My Wardrobe, Myself

NOTE:  This post was originally published on my previous blog, Body Image Rehab.

This post represents my first exercise from the book, “200 Ways to Love the Body You Have.”  Taking the author’s suggestion, I opened the book to a random page and let my intuition guide me in selecting the perfect exercise for me at this point in time.

I couldn’t have selected a more perfect exercise to start on my journey to finally love and accept my body!

First Exercise – Body Love Goals

The exercise I selected was #146, “Body Love Goals.”  This exercise involves writing about my vision of what it means to love my body and to live in peace and harmony with it.  In following the instructions, I completed the following sentence in as many ways as came to mind:  “I’ll know that I love and accept my body when…”

Some of my most poignant responses are included below and serve as powerful goals for my “body image rehab” project.

“I’ll know that I love and accept my body when…”

1. I stop battling against it.
2. I more readily notice my good points than my bad points.
3. I stop focusing so much on my appearance.
4. I can weigh myself and not have the number mean something about me as a human being.
5. I stop feeling so self-conscious all the time.
6. I am able to accept the aging process as a normal part of life and not stress out about it so much.
7. I don’t feel the need to look perfect all the time.
8. I can feel free to be me.
9. I stop making the size of my thighs or my clothing, etc., speak volumes about my personal worth.
10. I stop comparing myself with others so much and simply appreciate what I have.

I’m so happy that this exercise was the first one I selected from Marcia Germaine Hutchinson’s wonderful book.

Your Goals & Insights from Geneen Roth

I would love to hear what your goals are for your own personal body image rehab projects. How will you know when you love and accept your body?

I will close this post with a passage from “Women Food and God,” the powerful and insightful book by Geneen Roth.  I read this passage and wept, my tears springing forth from the sheer recognition of the truth of her words and the pain of my having lived in contradiction of these truths for so long.

“Either you are willing to believe in kindness or you aren’t.  Either you are willing to believe in the basic sanity of your being or you aren’t.  To be given wings, you’ve got to be willing to believe that you were put on this earth for more than your endless attempts to lose the same thirty pounds three hundred times for eighty years.  And that goodness and loveliness are possible, even in something as mundane and what you put in your mouth for breakfast.  Beginning now.

Once you take the first few steps, once you begin treating yourself with the kindness that you believe only thin or perfect people deserve, you can’t help but discover that love didn’t abandon you after all.”

Here’s to feeling love toward ourselves all the time, and to appreciating the magnificent bodies that carry us through our life journey!