Why Self-care is important in your permanent weight loss journey?

All my failed attempts to lose weight involved a “diet regime” a list of foods I could and couldn’t eat. Any weight that I lost, I quickly regained due to the food restriction nature of a diet. I would then binge eat all of the weight back on that I had lost and a lot more.

Even when I lost weight, I did not feel any happier with myself and felt like a failure when all the weight would inevitably go back on. It was a toxic cycle that was destroying my already low self-esteem.

This was how I ended up at my heaviest weight of nearly 22 stones in weight. I naively thought that if, and when I lost weight that I would be happy automatically and all of the problems in my life would disappear.

I honestly believed that the source of my low self-worth came from being hugely overweight.

I was very wrong! I can vividly remember weighing 15 stone, and that was after achieving over 7 and a half stones of weight loss. I was standing in front of a mirror and the tears were streaming down my face, I stood there picking holes in all the areas of my body that I loathed.

This was the opposite of how I thought I was going to feel and it hit me hard.

I felt no happier in fact I was sad, depressed and lonely on this journey of overcoming my addiction to food. The shame that I felt around my addiction to food was full of shame and I isolated myself from everyone.

I spoke to my friend Becky who was a holistic therapist, she suggested that I read a book by the author Louise Hay called “How to heal your life”.

I bought the book, and it changed my life, reading that book introduced me to the power that our thoughts and positive, nurturing self-talk.

I realised that our thoughts are what directs our actions. Although my body had changed physically, my mind was still living in my past.

I had done nothing to change my negative thoughts and negative self-talk.  It was time to change!

Louise Hay talks a lot about the “law of attraction” and “reframing “the way we spoke to ourselves”.

I still saw myself as the “big girl” and now had to tell myself a different story. It was about me teaching myself another new, healthy habit. No longer allowing myself to think cruel thoughts about my body, no more not feeling “good enough” in every area of my life. I would never have spoken to another person the horrible way I spoke to myself.

Reframing my thoughts meant that I would question myself, so when I said to myself “look at your flabby belly” I would say to myself “my body is amazing and has made 2 amazing children” it took lots of repetition, but I noticed that my mood improved by challenging my negative thoughts. Because I felt happier, I began to feel an increase in “happy hormones” I could feel a positive shift in my mental health.

Do any of you resonate with any of my story? What is your own self-talk like? Negative or positive? Please let me know in the comments below.

The piece of advice I can offer is to read the book that changed my life, permanently.