What if someone told that you don’t have to lose any weight or change anything about your body for you to love your body and be happier? Would you believe them? This article aims to introduce the idea that we can be happier by changing our mindset towards our bodies. By shifting our mindset from the appearance of our bodies to how amazing our bodies are right now, we can appreciate and love our bodies and increase our happiness.
Our Bodies are Amazing
You have an amazing body. Do you believe this? Think of all the things that your body is able to do. Your body is so amazing. It can fight infection and disease. It can get you where we want to go. It allows you to communicate and express yourself and connect with others. It allows you to play, to be affectionate, to work, to learn. The list goes on. When our body has a disability or illness, it works even harder for us. Think of all the things out bodies can do despite disability, infection and disease. Our bodies are amazing.
Barriers to Loving our Body
If we don’t think our body is amazing, we may have difficulty loving it. We may be too caught up in the size and outward appearance of our body to think how amazing it is. Our bodies are so much more than the look of our faces or the size of our body parts. Our bodies keep us breathing and allow us to live. Our bodies looks after us, protects our mind and helps us do what we want in life. How often do we take the time to appreciate our body? We may take it for granted that we breathe, but just think how much our body is doing every time we take a breath? Amazing, right? Surely, our body deserves respect and to be treated well. We only get one body and it is our choice how we treat it.
Knowledge isn’t Enough
We are constantly told how to treat our bodies by healthy eating, exercising, not smoking, not taking recreational drugs, not drinking to excess. We know this. We don’t need to be a health expert to look after our bodies. But knowledge by itself isn’t enough for us to treat our bodies well. Think of dieting for example, how often do diets work for a short time before the diet goes by the wayside and old eating habits return, including the weight gain? This is because we haven’t changed our mindset. We are trying to change our body instead of caring for our body.
Our bodies can define who we are
It is so hard to love our body when we desperately want to change it. But no wonder we want to change our bodies when we are constantly told how our bodies should look and feel. We can become very critical of our bodies for not looking like models in magazines. We are constantly told in the media to go on diets to get beach ready or to lose that extra Christmas weight we may have put on. We can become more comfortable talking negatively about our bodies than praising our bodies. This can have a damaging affect on our happiness. When we are not happy with our bodies, we are not happy with ourselves. We can end up defining ourselves by how we treat or think about our bodies such as I am fat, I am ugly, I am not good looking, I am too thin. This lowers our self-esteem making it more difficult to love ourself.
Changing our mindset to love our bodies
When we appreciate our bodies, we are more likely to treat are bodies well and therefore learn to give it what it needs. This may involve learning about nutrition and healthy eating, changing eating and drinking habits, exercising, grooming, buying new clothes. But the important difference is our mindset. We are not doing this out of motivation to change our bodies to look a certain way. Instead we are loving our bodies and creating a positive cycle of wellbeing for our bodies. It is likely when we love our bodies we may lose body fat, increase muscle mass, lower our cholesterol, decrease fatty tissue around our organs, improve our movement, increase our fitness. However all of these results are by products from loving our bodies and taking care of them.
So to conclude, we can be happier in 2018 by loving our body now through changing our mindset, not our bodies. I hope you have enjoyed reading. Next week I will be posting – Tip 3 – Love your mind for a happier you in 2018. Until then I hope you have a brilliant week.
With thanks to Grafxart-Photo for this week’s feature image.
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