What’s more painful than chronic pain? Three Simple Steps To Self-Care

What’s more painful than chronic physical pain? The pain that lives inside, that’s what. Can you imagine being 100 pounds overweight and living with all of the stares, comments and agony that goes along with that? The inability to buy a beautiful dress, or the fear that now goes with flying on an airplane? Now can you imagine losing that weight, and still coming up short? Still feeling, deep inside, that you were not good enough. Never believing, for more than a few moments at a time, that you were beautiful and valuable.

Those are the every-day feelings that attach themselves to thousands and thousands of men and women who suffer from eating disorders – even after they recover. Even after they lose the weight, the inside agony continues. We fill the overweight person with Cinderella dreams of becoming a swan, after feeling like the ugly duckling for so many years. Who remembers that television show devoted to makeovers named “The Swan.” The sad thing is that all the nose jobs, liposuction and hair weaves can’t heal a broken body image.

I know first hand being in agony both fat and thin. And I am happy to report that today I have freedom. None of these things have power over me anymore. Self criticism, the scale or food.

Body image. How we see ourselves from the inside out. The irony is that very few of us don’t have a distortion in our “internal mirror.” Like the reflections in a fun house, we’re all out of wack. Obese people often live in eternal (and deadly) denial, and perfectly healthy people harm themselves through starvation, compulsive exercise and purging. And there’s no easy fix to this. There’s no exiting the fun house with a few laughs at the experience. The ride goes on and on.

The simple truth is that getting off that wheel starts with what we eat, how we live, and how we feel. The more we can simply surrender our love affair with self-criticism, the more room we have to learn self-care and self-esteem. And learn it and learn it and learn it some more.

After a lifetime of taunts, teases and put downs from everywhere we look (the media, the magazine covers and the world at large), we now have to learn a whole new way to love ourselves no matter what. AND forgive ourselves for the hatred to begin with!

We can’t love ourselves and chastise at the same time. It’s got to be the whole shebang if we’re really going to change. And why not? Change is all around us. Our entire nation is seeking a change. Our seasons change. The world keeps revolving. And WE are allowed to change. Human beings are remarkable. We can survive. We can survive torture, trauma, decades of abuse within our childhoods and homes, and the self abuse that came from those things.

We can come out of the other side of self hatred and discover an experience as beautiful and magnificent as falling in love. We can LEARN to love our selves and our lives.

Step 1. Start your day with a prayer to remember that you are powerful and precious. On your knees, ask the power around you to remind you to love yourself today. No matter what. Let every negative comment or thought simply float away unjudged. If you want peace, you must give up the idea of conflict entirely and all the time, this is our goal.

Step 2. Take the TIME to do loving things. How do you build self esteem? You DO esteemable things. Let that materialize as loving actions toward YOU today. We’re talking the basics here. Rest, downtime, company and healthy food and movement. Those are the basics. How long since your day revolved around those things? Too long, I bet.

Step 3. Love is a two-way street. So treat yourself to time with those who LOVE YOU. Recreate your childhood (whether yours was happy or not) and run, skip, jump, climb and play with those you love deeply…and who love you.

The simple truth is that YOU have the right to be honored and comforted, fulfilled and LOVED today – from the inside and the outside. Allow this into your life today.

To your journey of self-love and self-care,
Laura Fenamore, Body Image Mastery Mentor

www.LauraFenamore.com