The Best Motivator...SELF CARE

Hey! I'm currently sitting at our dining room table in our new dining room at our new house we just moved to about 2 weeks ago in Greenville, South Carolina. Lots of newness happening here.I was thinking all last week about you. No, for real. I think about you! And I was wondering how you were doing with everything going on.I've been focusing on one thing over the last week that I thought I'd share with you...and that is, SELF-CARE.I was thinking about how self-care is the best motivator!Let me explain and then we'll dive into this conversation. Without self-care, what is your motivation with choosing healthy things? For a lot of people, and maybe for you, the motivation to be healthy comes from a belief that you need to change something about yourself. If you feel this way and believe this, yourself, you've most likely gotten it from diet culture. Diet culture is the belief that our culture puts on us defining health as thinness and that thinness is the ultimate goal to always strive for. It teaches that your body can't be trusted. And that you've got to have restrictive rules around eating to be healthy and "keep yourself in check".But what has this mindset done for you? If you're honest with yourself, diet culture has left you feeling guilty with eating, unable to experience joy with eating, and shameful of your body. It creates the restrict-binge cycle in your life, living a life of depravity instead of fullness, and a life of fear instead of surrender.All of those above are negative mental repercussions that diet culture yields. But what about the physical downside of diet culture's reiteration that you can't trust your body? Diets and the companies/media that promote them claim to be looking out for your health, but we know that diets have very unhealthy side effects. We already talked about how diet culture keeps you stuck in the restrict-binge cycle by giving you unrealistic and unhealthily strict rules around eating. Living in this cycle can actually lead to weight gain and other physical complications like poorly regulated blood sugar due to the extremes it causes you to go. With each diet (you could also plug in each "cleanse" or even each week you set out to eat "better" and end up not eating enough calories), your body senses deprivation and starvation and wants to "hold on" to whatever energy it gets for fear of starvation. This is why, if you've ever done a few diets, you may have noticed your weight actually go up over time.I want to propose a different motivator than anything you've heard from diet culture. And I am VERY confident you will feel your healthiest self with this.SELF-CARE.Hear me out here. When you are approaching every health choice from a place of self-care and even self-love, when your motivation to eat healthy food and move your body comes from wanting what's best for your body, you WILL be able to make health sustainable. I'm so confident in this!Think about it like this...you just got a brand new _____(insert dream car here)_____ and you are so excited about taking it out for a spin! You drive it to the mall, but you park way out back where there is space so you don't get your door dinged. You take care of it because you LOVE this new car! And then every weekend, without fail, you wash that car and vacuum the inside. You don't leave trash in it. Because you LOVE this car and all you want to do is care for it!But if you're like me and our family car, a beat up Jeep Liberty that we bought with ducktape holding on the front bumper and dings all on the doors, honestly...I hate to say it...but I don't really care if it gets more dings in the side or even if someone taps me with their car in the back. I clean it out occasionally, and only wash it maybe twice a year. I don't love the car, it's not my dream car by any means, and I don't really care what happens to it, so I don't take too great of care of it.Are you flowing with me here?So what if, instead of buying what diet culture is telling you...that you have to have some level of dissatisfaction of your body because only then will you be motivated to change, what if you chose a self-care approach instead?You eat nourishing foods because you CARE for your body.You exercise your body because you CARE for your body.You wake up and go through your morning routine because you CARE for your body's mental health.You go out with friends and enjoy a drink and some apps because you CARE about the benefits of joy for your body.What do you envision would be different for you if you took on this mindset, this motivation, of self-care?I see you being able to eat fearlessly and move joyfully. I see you being able to walk taller and with more confidence. I see you saying "yes" to more things you've wanted to do but been afraid to try out of a lack of appreciation for yourself. I see you LIVING the life you are meant to live.You, I believe, were made for more. What's diet culture keeping you from? What could self-care give to you?