In the past, I contested that Valentine’s Day was nothing more than a manufactured hallmark holiday and a perfect excuse for me to eat chocolate, lots of chocolate.  If you have been following my blog then you already know that I have dedicated this year to ‘living in love’.  So for this month’s post I wanted to share a little bit about my journey with living in love and how I got here, one donut at a time.  I dedicate this post to the wonderful women I had the opportunity to teach these ‘loving yourself healthy’ concepts to the other night. You inspire me!

For those of you who don’t know about my weight loss journey, the fat and skinny of it is that I lost more than 50lbs., going from a size 16 to a size 4. People complemented me and told me that I inspired them to live healthier lives.  The problem was I felt like complete shit.  While I was graciously accepting the complements, in my heart I felt like I was living a lie.  People would say, “Wow you must feel so good now, you look great.”  “Thanks, I feel fantastic,” I said.  When what I really wanted to say was ‘”Don’t envy me, I don’t feel any better then I did when I ate Duncan Hines frosting out of a tub.”  I knew that there was a difference on the outside, but I just couldn’t shake this feeling that it still wasn’t enough on the inside.  Something was missing.

I concluded that if it didn’t feel like enough that meant that I hadn’t done enough.  I needed to push harder, lose more weight.   I thought, once I lost just five more pounds then I would finally be done, it would be enough.  Then I reached that weight.  Then I lost another five pounds.  Then, guess what?  It still wasn’t enough. The feeling I thought would be on the other side of those five pounds, wasn’t.  Sound familiar?  I had this sense that I was was always running towards something that never ended up being there. 

Deeply, what I wanted was to get off the damn hampster wheel.  I wanted to stop feeling good for losing five pounds only to know it meant feeling bad if I didn’t.  I wanted to find deep peace, but a deeper fear always kept me clinging to that wheel.  I feared that if I got rid of my inner critic that screamed, “Hey fatty, get back on the treadmill,” I would lose all control and be wearing a moo-moo and shovelling ice-cream in my face before I knew it.

The point is, often times we tell ourselves if we can just lose five pounds, or get a new job, or get to the gym five times a week that will do ‘it’.  But will it really?  Or will you get there and still feel that something is missing?  The truth is when you are looking through the lens of ‘not enough yet’ you will always remain in the ‘not enough’ mindset.  When you put your happiness ‘out-there,’ that is where it will always stay.

If you want to make real and lasting transformation you have to start by figuring out the essence of what you really want.  Then give that essence to yourself NOW, not in the future when you finally…. (Fill in the thing you are waiting for here.)  If you want to lose weight, then you need to ‘lose the WAIT,’ literally. Stop waiting for your life to produce what you think you want and give it to yourself now.   But how?

I asked the weight loss group I coached on Friday night what they wanted.  They responded with:  “To lose weight, to have more energy, to look better, etc.”  “But, what is the essence?” I asked them.  “What is it that you perceive you will feel once you get these things?”  They looked confused.  “How do I know how I will feel if I don’t have it?”

The truth is that you already know how attaining your object of desire feels or you wouldn’t want it in the first place.  After all you wouldn’t want a million dollars if you thought it would make you feel crappy once you got it.  No.  You want it because you percieve that it will make you feel something better than you do now, atleast you think so.  Unfortunately, the form itself (money, weight loss, etc.) is never going to make you feel something that you aren’t already allowing yourself to feel now.

For most people, especially with weight loss, the feeling that they are seeking ‘out there’, 10 less pounds from now, is ‘self-love and self- acceptance’. Ironically the only place it can be found is ‘in here.’  Basically if you don’t love yourself now, you are not going to love yourself in the future when some external thing happens.  Loving yourself is something you can only do in the present moment and it starts with accepting your situation just as it is now, unconditionally.  Understand that accepting doesn’t have to mean being happy about your current situation.  I know that you may truly want to lose 20 lbs. that is fine.  But if your motivation to lose 20 lbs. is because you feel  bad about yourself now, you are just going to continue to feel bad about yourself in the future, 20 lbs. less or not.

The law of attraction states that like attracts like.  Self-hate now is NOT going to attract self-love in the future; it is only going to attract more of itself.  If the essence that you are seeking is self-love, you can only feel it by taking action and allowing yourself to feel it now. 

So this Valentine’s Day I want you to treat yourself with love and give your heart what it really wants.  Set aside some time to think about anything you have been putting ‘out there’.  What feeling are you going to allow yourself to have in the future, only when you… fill in the blank.   A lot of clients tell me they are going to ‘relax’ once they…. take a vacation, finish this or that project, find a mate, etc.  I challenge you to figure out the essence of what you have been seeking and give it to yourself this Valentine’s Day.  Who knows, maybe by actually giving yourself what you really need you may also get what you thought you wanted, or maybe something even better!

Happy Valentine’s Day!  Live in Love! 

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