Are you in love with your body?

A piece of research I read when doing my thesis many years ago always stayed with me…89% of obese people who lost their excess weight would prefer to be blind than be obese again. That really struck a cord with me – the negative emotions that they must have experienced while being overweight must have been so intense to result in them feeling like that.

I was reminded of this statistic recently when I did a phone survey with some clients of mine to delve deeper into their experiences of being overweight or obese. The words that many of them used to describe how they felt about being overweight were similar – strong words such as shame, guilt, hopeless, depressed and so on.

Literally the weight was weighing them down in life – when you feel like this it is hard to feel motivated to change, to spring into action, to start doing positive things for yourself. First of all we need to tackle the elephant in the room that we don’t often talk about and that is how ‘crap’ it can feel to be overweight, how many people hate their bodies, how it often leaves women feeling depressed and down. Once we acknowledge where we are – then we can start to do something about it and that’s where the “Love Your Body” Challenge comes in…

The challenge is all about getting us to think about our relationship with our body, understand how it came to be and do something to make it more positive. For 5 days we will be listing things we appreciate, we like and we love about our bodies (the last one might be a push for some people at the start but that’s ok) and to support the shift in our mindset we will be doing a daily visualisation on Body Gratitudes.

I’d love for you to join us and have some fun shifting our mindset about our bodies together so by the end of the week, we will all be singing along (think Ed Shereen song) “I’m in love with my body!”

All you have to do to join us is:

  1. Register for the challenge here
  2. Download the resources and be ready to start on May 15th
  3. Join the supportive Facebook group

The challenge start on May 15th – hope to see you there!