Show How Much You Love Yourself: Work Your Thing Out and Change Your Life

This will be a two-part post about self love, how the lack of it makes us dysfunctional and fat, and the first concrete step to tackle this issue.

Express love

We need to recognise that expressing love is natural and showing love is an exceptionally natural and right way of being. Start appreciating who you are, right here and right now.

I am so very grateful for the deep, abiding love I feel for myself. My eyes tear up every time because my heart feels so full.  I have come a very long way from those depressive, suicidal years.

I have been reflecting a lot on life and my own in particular as I want to create something that I never had before. A home that is filled with bountiful love and prosperity and goodness and a garden that stretches as far as the eye can see.

Those thoughts naturally took me to the perennial problem and obsession we women have with weight - because I have a man on my mind.

An early developer

Childhood experiences mark us indelibly and are often but not always, reflected in weight gain. I wasn't a fat kid yet others made me feel like I was. Nor am I fat in any of the family photos throughout the years.

I was broader and taller than everyone else in my age group and was moved up a year ahead of my class mates; and oh horror, I was the first girl to wear a trainer bra to school. 

My mother says proudly that I was walked and talked by the time I was ten months old.  Well... she said nine months but I don't believe it.

Not only that, I was a tomboy, fought every Friday after class, and was one of the few girls in my area who played the rough and tumble street games - cricket, basketball, soccer, and so on and I came from a "good" family.

No dolls and tea sets for me. With hindsight, I understood that my class mates felt intimidated but they didn't know what I was living either.  Rape and physical abuse was my lot.

My dysfunctional fat story

I left secondary school at sixteen with an average score and hung about at home for a year and got fat. I had nothing else to do and was told that I could not go to university; and the street games were over.

The clincher to the weight story was when my mother's so-called friend suggested I might be pregnant. And guess what happened... my weight gain skyrocketed as time went by.

Out of all those youthful experiences, it's the cruel, chanting taunts of "mama fat" in primary school that I remembered the most.  That was my dysfunctional fat story.

I have outgrown most of it - I still have some fat in my head - and closed the chapter on the rape stories. Yes, there was more than one. All of that is finished now.

Create a new story

Now, I am setting my gift free and creating a new story. Sharing what I've learnt about weight gain and physical and emotional fitness. Women do not choose to be fat.

However, because we are so connected to our feelings and have been screwed up by our cultures, the dysfunctional story is part of our psyche. What we want and deeply yearn for is completely at odds with what we are told we can have. We don't know if we're coming or going.

Fat is a defence. It is a bulwark against the aggression to which women and girls are subjected. The only way to get free of the psychological prison of fatness is to face your demons and that will only happen when the time is right.

You won't think you are when it happens because it is a painful process. However, it is the only way to heal yourself. When that Aha! moment dawns, you will decide what is right for you.

Work your thing out

It would be the perfect time to say This is how much I love myself.  Be compassionate. Loving yourself is the most exquisite gift you can offer. Start living life on your terms.

Drop me a line and let me know how you are dealing with your barriers which were not of your making?

Show how much you love yourself;

Change your life!