Give Yourself Some Credit . . . Each and Every Day

I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.  I really like my world that way.  No one is purposefully doing bad things through my lens' filter.  Everyone is safe and wonderful.  The world is a happy place! If something is going wrong, I'll always make up a legitimate reason why it's not really someone's fault.  There aren't bad people, or people who mess things up on purpose--everyone is doing the best that they can at that given moment. If there's a problem, I'll find a solution, not get into a blame game.  I do this for everyone, except for the one most important person to me, myself.

I'm really hard on myself.

If I eat too much, my thoughts are not pretty.  And my negative thoughts can take me to a place of anxiety and stress about my weight. Especially because weight issues are not something that can be "fixed" by brainstorming a good idea and then having immediate follow through.  Overcoming them takes a lot of time and persistence--a whole lifetime's worth in fact.

If you suffer with weight issues, than I'll bet you are very familiar with being hard on yourself. And what you may not be familiar with AT ALL is giving yourself credit for the things that you do right. Yes! You read that correctly! GIVING YOURSELF CREDIT FOR THE THINGS YOU DO RIGHT.

Give it a try. Today. When you do something right, like go to your gym or resist eating the kid's leftover macaroni and cheese, acknowledge to yourself that you did something awesome. When you mess up, which we all do, say to yourself, "Oh well," and leave it alone.

Why should you do this? Because this is what healthy, thin people do. They don't berate themselves when they overeat. They acknowledge it an move on. If you are in the berating yourself cycle, it is very easy to get overwhelmed, anxious and stressed about your weight. If you are in the giving yourself credit cycle, something else entirely can develop.

What is that? A new way of being. One that involves a tremendous natural high that you can get from doing the things that are healthy for your body.  For example, think about going to a party. You know that there are all sorts of foods at the party that are high in calories and that if you eat  them, you are not going to lose weight or worse, you will put some weight on.  There are two ways that this can go down, you can partake or you can resist.

I don't have to explain to anyone here what goes on in your head if you partook (is that a word?).

But what if you resisted? What would happen then? One of two things:

You would leave the party feeling really crappy. You would obsess about the food that you didn't eat and probably go home and binge.

Or, you could leave the party and on the drive home, think to yourself how amazing you feel because you didn't overeat. Why do you feel amazing? Because you know that you have maintained your weight and that it is really important to you. Maintaining your weight is really wonderful.  Do you know all of the fantastic things about being at your ideal weight? I'll bet you do. Go through them in your mind. And give yourself credit for not overeating at that party.  You just might experience a natural high, and as we all know, highs can be addictive. And this is just the sort of high you want to become addicted to if you are going to be successful at losing weight.

I want you to give yourself credit right now for something that you have done right. I would like you to put it in writing in the comments section right here--anonomously if you are not ready to be public about your involvement in this blog. Let's see what happens!