By Heather Nicholds
When you’re trying to follow a healthy diet plan, it’s so easy to get caught up in always focusing on what you can do better. It’s important to have goals, and to improve, but you also need to feel good about yourself and be proud of what you’ve already done.
It’s all too easy, especially when you’re on a healthy eating plan to lose weight, to feel like you don’t measure up to the people around you or on TV.
If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed by the perfection you’re aiming for, take a minute to remember that you’re awesome…
When I was younger, I read somewhere about keeping a happiness journal. You just write down 5 things every single day that made you happy. It’s amazing how much more fun life seems when you record the fun stuff!
It also helps you recognize the awesome things in your day more easily. You get tuned into them, and they pop out more right in front of your face. It got easier and easier for me to come up with 5 things, and a lot of the time I’d wind up with 10.
Just after I wrote this post, Phil and I watched a TED talk (The Happy Secret To Better Work) that coincidentally talked about the same idea – a gratitude journal.
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It’s a fantastic talk about how to shift your brain from achieving in order to gain happiness, to being happy in order to achieve more success. Watch it, it’s one of the best TED talks I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them!
In high school, I was on a skating team that had a mental trainer one year. One exercise she had us do was that everyone wrote down one adjective (a positive one!) to described each other member of the team.
She took our lists, and then gave each of us a laminated card that had all of the adjectives our teammates had used to describe us. You could try doing the same thing, asking your closest friends and family to describe you in one word. Email makes this less embarrassing 😉
You can also write down the things you like and are proud of about yourself. Try doing it on a day when you feel on top of the world, and then you can go back to it on a day when you’re in the dumps.
I started a list and broke it down into categories for things I’m proud of, things I’m grateful for and things I like about myself physically. It helps me on bad days, and on good days I try to add to it.
Sticky notes can be a good way to keep reminders around in different places. The fridge, the mirror, or even hide some in places you don’t go too often so that you can surprise yourself 🙂
So remember – self-improvement is a wonderful thing, but self-love is equally important.
