In order for you to reach your healthy weight and stay there permanently, you need to improve your body image first. Yes, you read that correctly. What I’m saying is that hating the way you look now is actually a direct impediment to you being able to make – and sustain – the kind of changes in your weight and body shape that you’d love to see.

Hating your body makes you feel down and when you feel down you’re more likely to binge.

I’ve learned there is a direct correlation between those two phenomena. When women (and many men) are feeling bad about their bodies, they find themselves irresistibly attracted to what I call ‘trigger foods’ – foods that they can’t stop eating once they’ve had a taste.

Hating your body makes you feel undeserving.

Confronting, don’t you think? But over and over again I’ve found women who see themselves as “fat” also don’t feel worthy of having the body they’d really like to live in. Not only do they feel judged by our thin-obsessed society – they also judge themselves overly harshly most of the time. They defer self-acceptance and self-love until after they look the way they believe they ‘should’ in order to be acceptable.

Because they also have great difficulty seeing themselves as slim, even when they’ve lost significant amounts of weight, they tend to self-sabotage and regain the weight they’ve lost.

The key here is to love your body right now! Don’t defer that love until you look the way you want to look… because if you hate yourself now, you’ll still be hating yourself after you’ve lost weight – you’ll just find new things to focus on!

Article from Hopewood contributor Robyn Chuter.