Helping You Love Yourself into Success with Less Stress! Loving Yourself into Less Stress for Weigh-in Success Part I: Overview by Ilenya Marrin, DSS HOME FREE NEWSLETTER PRODUCTS SERVICES ABOUT ME TESTIMONIALS RESOURCES CONTACT Are you totally frustrated with your efforts to lose weight? Do you berate yourself as undisciplined, lacking will power, or a victim of your own greedy impulses? Have you fallen off more diet plans than you can count? Are you constantly dieting with little success, or yo-yo dieting and gaining it all back? Diet and exercise plans abound, all variations on the basic success mechanism: take in fewer calories and burn more. Eat less and be more active. What stops you and millions of others from doing just that? Huge numbers of people struggling with diet, nutrition and the need to lose weight report that stress is the main factor contributing to their overeating or failing with various diet plans. They report having high stress levels, low stress resistance, and that eating makes them feel better temporarily. In many cases, dieting and exercise just add to their stress level – unless they make some inner attitude adjustments first! Creating Inner Support for Weight Loss. This series of articles is not directly about how to lose weight. This is a back door approach, a mind-shift approach to lay a foundation for greater success with diet and exercise. Therefore, in this series, I'll address several ways to approach altering your lifestyle by using a key strategy – loving yourself from the inside out, to reduce stress and improve your relationship with food and your own body. Developing self-compassion or self-loving is a key concept from my e-book, The Power of Personal Peace: Reducing Stress by Loving Yourself from the Inside Out. Now let's look at lifestyle. Lifestyle impacts stress resistance in two major ways. 1) Factors such as healthy food intake, exercise and recreational habits can increase your resistance to stress by providing more optimism and energy, productivity and coping ability day in and day out. 2) These lifestyle factors can prevent or minimize illness and help you maintain excellent health, thus avoiding the stress of fatigue and disease. When you additionally consider your inner lifestyle – your habits of thinking and feeling – an additional factor appears: a master key for managing stress and changing your lifestyle to support healthy weight loss and maintenance. Loving yourself from the inside out involves giving yourself acceptance, compassion, forgiveness and nurturing. It means – regardless of your shape, weight, health issues, or the various stressors at play in your life – showering yourself with the same caring you give your family and friends. It means filling your own cup before you try to meet the endless needs of others. It means holding a loving intention and making decisions for yourself based on your own inner wisdom rather than the opinions of others, however well-meaning. You start inside, with your own awareness. You extend that simple awareness as self-loving, and gently and gradually tailor your external activities to line up with what is true for you. You take time for your self. You have the courage to look inwardly and lovingly face your inner fears and self-judgments, or any senseof failure, shame and guilt that may be blocking your progress in lining up your body-mind-spirit connection. As you learn to lovingly follow the wisdom of your own heart, you can naturally begin to make wiser and more loving choices for your lifestyle. You can release the non-essential people and tasks that add to stress in your life and reclaim more time for you and those loved ones most important to you. You can select the diet plan and individual foods that support your unique needs. You can take small steps to support yourself with exercise or fun activities to help you burn calories. Lifestyle Makeover. This approach is virtually the opposite of a crash diet. This approach is a lifestyle makeover guided by the one who knows you best – yourself. It takes a little time, but if you do any of the steps suggested, if you truly put them to work in your life, you will almost certainly find you begin doing things differently and getting different results, in line with your heart's desires. Click on the links below for the rest of the articles in this series. Part I: Overview Part II: Basics of Loving Yourself from the Inside Out Part III: How to Love Yourself and Your Weight Loss Process Part IV: How to Love Yourself Forward with Small Steps Back to List of Articles

Loving Your Success Blog
Phone: 802-658-2921