body love

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…”

If someone were to ask you if you love yourself, how many of you would reply with an enthusiastic “Yes”? How about if you were asked if you love your body? I know that for most of my life, I would have found both questions absurd. I definitely and unequivocally did not love myself or my body.

For years, I was my own worst critic. I would unleash a torrent of criticism upon myself on a daily basis that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. In fact, I was my own worst enemy. Nothing I could do was ever good enough for me; my standards were impossibly high and there was no way I could reach them. While my targets for accomplishment and success were virtually unachievable, my standards for my body and physical appearance surpassed them by leaps and bounds.