Are you too judgemental and critical of yourself?
Are you too hard on yourself? If so, here’s an effective, quick technique that will change everything. All it takes is 30 seconds! Being a psychologist who specialises in emotional eating and weight, I work with women daily in this area, and I can also speak from personal experience. There’s a strong perfectionist. The I’m a perfectionist part of yourself is always ready to pounce. It’s critical, harsh and judgemental. It looks for faults and finds everything that’s wrong.
Life is hard. You go through ups and downs. Dieting and weight loss doesn’t actually buffer you from those ups and downs. You need strategies to deal with the cause.
Don’t look at weight loss as the ultimate solution to fix everything in your life.
Here is the self compassion tool that I want you to try. You are so compassionate to everyone around you, including total strangers.
Why can you show a total stranger more compassion than you show yourself?
This needs to change. You need to turn this around. This is not only having an effect on your life, but particularly having effect on your eating and weight. You’re trying to deal with everything and showing yourself zero self-compassion.
Emotional eating has become your way of showing yourself self-compassion.
You get caught up in a destructive cycle. You end up feeling worse about yourself. Emotional eating is not an effective, long term strategy. It’s instant relief and then it leaves you with more problems.
Is The Perfectionist telling you everything that’s wrong with you, and beating you up?
Here’s the technique:
Place both hands on your heart space.
Take a few deep breaths in. Come back to your breath. Get out of your head and into the body.
Focus even on that area where your hands are over your heart.
You might say something to yourself like: “This is a tough time right now.” And feel into those words.
This is a moment of suffering and this too shall pass.
At this point, you might add any other words of comfort that you might need to hear. Like your best friend or your loved one, giving you that reassuring advice.
Start to give that back to yourself. Start to practice more self-compassion whenever you need it during the day. Start slow, once a day and build up from there. It will make a huge difference to how you feel.
The intention behind it is actually to put yourself in the circle of compassion. Right now you’re probably out of that circle and it’s all about everyone else.
Self-compassion is very self-soothing.
Perhaps you might not need the chocolate to self soothe after all. Maybe this might be enough. It’s a great place to start and feels good.
It’s all about an internal transformation, increasing your confidence, freedom, and empowerment. Not only around food, but in yourself, to change your life!
For more tools and techniques to help you love and accept yourself as you are now, and to take back control from food for good, I invite you to join my free Facebook group, Food Freedom! Join here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/570001309855819/
Bye for now!-
Self Compassion from Georgie Beames on Vimeo.