At Natural Health Strategies, we help our clients overcome chronic illness symptoms by addressing the root cause of their health concerns. Instead of using pharmaceutical drugs as a band-aid, we show them how to get their bodies into balance and improve their health naturally. While weight-loss is a common side effect of this process, some people continue to struggle with losing extra stubborn pounds. Interestingly, stubborn weight is often tied to our emotions and the habits that we learned in our youth. Thankfully, there are dieticians like Jennifer Garibaldi who teach people how to retrain their brains and break the cycle of emotional eating. Keep reading and she’ll explain how kindness improves health. Specially, she’ll discuss how being kind to ourselves can help us reach our wellness goals.
Kindness Improves Health
As we’ve turned the page into a new decade, it truly feels as though we’re living a story straight from a fiction novel. We’ve faced unprecedented challenges that we never thought we’d face and although it might make for an interesting book, I think we can all agree that it’s a very different thing to live it in real life. With all of the uncertainty, negativity, and doubt that’s out there in our world today, it’s easy to get lost in those feelings and stay in that unhappy place. Before we know it, those feelings can start to affect how we feel about ourselves.
Have you noticed that it’s pretty easy to be hard on yourself but more difficult to give yourself encouragement or understanding when you make a mistake? I don’t know about you, but I can criticize myself faster than I even realize I’ve done it! We learn to do this at a very young age, and we carry this habit with us through adulthood. Being unkind becomes so commonplace that practicing self-compassion seems foreign to us. But this skill can be learned or relearned with time.
Practice Self-Compassion
Practicing self-compassion during our weakest moments is key to building our strength in times when we need it most. When we set goals for ourselves, especially lifestyle goals, we must give ourselves grace when we don’t meet those goals. Many people believe that if they’re nice to themselves it means that they’ve given up. But in actuality, it creates a positive space for you to not only attain your goals, but to maintain them. You see, change isn’t easy. You’re asking your brain to undo habits that have been ingrained within you for some time. And when you start something new, your brain needs time to replace the old behavior with the new behavior. Think about it. How often have you tried to change up your diet only for it to last 2 weeks? Usually, something happens that derails us, we then beat ourselves up for being so “weak”, and then we give up and go back to how we were before. “Maybe next time”, you tell yourself. “Next time I’ll have more willpower.” Maybe if you were a little kinder to yourself, you would have realized that you had a very challenging week and you’re not an idiot for “failing”.
I don’t believe in failures. We can use those challenging times to teach us a lesson, so that we can grow and become wiser. Just break down what didn’t work and strive to do better the next week. THIS is self-compassion and practicing kindness improves health. Understanding that everyone goes through challenging times and knowing that it isn’t the end of the world. Focus on finding a way that works for YOU. Because beating yourself up along the way will make your journey unbearable to the point that throwing in the towel will be inevitable.
Self-compassion also means that you recognize just how much you’re worth as a person. Ever heard the phrase, “I’m a nobody” or “Why should I even try…..I’ll just screw up eventually”? Maybe you’ve said these things to yourself in the past or you’re finding yourself saying them now. No matter what mistakes you’ve made or what pain you’ve been through, you ARE valuable and you ARE worthy! You can respect who you are despite your past, your pain, or your mistakes. It’s easy for us to show compassion to others, but we have to recognize that we can turn that same compassion inwards and give it to ourselves too. Each one of us deserves it.
Avoid Comparisons.
You might be thinking that self-compassion sounds a lot easier said than done and you’re correct! It takes time and…..well….. even self-compassion to learn the art of self-compassion. I get asked often where to start especially if it’s been a long time since you’ve been kind to yourself. I believe the first step is to work on not comparing yourself to others. The root cause of a lot of self-criticism comes from idealizing what someone else has and feeling like you don’t measure up. Whether we’d like to admit it or not, it’s easy to fall into the comparison trap.
The rise in social media makes this an everyday reality for many. But if you think about it, you’re comparing yourself to someone’s highlight reel and most likely something that isn’t even true for them. People have gotten really clever with filters, angles, poses, and living in this fantasy world that we forget what’s real and what’s fake. Even if it is real, we don’t think about what it took for them to get to where they are. Most of the time we don’t know anything about their back story. Yet, that doesn’t stop us from comparing. So, that’s the first step. Try to stop comparing yourself to someone else and focus on your life. Focus on how you want to improve and grow. This is within YOUR control….you can’t change what someone else does or how someone else lives his or her life. You can only control what you say and do.
Work on Self-Forgiveness
Next, work on self-forgiveness. This may sound odd, but I’ve found with many of my clients that it’s hard for them to practice self-compassion when they’re working on something that they’ve tried to change many times in the past. For example, changing your eating habits isn’t easy. It’s a simple concept, but it ain’t easy. And instead of having compassion and patience, we beat ourselves up for not getting it right the first time (or any time for that matter). But when you understand how changing your habits work and that it’s challenging for everyone, it’s easier to lighten up a little. Go ahead and forgive yourself first for being so hard on yourself. Forgive yourself for trying to force yourself to stick to a diet that was never going to work to begin with. Forgive yourself for all of the nasty things you said to yourself and about your body. Once you’ve done that, you can start fresh.
You can approach change from a standpoint of now knowing what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. This is also a crucial step when it comes to changing your habits. You have to be honest with yourself about your past attempts. Ask yourself, “what worked and what didn’t work?” Did drinking more water work? Was adding one more serving of fruits and vegetables helpful? Did forcing myself to fast even when I was hungry work? Was making myself do exercises that I didn’t enjoy helpful? Once you honestly answer these types of questions and come up with a game plan of how you’re going to move forward, then it may be easier to be kinder to yourself when you start to work on changing your lifestyle. Remember, if you do the same things, you get the same results.
Reaching your goals, whether it be improving your eating or something else, is a lifelong journey. We all know that life doesn’t always follow a straight path and we get sidetracked with the things that are out of our control. This is where practicing self-compassion is most important and necessary. Yes, we make mistakes and life throws us curveballs; however, kindness improves health. Understanding that everyone makes mistakes helps us to not only show love and compassion to others, but also to ourselves.
