After today we have 8 days left in the Loving Yourself Thin series. At this point I’d really like to hear from you! That’s right, I’d like to hear which negative thoughts are sabotaging you when it comes to your goals of weight loss and fitness. It’s that negative, critical thinking that is getting in the way of you loving yourself, and loving yourself as you are now will help you to naturally motivate yourself to treat yourself better.

To start, make a list of 10 negative, critical thoughts that you give yourself regarding your weight, how you eat, or the amount of exercise you get, anything related to weight loss. Once you have that list, leave a comment with your top one or two negative thoughts, the thoughts that you know are causing you the most problem when it comes to loving yourself exactly as you are right now.

When I get your feedback I’ll either turn it into an exercise in the series, or I’ll give you a positive affirmation that you can use to replace the negative thought. It depends on where we’re at in the process whether I’ll turn it in to an exercise (or if it’s one that’s already in the previous exercises), but I would like to if there is time. For example, if I receive your comment and we’re at the end of the series, I might already have exercises ready to post, so get your comment in quickly!

This post wouldn’t be complete without giving you an exercise for today, Day 23 of Loving Yourself Thin: go to the mirror, look yourself deep in the eyes, and repeat 10 times, “I love you as you are now. I love you even when you overeat and are overweight. You are enough, you do enough, and you have enough”. This positive affirmation is based on what Louise L. Hay has learned by personally helping many many individuals in her life: the bottom-line negative thought that people are afflicted with is, “I’m not good enough”. No matter what the issue is, when you are suffering from not loving you, you can trace it all back to the thought, “I’m not good enough”.

When you do love and approve of yourself as you are now, you can realize that you are good enough. You are good enough as you now to achieve your weight loss and fitness goals, you are good enough to live at a maximum level of health, and you are good enough to learn new ways of eating and exercising so that you can achieve your goals. The thing is, is that by affirming that you are enough and that you approve of yourself, you increase your self-love and self-acceptance.

In case you’re new to the series, what we’re working on is loving ourselves exactly as we are now in order to gain some natural motivation to make healthy changes since the more you love yourself, the more you naturally want to do what’s good for you. When you keep negative, critical thoughts hanging around, you are sabotaging your efforts, perhaps without even realizing it. I recommend reading the introduction to the Loving Yourself Thin series, as well as Day 14 to get a good understanding of the exercises.