Post No.: 0003
Furrywisepuppy says:
To look after your health – confidence in yourself and self-compassion (which is self-esteem and a respect for oneself but without ever venturing into a feeling of self-superiority over others, narcissism or self-righteousness) are absolutely key and should come first in any journey that has the goal of achieving a healthy lifestyle for yourself (being healthy involves both the mind and body after all).
As an analogy, you don’t normally happily wash your car every weekend or give it the best oil and fuel you can get and then love that car – you normally already love your car and then happily choose to wash it every weekend or give it the best products for performance you can. We’re not lazy or neglectful about the things we genuinely or intrinsically love (e.g. spending time on our own hobbies and interests). But if you washed a car you didn’t like very much then you won’t necessarily suddenly like that car (or do the best job you can, or treat it in the right way that’s best for its long-term performance since you don’t think it deserves any more of your time or effort than attempted shortcuts/quick-fixes) and in fact you may loathe it and the process even more.
Well, depending on one’s autonomy in the decision to care or not care – we can end up loving what we care for, as well as care for what we love, especially when we like the results or the positive impacts of our fluffy efforts. So sometimes we will subsequently love our own bodies more if only we take better care of our bodies. But it’s harder to autonomously and joyously decide to put in a lot of time and effort for something unless one loved this something enough in the first place – hence why this initial confidence and self-compassion is key before one normally decides to partake in a sustainable and sustained healthy lifestyle.
Children also need confidence to participate in physical education classes or sports without feeling self-conscious in public/in front of their peers. And when we don’t feel great about ourselves, when we feel stressed – our fuzzy minds are conversely not on long-term desires but short-term ones, leading potentially to behaviours such as comfort eating instead; for which this instinct can, if repeated too frequently, be self-destructive in an environment where calorie-dense foods and drinks are highly and easily accessible.
So the feeling that you deserve to be as healthy as you can be is the first step on the road to starting and achieving a sustainable healthy lifestyle! People must actually like who they currently are first, rather than think that they’ll only like and respect themselves after e.g. dropping a couple of dress sizes. Love your body, then you will find that you will want to invest great care, and proper care, of it i.e. you won’t be just looking for attempted shortcuts or quick-fixes, which often aren’t sustainable or actually that healthy for the long-term anyway. We don’t seek shortcuts for the things we really care about in the right way. Exercising too much or otherwise obsessing too much about one’s body because one is unhappy with it is not being healthy towards one’s body either. The vicious cycle of ‘hate my body, give up on myself or conversely obsess too much, hate my body, etc.’ has to be broken.
No matter what other people say about you or how you currently think about yourself, Furrywisepuppy wants to give you all the confidence in the world, thinks you and your body deserve good health, and loves you!
Woof. I’m going outside for a little run in the garden now, to smell some flowers and chase a butterfly, especially because it’s such nice weather today…
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