Self-care
In times when we are taught to hate our bodies, acts of love toward ourselves are revolutionary.
We often view self-care as a "luxury," like taking baths, massages, and so on. (Clearly, this provides relaxation, and it is self-care.) But real self-care is meeting our basic physical and emotional needs on a daily basis. It's like taking care of my relationships, my environment, and my routine.
Other forms of daily self-care include:
- Honor and follow my hunger cues
- Eat enough
- Drink enough water
- Move your body in a way that feels comfortable and that you enjoy
- Rest
- Setting healthy boundaries in my relationships
- Let me feel my emotions
- Treat me with respect and compassion (speak to me in a loving manner)
Self-compassion can help us.
Finding a place of refuge in our bodies, inhabiting our bodies with respect and appreciation, is different from constantly liking our bodies, which is very difficult knowing that our environment affects us, hormonal and metabolic changes throughout the month affect us, our psychology, trauma, and other factors.
Respecting your body is a powerful and revolutionary practice in resistance to diet culture and beauty stereotypes.
People who do not respect their bodies are generally in conflict with their physical and/or psychological health.
You don't have to love every part of your body to respect it. Nor is it necessary to accept where your body is now.
Respecting the body means treating it with dignity, while providing self-care to meet its basic needs.
The practice of respecting and appreciating our bodies is one of the most powerful examples of SELF-LOVE. And it's key to making peace with our relationship with our bodies, our nutrition, and honoring our physical and mental health.
Probably one of the most difficult things, since we live in a culture obsessed with the body, thinness, extreme eating, the moral value of food, and stigmas, especially for WOMEN.
This practice helps us achieve personal change around loving our bodies, which contributes to collective change.
You can start with simple things
- Respond to your basic needs: hunger, satiety, sleep, thirst.
- Find spaces where you feel comfortable
- Wear clothes that make you feel comfortable
- Feeling deserving
- Set healthy boundaries in your environment
- Language matters, seek self-compassionate practices towards your body
Another recommendation is to ask yourself
What do I need? What do I do to take care of myself? What is your understanding of self-care?
Write down “mantras” that help you develop self-respect.
Feeling deserving is one of them.
You deserve :
- My body deserves to be fed
- My body deserves to be treated with dignity
- My body deserves to be touched in a loving way
- My body deserves to move in the way that suits me.
- I respect diversity in other bodies and in my own.
- I do activities that give me PLEASURE and enjoyment
- See my body as my home
- See my body as an instrument
I also recommend you eliminate some things like:
Body checking (constantly paying attention to and criticizing different parts of your body), cleaning up your social media, NOT allowing comments about your body, eliminating apps that make you obsess over your body (calorie counting, steps, etc.), gradually working on letting go of body criticism.
Taking care of yourself isn't about dieting, exercising excessively, or being in a constant state of stress trying to satisfy other people's needs and not your own.
Self-care requires a safe and loving space, a space where you can listen to yourself, cultivate yourself, observe with curiosity instead of criticism, and thus seek calm within yourself.
Cultivate those things within yourself that make you feel better, so you can set an example for others.
Post creator by @radiant.nutritionist
Nutritionist|Non Diet|HAES®️
- Compassionate and inclusive support
- Women's Health Specialist 💜
- Somatic Therapy
More information https://radiantnutritionist.com/