Are your thoughts dominated by thoughts of your weight and food? Have you ever noticed how often you think about your weight? Are the majority of these thoughts self-critical?

Today’s exercise in Loving Yourself Thin is to give yourself a break. Give yourself a break from thinking about your weight and food issues. Give yourself a break from thinking about being overweight, about the fact that you gained weight, anything at all connected to this topic.

How can you do this if your thoughts are dominated with issues of your weight? You won’t necessarily be stopping these thoughts from coming up, but you can replace them or counteract them when they do surface. So, to give yourself a break today, every time that you have any thought about your weight, counteract it with the thought, “I approve of myself”.

While you can also choose one of the other positive affirmations from the previous exercises in the series, I am suggesting “I approve of myself” because it’s simple and powerful. When you approve of yourself as you are now, overweight and all, it will make it easier for you to relax and release the negative self-talk that can easily lead to emotional eating and overeating. By approving of yourself as you are now, you are loving yourself just a little bit more than you did yesterday, besides the fact that your approval of you is more important than anyone else’s approval of you!

The purpose of this exercise is to start releasing the obsession with weight and food and the self-criticism that comes along with it. While your health does need to be of main importance to you (if you don’t have your health, what do you have?), there is a difference between taking healthy action to care for yourself, and making food and weight an obsessive focus in your life. So, just for today, see how it feels to start releasing those obsessive, critical thoughts about your weight and food.

Have fun today, use the positive affirmation “I approve of myself” or another positive affirmation from the series to counteract every thought about your weight that comes up. Enjoy yourself while releasing those dominating thoughts about your weight and building up some self-approving thoughts.

You can find the introduction to the 31 Days of Loving Yourself Thin exercises here. Day 14 is a review day, which will also give you information on the focus of these exercises.