What if you felt good about feeling good? 

Unfortunately, we as a culture are conditioned to believe that healthy living and caring for our bodies is hard, boring, and simply not worth giving up what we love. 

What?

Is self-care a struggle?

Often when we talk about getting healthier, feeling better, or losing weight, all those things, our thoughts shift to things like, “Oh, well, exercise is going to be torture, it's going to feel terrible!” Or if it’s dieting, we believe, “I’m going to starve! I'm never gonna get to have my favorite food again! All my time is going to be spent prepping food and I’ll only get to eat the same boring meals.” Or, “Ugh! Journaling and meditating are going to take HOURS!” 

These messages aren’t just invented in our own minds, they are shown to us over and over again in the media. Have you seen videos of a woman who wants to go out with her friends for a celebration or a night out, but she can’t because she’s “on a diet?”  So they show her sitting home alone in sweatpants and a dirty t-shirt eating a dry salad? Or maybe the print ads of a woman in agony at the gym because the workout she is doing is sucking the joy out of her life? It’s this underlying perception that if we want to feel good, it's going to feel bad. 

Layer on top of that the feeling of guilt. Where does that come in? Well, society wants you to believe if you are investing time at the gym, you must be away from your family to care for yourself. So you should feel bad about prioritizing your workout in your workday. There are books about how to hide vegetables into different “fun” foods so you don’t have to feel bad about making your kids eat healthy food. After all, the fun, cool moms go to McDonald's after sports practice, right? (This is a whole other soapbox issue I will not get on right now.) 

Over and over again, we are taught to feel bad about trying to feel good. 

Let's flip the script.

If you're like most of my clients, you already feel frustrated, disappointed, maybe even disgusted in yourself and where you've allowed yourself to be or to end up.

And that certainly doesn't feel good, does it? 

What is the point of society trying to make you feel worse for trying to feel better? For encouraging shame and guilt in your efforts to better yourself? For belittling choices to make sustainable changes?

You already feel bad now about how you look, how you feel, and whatever choices you're making.

Why not change that?

Maybe it's time to do something different.

I know you're busy. I know work is crazy. I know that going home and having a glass of wine at the end of the night fixes it for right now. But trust me, it's not going to fix it forever. In my heart, I’m pretty sure you don’t want that to be how you spend every day. I really believe you want to feel good. I think you want to have more energy. I think you want to be proud of yourself. I think that waking up in the morning is tortuous right now, and I think that you would prefer that to not be the case. I’ll bet you'd like to feel great about how you look. 

If that's the case, I'm telling you that it's not only possible, but it's totally doable. You can start right now. Last week, I talked about how you could feel and should feel by December if you make the right choices right now. 

You’ll not only feel better, but you'll feel great about feeling great. You already know, in your heart, that the time to do something is now. You’ve been thinking about it for a while. You deserve to be the best version of you. There’s a saying, “Stop ‘shoulding’ all over yourself.” And so stop saying you should exercise more and you should eat healthier. Schedule a call with me today, and let’s take the steps to finally make the decision to feel good and actually do it.