How do you deal with weight gain & feeling fat? How can I appreciate my body and be happy in my skin

Hello! Today we're going to do a body appreciation exercise. As soon as you can, I want you to find a full length mirror that you can stand in front of naked, or wearing underwear if you like. Just you, your body and the mirror. I want you to look at yourself. Don't think anything, about how you look or anything like that, if any thoughts come up, just let them go, Thoughts always come and go, they're habitual, so just practice standing and looking at your body without any thought.

Now I want you to look at each part of your body and the things that it does for you. Start at your feet and think about what your feet do for you. Well, for starters, they help you stand and they help you walk, they can even help you pick things up! :) Well mine do anyway, my boyfriend calls them my "grippers", which is pretty funny, because my feet like to grip things - so they're pretty handy!

Thoughts always come and go, they're habitual, so just practice standing and looking at your body without any thought.

Then turn your attention to your ankles. What do your ankles do? They help your feet rotate which is pretty helpful. And now your legs - your calves and your thighs, these allow you to walk, run, jump, climb mountains, swim - to do whatever it is that you do. Now turn around and look at your bum, remember you're not thinking about anything else except for what your body's doing for you. You're not judging. You're not thinking about weight here. You're just thinking about what does my body do for me? So what does your bum do for you? Well, it cushions you when you sit down, it cushions you if you happen to fall. And what else does it do? Well the inside helps you remove toxins from your body by defecating. That's definitely helpful!

Now your pelvic region, if you're female, it helps you to give birth, and it helps all of us have sexual pleasure. Now look at your beautiful stomach, it carries babies, it digests food, it does so many important things. Now move your attention up towards your chest, which protects your heart that pumps blood though your body and gives you life, your lungs that help you breathe. How about your breasts now, they can feed babies! Now look at your arms, your hands, what would we do without those? And now move to your head, it protects your brain, that controls everything in your body. It gives you eyes so you can see, a mouth so you can talk, ears so that you can hear and a nose so that you can smell.

How can you not be grateful for and appreciate ALL OF THAT?

I want you to do this exercise every day, or as often as you need to, to remind yourself of how amazing your body is so that you can be grateful and appreciative of your body rather than just thinking of it as a weight machine.

Once you accept yourself as you are, then you can change.

Start looking at your body for all the things that it does for you. Find the beauty in it, because there's beauty in everything. So find your beauty and and focus there. Don't worry about other people, because the more we rely on others for validation and acceptance, the more power we give away - nothing has meaning except for the meaning that WE give it. So forget about others, and focus on accepting you. Once you accept yourself as you are, then you can change. So how can you accept yourself as you are? The smallest thing you can do and start RIGHT NOW is to just let go of those thoughts, they're not helpful most of the time, so just let them go. It'll take practice, but in time, it will become natural to just let them flow through you, without attaching to them.

Our body is the container that is housing our soul in this world, without it, we couldn't be here. And we're so lucky to be here, in this life, in this experience, on this beautiful planet. So be grateful for this body, it's the only one that you have.