What to do when you hate your body.
Do you wish you had a different body? Here's how to stop loathing the one you have.
You’re a woman living with a health condition and you hate your body.
It’s let you down, again and again and again.
You tried to be healthier. You changed your lifestyle, your diet, and you did everything you were supposed to, but your body had different plans.
You enviously gaze at others getting on with their lives and you feel angry at yours. Your body is useless, and you have no idea how to fix it. You can barely look at yourself, or when you do, it’s with disgust.
You desperately wish for another body, or a different life.
What to do with all this hate? Gabriela asked herself the same question because the poison of self-loathing was too much to bear.
Here is what she did next.
Stop shopping for pain.
Gabriela knew that every time she fixated on hating her body, she suffered an extraordinary amount of pain. The more oxygen she gave the loathing, the greater it grew!
Over many years, Gabriela had built up a nightly routine of washing her face and looking in a magnifying mirror at the thick hairs on her chin growing back, from the hirsutism caused by her PCOS (now called PMOS - polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome).
It was normally at this moment she’d think to herself urgh, I’m disgusting, and of course, that made her feel so low.
As an experiment, she put the magnifying mirror away. She put it in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cabinet. It was a tiny action but without that mirror, there was less temptation to shop for pain.
Just 4 days later, on washing her face before bed, Gabriela didn’t have the I’m disgusting thought come to her. She didn’t think anything other than I need to change the towels - a far cry from the self loathing comments!
Flip the complaint.
Gabriela wasn’t out of the woods just yet. Yes, that magnifying mirror was probably never going to see the light of day again but Gabriela, very sadly, had plenty of other self-loathing comments woven into daily life.
Her unpredictable periods, her difficulty shifting extra weight, and her unwanted mood swings were other battles to contend with.
I may as well have been a man was the next most common demeaning thing she’d say to herself, because her absence of periods made her feel unfeminine on top of the hirsutism.
Right there is what Gabriela was upset about; her lack of femininity, or perceived femininity!
So, during a powerful session with her coach, she inverted I may as well have been a man into I’d love to feel more feminine.
Bam! There was a huge flip of a complaint into a desire!
On giving her brain a direction to look to, she could avoid stewing in her lack of feeling feminine and instead, go towards reclaiming her femininity!
Gabriela’s notion of being feminine was to have more girl’s nights with her friends. She loves dressing up, partying and karaoke. Her friends and cousins love that about her too.
She called her cousin Dana up and got planning their next night out and Gabriela was, needless to say, extremely excited.
Give yourself the gift of prophecy.
Gabriela had resigned herself to having a body she hated. It had been years without anything changing, so why bother hoping for improvement?
In one way, and maybe because of this very prophecy she’d announced, Gabriela expected nothing to change, so nothing did. She’d written her own destiny.
However, Gabriela wanted to shift that extra weight around her abdomen. She could picture in her mind's eye looking a certain way and she was somewhat determined, if not fully committed, to seeing that vision come true!
Instead of thinking I’m going to look like this forever, she shifted to saying, out loud, I’m going to look the way I’ve always wanted to. She wrote it on a sticky note and put it on her bathroom mirror. She wrote identical notes and put them around her home; one in the kitchen, another in the bedroom and one by her desk where she worked from home.
Repeatedly seeing these notes and saying them out loud whenever she got the chance, gave her some gentle nudges in the right direction.
With better and sustainable food choices, more hydration than she’d ever tried before, and a new medication recommended by her doctor to experiment with, Gabriela was unknowingly on track.
Those sticky notes prophesying the outcome she wanted were powerful enough to keep Gabriela from falling back to her self-loathing and resignation of a future she didn’t want.
The happy outcome?
Gabriela is the proud owner of something; her body! She adores it. She’s quicker to realise when she’s engaging in a destructive shopping-for-pain habit, that she nips it in the bud; the memory of the magnifying mirror going away in the drawer for good is a powerful one!
She not only feels more feminine for building in more activities that make her feel so, she’s also steadier with her mood, having taken up poetry and creative writing classes. She loves expressing herself through words and has notebooks filled with poignant verses and prose.
Although the sticky notes have faded in colour, and are holding on by the last bit of adhesive, they remain in Gabriela’s view. They reflect back to her that she now looks the way she always wanted to. Her last ditch attempt paid off and she couldn’t be happier for it.
