Is Your Self-Talk Sabotaging Your Happiness?

According to the Psychology Dictionary, self-talk is defined as, “the dialogue that we have with ourselves that can confirm and reinforce both positive and negative beliefs”.

Do you talk to yourself like you would a friend, relative, or spouse? Unfortunately, negative self-talk is the norm. This can be a gateway to self-hate, self-destruction, poor body image, low self-esteem, and loads of other self-defeating behaviors.

For me personally, I struggled with negative self-talk. There wasn’t a day without thinking how much I hated the way I looked. I thought this was normal. This negative self-talk led me to a life of dieting and self-destructive behavior.
The ugly comments were never ending. Things like, “I need to lose weight”, “I hate my stomach”, “Why can’t I just stick to a diet”, “My friends are skinny, how come I’m not”, “I hate that I’ve been born with this body”.

Sound familiar?

This is now a cultural norm. If you are not on a diet or wanting to change your weight you are an outlier.

According to SJ insights, an article posted in 2014 by Sheree Johnson, the average exposure to advertisements and brands per day per person is 5,000+. And according to Esther Vargas in her article, “The Negative Effects of Media on Body Image”, these ads are the reason we want to look different than we do, which leads to obsessing about changing our bodies i.e. dieting.

Today, the weight loss industry is a $60 billion dollar industry and growing, yet the media claims we have the biggest weight and obesity problem in the US than we’ve ever had before.

So, what does this all mean?

It tells us we have a fat-phobic culture where individuals, especially women, drive themselves into depression, eating disorders, unhealthy thoughts about their bodies, and a perpetuation of fearing fat. Which all leads to more and more diets and self-destruction. And worse yet, the diets do not work.

The statistics are staggering when it comes to the failure rate of diets, in fact, 95% of all dieters will regain their lost weight in 1-5 years (Grodstein, Levine, Spencer, Colditz, &Stampfer, 1996; Neumark-Sztainer, Haines, Wall, & Eisenberg, 2007).

A few years ago, I realized I was the statistic. I would diet, fail, hate myself for it, and gain back any weight I lost. Because of cultural pressures, I remember hating my body at a very young age and I started dieting when I was in my teens. And sadly, my story isn’t even close to being the worst. There are tons of people who start dieting when they are children because doctors scare their parents into thinking their child is doomed to obesity and an early death.

With so many failed attempts to change my body, I decided to find a better way to live. I stopped dieting. I gave it up. I stopped obsessing about what I looked like and just accepted me for who I was. A strong, healthy, successful, smart, and most importantly, a loved woman. And today I love my body. I don’t diet. I eat and exercise normally. And I am no longer a prisoner.

I talk to my body as if she’s a person. She is something special to me that deserves respect and love. I feel free and people tell me how much happier I seem.

I want you to know, there is a better way to live your life than in a constant state of hate, negative self-talk, and dieting. Your self-talk and sabotage is not your fault. It’s a result of media and cultural brainwashing.

Life is too short to be in a constant state of thinking about how to manipulate your body just to feel good. You can feel good every day. You can be free of this bullshit diet world.

Start by paying a compliment every day to yourself. And go from there. Because we are wired to put ourselves down, a daily compliment will go a long way and start to reverse the lifelong brainwash of negative self-talk. This won’t alleviate everything, but it’s a start.

If you’d like to learn more about how to stop dieting and start living, sign up for my free 5 steps to never dieting again and contact me so we can talk about how to live a life free of the diet craze.