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

No Give Backs, No Trade In’s, No Kidding

There is no doubt that we live in a throw-away society today. Everywhere we look, we embrace the “out with the old, and in with the new” philosophy. Something breaks nowadays, and we don’t even think about calling the repairman – it’s somehow just easier to buy a new one. Even larger items, like cars, are replaced with abandon after only a few years.

Sadly, we seem to think that virtually everything can just be replaced and renewed with the snap of a finger. It doesn’t just kill our sustainability as a planet, it effects how we look at the very core of our existence. Don’t like your body? Well, get it botoxed – or lipo’d – or tucked – or otherwise molded into something that simply wasn’t the “you” that you knew only the day before.

What did we do before today’s craze for instant fixes? Well, to begin with, we lived with our imperfections. Take a look at the old “Charlie’s Angels” pictures – oddly enough, even the pin-up girls of yesteryear weren’t perfect.

We have simply lost something in translation over the last few decades, and in that, we’ve lost some of our personal responsibility to our personal sustainability. Bluntly, there are no trade-in’s on your body.

Your body is literally your HOME. You live in it from your first breath to your last. And believe me, the LAST thing that the mainstream diet and exercise industry wants you to do is the ONE thing you must do – love yourself and take care of that home. You see, if you really learned self-care and self-love, you wouldn’t need them any longer. Instead, they want you to BUY THE LIE that you aren’t even WORTH loving until you are slender and can run a seven-minute mile.

Well, slender and fit is an awesome goal – it means that we would no longer be eaten alive with insecurity and self-loathing about our bodies and our weight – and that we would live awesome lives of inspiration and meaning. But let’s face it, even slender people suffer from crippling poor body image (and there are plenty of full-figured people who seem to be fulfilled and successful). So where do we begin???

• First, we need to trade-in the idea about “disposability” that we’ve made love to the last few years. This is your ONE body and your ONLY chance to be healthy and live long and strong.
  
• Second, if that’s true, then we need to LOVE who we are RIGHT NOW. If we truly loved ourselves, we wouldn’t be eating our hearts out and stuffing our feelings every day.
  
• Third, let the healing begin. Whatever you do, just REFUSE TO DO NOTHING.

On August 5th, I will begin a 12-week course entitled, Loving What You See in the Mirror (Crucial Components to Permanent Weight Loss). I am still interviewing potential participants to fill the last few spots still open. The first group started in June, and it has been spectacular. The women are dynamic and wonderful. They are calling forth permanent change, they are committed to their accountability partners, and they are embracing their own transformation.

Now maybe this course isn’t right for you, but whatever you do, just don’t give up. Although there really are no give backs or trade in’s, you can absolutely claim your right to a DO OVER and begin your new start (and love affair) with a healthy body any time you want to.

Laura Fenamore
Laura@LauraFenamore.com
www.LauraFenamore.com