Having recently started going to the gym again, I’ve been over hearing a lot of conversations about body image, weight and things surrounding those topics. I’ve spent a lot of time working on accepting and loving my body, but I never really knew exactly what things I’d changed to go from hating my body to loving, or at least being okay with, my body. Hearing people talk about their own bodies and other people’s though, I realised it was mostly these three things.

Negative Self Talk

We’ve all been there. We think and say things about ourselves that we’d never say to anyone else, and we don’t often think about how it affects us. Imagine if someone followed you around all day pointing out anything you don’t like about your body or anything you do wrong, it’d be horrible!

It takes time and effort to change your approach to how you talk and think about yourself. I straight up stopped saying anything about my body. It’s my body, it does everything I need it to and gets me about, it doesn’t need to be talked about in my eyes. The things we think to ourselves are harder, but correcting negative thoughts or redirecting them will get rid of all the negative self talk with a bit of time!

Comparison

It’s so easy to compare ourselves to others, and I know for me I used to automatically do it without thinking. It’s been years now since I started consciously trying not to compare myself to other women and even now I sometimes have to correct myself.

You’re you though, you’ve got all your own unique qualities and quirks and amazing things about you just like everyone else does and our bodies just really don’t matter that much. I really started being able to stop comparing myself to others when I began replacing the comparison with a compliment. Maybe I’m at a party and some girl looks amazing, my first thought would have been ‘I don’t look as good as her’ before diving into exactly why, now if that’s my thought I correct it to ‘wow, everyone at this party looks great!’

Being nicer to and about people is good for how you feel about yourself and will likely make them feel good too!

Judging People

I’ve notice over and over through friends over the years that those who are quickest to point out other people’s flaws are usually the ones most insecure about their own. If you’re judging how everyone around you looks, like most of us have at some point, you’ll only feel more comfortable to judge yourself harshly and make horrible judgements about yourself too.

I did the same as I said above for this one, anytime I noticed myself judging someone I turned it into a compliment. If I look at someone in an outfit I’d have previously called ‘ugly’ I’m now more likely to think of words like ‘unique’ or ‘brave’, where as before I would have just thought well that’s an ugly outfit.

If you’re thinking nasty things about others, you’ll automatically think nasty things about yourself and likely also assume other people are judging you as you judge them.

So those are my tips for loving your body more! You deserve to feel good about yourself, be as kind to yourself as you would be to your best friend and have a good day!

-Dana