Successful weight loss starts with loving your body first.

You might think this concept is contradictory, one would rather assume that dieters have decided their body is not acceptable, and for this reason, they must take action. It’s too fat, or too weak and there is no way they can be happy living in that body without changing it. They have decided to make some drastic changes. Woman frantically search for the Top 10 Tips on how to lose weight fast, or what best diet you can use to lose 10kilos by just drinking fluids for 5 days. Weight loss most of the time is motivated by fear that we will never be happy with our bodies, that we need to gallantly commit to achieving the perfect weight. When fear persuades you to go on a weight loss program, you will pretty quickly get tired, disconnected from your goals and have guilt and shame pile on with additional kilos. Sprezzatura propose a much different approach to weight loss. We say, shift your perspective and draw motivation from love! Now you might say to yourself, how can I love a body that I hate. I am suggesting exactly that. When you start a weight loss journey by loving the body you have right now you will find that the energy of the journey is completely different. When you work toward weight loss from a place of self-love and have a deep connection to your incredible, useful body, your focus becomes the vision of what you want to create in and about yourself, not what you want to banish, destroy, or control. When you do this weight loss becomes a journey resulting in caring for your body, and caring for your emotional wellness.

Have you taken a moment and tapped into how you want to feel in your body? Not how you want to look in a bikini or the number you want to see on your scale. How you feel? You never considered this, did you? When we approach weight loss we think look, the outside. We don’t think feel, the inside. Why should you, it defeats the objective. No, that is why so many diets fail and within a few months you picked up all the weight you have lost and some more. Leaving you miserable, disappointed, and ashamed. If we constantly think our bodies as they are now, are disgusting, that you need to hide and punish yourself for your unhealthy habits, you are operating from a place of fear and self-judgement. What if you released fear and allowed yourself to be motivated by self love on the journey to your ideal weight? Essentially it will reverse the process of how we release the weight and change our commitment to the process. Think about how much easier it would be when you feel a genuine excitement about the outcome, feeling good and free. Not focusing on how hard it is going to be and what foods are forbidden. It is much more satisfying to feel great about your body, than looking great. And look, I’m not advocating that excess weight should make you happy and free. Acknowledging that you want to change your body is perfectly fine, I’m just suggesting you do it with the motivation of how your body will make you feel in the end. If you feel positive and amazing about your body, I can guarantee you, you will make better food choices and feel more content. In turn you will be determined to keep the weight off, because the need to do so stems from an inner self worth. You will get to a place of deep fulfilment and be true to yourself. This is the most important aspect of believing you are valuable and having realistic expectations of yourself and your weight loss journey. Loving yourself, allows for mistakes and being imperfect. This gentle attitude towards yourself will help you a great deal more on your journey and bring you closer to your goal weight. Loving your body will motivate you to have and pursue the best for it, to make it a priority. If you feel that deep connection with your needs, you will all the more strive for your body to look better and be less likely to fall of the wagon. And if you do, fall off, you are ten times more likely to get back on the program than giving up entirely because you didn’t do it perfectly the first time. All this being said, how do you go from a lifetime of hating your body to all of a sudden loving it. We don’t have a reference for what that feels like or how to even feel that way. The idea is complicated and overwhelming, and the truth is, we need to allow ourselves to feel how we feel first without judgement. Body love takes time, I don’t believe we can just flip a switch and immediately do so. Truly loving ourselves after a lifetime of negative self talk and having a “I’m fat” mindset takes practice and time. Okay, after you have thought to yourself this is complete poppycock, I will show you exactly how you can move from body hate to body love. Remember this is not an overnight matter, also it cannot be done perfectly. You will fail and must try, try again. One thing that I can promise you is this, if you start weight loss from love, you will be more successful than starting it from hatred.

Understand you don’t hate your body.

You actually don’t hate your body, what you do hate is how it makes you feel! You hate what the fat represents on your body, not your actual physical body. Without your body you would not be. You might have a story that the fat on your body represents being unlovable, unworthy, or undesirable. Maybe you think about your body as being out of control or lazy or unable to change. Whatever reasons you have for being at war with your body, whatever meaning you have attached to your body’s shape and size, hear this now. Your body is your friend, not an enemy. Your body has allowed you to do and have amazing things in your life. You really kind of need it, and not resent it for the wrong reasons.

Acceptance.

Allow yourself to be okay with ‘what is’. And just accept it as that, a mess. But it’s an okay mess. You can fix it. But in this moment, take ownership and accept where you are starting this journey from. Acknowledge the discomfort and resentment you have towards how your body makes you, again….FEEL! You can’t skip this part. You need to be honest as hell with yourself and identify all the feels.

Embody Swiss Neutrality.

You are not going to love your body right out of the gate. So, there is no need to put extreme pressure on yourself to force an opposite feeling to the one you have now. You neither love it, nor hate it. You are completely neutral to it. Body neutrality is beyond acceptance because you can accept something and still not like it. In this case you are simply removing judgement. Your body simply is.

The path to Love.

Once you have mastered neutrality, you can let the hatred go, but you haven’t yet landed in the place where you feel self-love. Remember the timeline for this process will be much longer than what your mind will tell you it should be. No amount of convincing ourselves that we love our bodies will replace the work of actually moving toward establishing a loving relationship with our bodies from the inside out. We need to show up and do the work. The path to body love, is to allow yourself to be okay with the ‘it is, what it is’. To love, is to let go of shame, let go of the judgement, let go of the punishment. Change the ‘what is not good about me’ to ‘what is good about me and my body’. When you focus on what positive things you will eventually feel when you reach your goal weight you will encourage your mind to rather practice self-love as appose to self-hatred through your weight loss journey.

Our bodies are without a doubt the most impressive technology on the face of the earth. We can grow humans inside us, for goodness sake! Your body can heal itself physically and emotionally, if only you let it. And yours is the only one you have. No matter what stage you are in, the most important thing to remind yourself as you are on this path of weight loss with body love is that you cannot shame yourself to love, nor can you hate your way to happiness.