow from this exercise, that’s great, too! Write them down so that you can refer to them later. After doing this exercise, you could read this post if you would like more information on why you might feel negative responses when doing this exercise.
If you would like to share any feelings that came up for you, feel free to leave a comment. What is most important for you though, is that you write about your experience in your notebook or journal.
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Thanks JoLynn - I’m going to try this. You know, I spend so much time “tricking my mind” for business purposes.
Yet, I never thought about doing it to give me confidence about the way I look.
And it is silly really. Something happened to me a few years ago that left me with a scar on my face. I hated the way I looked for a time, then I eventually I suppose I began deliberately ignoring the scar completely. But, your way sounds better. I’ll let you know how I get on.
Hi Catherine!
Affirmations are very powerful, especially when you speak them as if you are talking to a good friend when you look yourself in the eye in the mirror. That’s because most negative affirmations were given to us as children (and as adults, too) by others looking us in the eye and telling us “you were bad”, or some other negative criticism when you were a child. So, when you look yourself in the eyes now and tell yourself wonderful positives, it’s quite effective.
I’d love to hear how you like these exercises. I’m making them as simple as possible just because it gives you a start on “just doing it”. I’m doing them, too.
I just found your website and am encouraged. Weight is hard, self-esteem is harder. I have always had self-esteem problems and now weight problems (which doesn’t help the self-esteem). I’m encouraged with the daily affirmations and will commit to visiting your site daily to get the new daily affirmation. I not only want to be thinner but I want the self-esteem more. Thanks for your site.
Jeanne
Hi Jeanne,
I’m very happy to hear that I could offer you some encouragement and inspiration - that’s what I aim to do.
You’re spot on, that the weight problems don’t help your self-esteem, and I think you’ve got an excellent focus - focusing on raising your self-esteem instead of just focusing on weight loss.
The overweight is almost always about something greater than the food and weight, and you’re going to go further by working on loving yourself as you are while working on your health and fitness at the same time.