It’s Day 19 of Loving Yourself Thin. You’ve been working on becoming your own best friend, loving yourself as you are now and releasing self-criticism. You are working towards living a life filled with joy and happiness, which includes your goal of weight loss and living in a healthy, fit body.

How do you get from where you are today to where you want to be? Besides loving yourself as you are now, practicing self-acceptance and self-approval, you will need to take action. What I am proposing through these exercises is that the more you love yourself today, the easier it will be to take care of your body and your health. You will find that you are naturally motivated to take action, eat healthier foods and get moving.

To make more progress in loving yourself just a little bit more, today’s exercise is to go to the mirror, look yourself deep in your eyes, and repeat the following 10 times: “I love you exactly as you are no matter what you weigh. I appreciate all of the wonderful qualities that you possess and I forgive you for every time that you have overeaten and gained weight. I support you in getting healthy and fit if that is what you want to do.”

If you have any negative thoughts or resistance come up, write it down in your notebook or journal. Whatever is coming up (the negativity) is on its way out, so it’s a good thing when you react with negative thoughts when you do your affirmations. You see, if you weren’t doing these positive affirmations, it’s likely that those negative thoughts would just keep running around in your head and you wouldn’t even notice them. Either they are subconscious beliefs (thoughts that you have held for a long time, which have turned into beliefs), or you think and say them to yourself so often that you are used to them.

For an added boost, you can take those negative reactionary thoughts that you get from doing these affirmations and turn them into positive affirmations. For example, when you do your exercise in the mirror, if you think “I can’t forgive myself for gaining weight, there’s no way!”, a positive affirmation would be: “I am willing to forgive myself for gaining weight”, or “I easily forgive myself for gaining weight”. You can then speak this affirmation in the mirror and also write it out 10 times on paper.

It took me awhile in front of the mirror to come up with today’s affirmations and I feel a great increase in energy and well being after doing them. I hope that if you have been doing these exercises along with me that you are experiencing a positive shift in your consciousness and level of motivation like I am.

If this is your first time happening upon this series of exercises, you can find the complete list here and start them from the beginning if you wish. Additionally, both the introduction post and Day 14 give you the foundation for the goals and principles of these exercises.