How Do You Feel About Your Body?
How do you feel about your body?
Are you in awe of how it does so much for you every day?
Do you love and value your body for allowing you to move, work, travel, and so much more?
Or perhaps... do you constantly feel the need to change/ improve your body?
Do you always feel as though your body isn't good enough/ quite slim or toned enough/ quite perfect enough?
Do you spend your days focusing on things that you hate about your body?
Many people go through their entire lives feeling bad about their body. Their days are spent thinking negative thoughts about their body, criticising their body, and wishing that it looked different. Yet how we feel about our bodies can have a profound effect on so many areas of our life:
- If we feel bad about our body we may not feel motivated to nurture and take care of our body. We may not make the time for self-care, nourishing meals, sleep, or movement because we don't value or respect our body enough to prioritise these things.
- Feeling bad about our body can impact on our social and personal life too. We may shy away from those dates or big family/ friend gatherings because we don't have the confidence to go and spend time with others. Often this can be driven by fears of how other people may perceive our body.
- If we feel down about our body it can also hold us back professionally. The low confidence we experience may stop us from applying for that promotion, speaking out at that meeting, or putting ourselves forward for that new project.
Low body confidence levels can cause significant harm to us and our lives. And yet, so many people feel bad about their appearance and their bodies day-to-day... and you can't blame them, we live in a society and culture in which we are presented with unhelpful and unrealistic body ideals and beauty standards that leave many of us feeling as though we are never good enough.
So if you do feel bad about your body a lot of the time, what can you do about it? Here are a few gentle steps you can start to take to begin improving your body confidence:
1. Show self-compassion
How you talk to yourself in your own head has a huge impact on how you feel about yourself and your body. You would never say mean things to your best friend about her body and how she looks and yet you probably do this to yourself every day. Trying to talk to yourself in your own head like you would talk to a dear friend is a huge step towards achieving a better relationship with your body.
2. Be careful what you consume
The things you watch and read, the people you spend your time around, and the things you devote your time and energy to, can all significantly affect how you feel about your body. Spending hours on Instagram looking at heavily edited pictures of people in bikinis is undoubtedly going to affect how you feel about your own body. Watching TV shows on body transformations or plastic surgery is also going to influence your self-perception. What you consume, the words you hear and the things you expose yourself to can all either lead you down a path of feeling good and empowered in your body or feeling bad about yourself and your body.
3. Focus on what your body does for you practically instead of what it looks like
You may be spending so much time focusing on what your body looks like that you may have forgotten just how much it does for you. Your body really is a miracles. When you think about how these bodies grow and give birth to children, keep your temperature so carefully controlled, extract nutrients from food so effectively, it can help you to appreciate your body rather than to constantly battle against it.
4. Consciously focus on things you like about your appearance instead of "flaws"
How you feel about something is heavily influenced by what you focus on when you think of that thing. So if, when you think about your body, you are only focusing on things that you perceive of as "flaws" - it is no wonder that you then feel bad about yourself and your body. If you can gently try to shift your focus to things that you like and appreciate about your body, this can help to shift your self-perception and improve your body confidence.
5. Wear clothes that make you feel good about yourself
The clothes you wear have the power to dramatically shift how you feel about yourself. If you are struggling through the day in a tight, old pair of jeans, you are likely to feel uncomfortable and the tight jeans will make you feel down and bad about yourself. If you wear very baggy clothes to try and hide your body, you are putting out to the world (and communicating to yourself) that your body needs to be hidden away. If instead, you wear clothes that are flattering for your shape and that make you feel good about yourself, you are much more likely to exude that confidence. This in turn can make you feel better about your body and actually want to make choices to nurture and nourish your body too.
6. Show your body through your actions that you value it
How you treat your body either communicates to it that you love, value and appreciate it or that it isn't worth your time and energy. Do you make the time to move your body in a way that feels good, to apply moisturiser, to prepare nourishing meals, and to get enough sleep? Or do you rush through the day neglecting your body and its needs and just trying to get through. You can start to shift your relationship with your body by changing how you treat your body and this can then boost your levels of body confidence too.
Through taking some of these gentle steps, you can start to rebuild your relationship with your body and to build up your body confidence.
COMING SOON
We will soon be launching an 8 week online body confidence programme. This programme will equip you with all of the tools you need to completely rebuild your relationship with your body and to build up your body confidence.
You will get:
Weekly hypnotherapy recordings to re-programme your thoughts around your body.
Weekly animated videos exploring new topics that will help you to shift how you think and feel about your body.
Lots of audios to listen to with tools and techniques you can apply straight away to change your relationship with your body.
Reading materials to work through at your own pace.
Quizzes and surveys to allow you to learn more about your relationship with your body.
Email support throughout the programme... and so much more....
Subscribers will get an introductory discount off the course - so keep an eye on your inbox in the coming weeks!
“It has come with age — age and continuing to read and travel and realize that nobody, except for mean girls, gives a shit about a dimple in a thigh or what your upper arms look like. If you carry yourself with confidence, and you move through the world with your head held high and your shoulders thrown back, you don’t need to be a [size] double-zero. What people are attracted to is the fact that you’re attracted to yourself.” — Gabrielle Union