These 31 Days of Loving Yourself Thin are all about increasing your love for your self. This is not about vanity, ego, or boasting to others about how wonderful you think you are, in fact these are symptoms of a lack of self-love. Instead, these exercises are about accepting yourself as you are now, recognizing all of the wonderful, unique bits about you, and a large dose of forgiveness.

You see if you are holding on to self-criticisms over your past weight loss failures or for regaining all of the weight that you did lose (plus some!), then you might just find yourself stuck in a rut of non-motivation. After all, why would you want to try to change your lifestyle again if it didn’t stick last time and you ended up regaining the weight that you worked so hard to shed?

This leads us to today’s exercise, which is to begin the process of forgiveness. First, pick one topic regarding your weight loss efforts that you find it most hard to forgive yourself for. Here are a few examples:

• Losing weight only to regain it soon after.
• Not sticking to a new way of eating and exercising.
• Forcing yourself to diet instead of accepting that your lifestyle must change.
• Continuing to overeat even though you would like to change and lose weight.
• Feeling like you are a failure because you haven’t lost weight.

Just like the previous exercises, these are examples and you might have something completely different that you are having a difficult time forgiving yourself for when it comes to the topic of weight loss.

Once you have identified a main issue that you have been holding against yourself in regards to your weight loss efforts, the next step is to start forgiving yourself and letting go of the past. The way to get started with this is to get out your notebook or journal and start writing. Using the first example in the list above write, “I forgive myself for losing weight in the past and then regaining it all later.” Follow that by writing a related, positive affirmation, “I believe in myself and I know I can lose weight and maintain that loss for life.”

Write out your forgiveness followed by your positive affirmation 10 times now and 10 times this evening. Also jot down any negative rebuttals that come up during your writing to help you become more aware of exactly what is lurking in your subconscious, thoughts that affect your attitude towards weight loss.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!