Can you learn to love your body? Yes!
This is from someone who practiced deprivation dieting, hated her body, body-shamed herself, and thought she could “run off” calories. I endured injury after injury seeking that perfect butt – even while running a fitness business. Yep, that would be me!
This is the top habit of the most successful women over 45 today: Body Acceptance
The key to achieving your wellness is to learn to accept your body. My clients journal about these very topics and journaling helps them capture what is truly most important to their wellness. Writing it down and saying it aloud creates a “goal” already in your brain. Journaling also reduces stress and strengthens emotional functions.
From the minute we awaken to the last second of conscious breath, we are in a game of thoughts. We are in a game of FOMO (fear of missing out), comparison syndrome, and the root of it all – is called “scarcity syndrome.”
Brene Brown, mega author, speaker, psychologist, and pretty much rock-star-of-all-things-we-didn’t-like-to-talk-about calls these types of thoughts “the never enough” syndrome.
“What makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection or holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it.” – Dr. Brene Brown
A Habit of Highly Successful Women
Women who crush their wellness embrace their bodies. They accept their bodies.
- She makes her health a top priority, not her physique
- She compares herself only to herself based on reasonable and achievable goals
- She continually works on defining her core values, one of which remains total wellness
- She is dedicated to her sleep, her relationship with food, her use of her time, her stress tolerance, and her boundaries
- Her body is a vessel for which she wants to care, not abuse
- The shape of her body is a journey for which she embraces each phase, each minute, each day
How do you view your physical body?
- Do you look in the mirror and see what you don’t like first? Can you find that one part of your body that makes you proud?
- Is your body something you treasure or something you secretly loathe?
- Do you look in the mirror and like what you see? Or, do you avoid looking at yourself in the mirror at all?
- Do you feel like you are fully utilizing your body for the gift it is to achieve your most precious dreams? Or do you constantly judge yourself on how you fit (or don’t) in your clothes?
- Do you appreciate you are on a journey? Are you achieving the body you have given the choices you have made like family, career, volunteer, social life, and faith, which all take much of your time and may take away time for self-care?
- Is it possible, after 45, to gain confidence in your body?
If you have a negative body image, your chances of achieving whole wellness are decreased. It can be the biggest barrier every time you want to try something new and fresh. Lacking body confidence can turn a perfectly achievable goal, like getting up 10 minutes early to stretch into self-talk like, “Why try? I’ve never been able to stick to a program.”
This is the most important habit you can start practicing today…Practice Loving Your Body.
Accepting that their body is on a path toward overall wellness helps my clients strive for the next goal, lean into the discomfort of loving themselves where they are, and approaching their wellness with gentle kindness. They learn that they are on a journey for health and recognize a quick (body) fix is the disaster they practiced in their teens, 20s, and 30s. They are different at 45+.
They recognize they may have inherited comments from their mom or grandma and have been telling themselves stories based on those comments for decades. Guess where your mom and grandma got their comments? Their mom and grandma.
They understand part of the journey is forgiveness and, ultimately, acceptance of themselves – wholly. Embarking on a journey of wellness brings with it the satisfaction of knowing you are not only enough – you are worthy of truly anything. Yes, this also means the body you have that is on this path.
They achieve their wellness because they have moved past those dark days and have made a conscious decision to love themselves and their bodies and the journey. They have one life and one body to fulfill their dreams.
