How to change your mindset to change your body

How do you feel about yourself and your body? How do you try to motivate yourself to exercise or diet? Look in the mirror and scold yourself with not the most disingenuous words? Are you trying to force yourself to do something with self-loathing and shame reproaches? Such tactics threaten endless weight fluctuations, constant anxiety and self-dissatisfaction, training injuries. Having lost weight, you will strive to lose more weight, and playing sports, you will exhaust yourself to the maximum, but you will not get a satisfactory result, you will always be unhappy.

However, there are five tips to help you find harmony with yourself that will help you transform yourself for the better without killing you with endless stress. Here they are:

Accept

Accepting your body as it is does not mean that you do not want to change anything. This does not mean that you give up your desire to be healthy and turn into a gluttonous slush. This means that you are embarking on the path of striving for health with kindness and compassion for yourself, and not with guilt, shame and strict conviction of "how it really should be." Acceptance gives you a clear understanding of where you are now and where you are striving. And this brings much more motivation than self-loathing, which is accompanied by thoughts "I should" …

Thinking about how much you “should” weigh, how fast you “should” run, how strong / slim / fit you “should” be, only generate frustration.

Body shame is more likely to cause you to give up training, or train with such zeal and spite that you just hurt yourself. Understanding where you are now will help you to approach training consciously, with kindness to yourself and pleasure.

Stop comparing

Stop comparing yourself to others, or even yourself to yourself five years ago. Comparison is a thief of joy, as it leads either to smug admiration or to feelings of inferiority and shame. But you already know that shame kills motivation.

And at this particular moment in life you have unique opportunities, admit it, open your eyes and realize how amazing life is.

A great first step is to go on a media diet.

Get rid of magazines that promote ridiculous beauty ideals. Naturally, you intellectually understand that even the models in photographs are absolutely imperfect, their beauty has been brought to perfection using a whole arsenal of tools, including post-processing of the image in a photo editor, but your subconscious mind still saves these images and slips you as something to strive for …

The fewer you are surrounded by pictures with which you could compare yourself, the better for your psychological state.

It is worth giving up even health and fitness magazines, as they end up paying too much attention to pictures of pumped up women and men, and again your subconscious mind is working against you, making you feel ashamed of your body again.

Turn off internal nerd

Surely in each of us lives a nasty inner voice that endlessly nagging, criticizing, accusing … He is so interested that you are perfect in everything that reveals such secrets that you will never confess to anyone.

He scolds you for every pie you eat and every day you skip a workout. But, despite the fact that this voice is a part of you, you are not at all obliged to anxiously listen to everything that it beeps to you.

Indeed, in fact, these cruel, constantly repeated messages that he tries to convey to you only bring endless anxiety. These are not true statements about your personality and your potential.

Include an inner friend

It's so easy to transform your critical monologues when you imagine that your inner voice is your best friend. At first, of course, it will be very difficult: your bore will not want to be friends with you. And you have to teach him this. Every time you start to hear the first outbursts of criticism, immediately think about what would you say to your best friend in such a situation? To the closest person? In what words would you try to calm and motivate him? What do you say to family members who need compassion?

Agree, you are unlikely to tell them the same thing that you tell yourself internally. So, you need to try to talk to yourself as your best friend. Allow yourself to be kinder to yourself, love yourself as the closest person.

Be considerate of yourself

Being aware of yourself in the present moment and focusing on events and your state in the present - the combination of these two elements simultaneously gives you freedom and at the same time keeps you firmly on your feet.

Nowadays, when we are available through any communication channels 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, learning to pay attention to yourself is very important. To learn to be grateful to life for everything that it gives, you must first of all learn to appreciate every moment of it, try to slow down the present in order to feel the taste of every day.

This mindfulness reduces internal anxiety and helps avoid stress seizure. You will pay attention to whether you are really hungry or if you want to chew on something because you are overwhelmed with emotion. Focusing on your inner feelings also helps during training, you do everything consciously, and their quality increases.

How to learn to be more attentive to yourself? Take 10 minutes a day to sit and breathe calmly. Your goal in this case is not to throw away negative thoughts, and not to think about anything at all. The goal is to calmly observe your thoughts without involving judgment or criticism in the thinking process. Every time you feel that this is happening, focus on the physical sensations: on inhalation and exhalation.

Cultivating mindfulness certainly takes practice, but after a while you will notice the benefits that this practice will bring to all areas of your life.

Are you happy with your body? How do you motivate yourself to stay healthy and fit? What other tips can you offer to help you feel self-love?