RESULTS TEND TO SHOW UP WHEN YOU DEMAND A HIGHER STANDARD.

Who else has been binge- watching THE BACHELOR this season?

Isn’t it amazing how far people will go to find love? Whether the intent is to get famous or to find true love is debatable. What’s for sure is that we are all craving love and acceptance.

As a personal trainer in Vancouver, people come to me all the time for weight loss tips and workouts to tone up and look slimmer. I’m happy to help, but often I like to think deeper about what is driving the desire to change. It’s the search for this deeper “why” that ultimately help me lead a client to their best results.

Like most women, I will admit to having struggled in the past with maintaining a healthy body image. Any woman who takes in any kind of popular media is going to be flooded with unrealistic ideas of what beauty is. Personally, I found that chasing this ideal made me miserable.

This Valentine’s Day, I’m not going to talk about how to look more attractive in order to find the love of someone else. I’m going to talk about three reasons you need to focus on loving yourself.

NO MATTER WHAT YOU WEIGH, YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE.

If you don’t feel good about yourself right now, I promise you won’t love yourself any differently when you hit your weight loss goal. You might feel proud, you might feel more confident in public, but your bathroom scale has zero impact on your love for yourself.

“Whether you are in shape or not, you can never truly be healthy until you decide to love yourself exactly the way you are.”

If you think I’m off base, consider this: There are plenty of really thin people who do not like the way they look.

These people compare themselves to pictures in magazines; they compare themselves to their friends. Beauty really comes from the inside out, and you are most beautiful, at any weight, when you decide to love yourself for who you are. This is totally separate from the way you look. I can’t stress that enough.

No matter what your state of health, you are worthy of love. Wherever you are at, you have to love yourself. What’s underneath is far more valuable than what is visible to the outside world.

YOU CAN LOVE YOURSELF, AND STILL STRIVE FOR BETTER.

Loving yourself doesn’t mean you don’t need to make changes. In fact, you might need to make some drastic alterations for your long-term health.

There are consequences to being overweight. Don’t settle! But your value and your self-image must remain totally separate from what the scale, or your jean size tells you

I used to stress about what the scale said and how I looked. I found maintaining a healthy weight a challenge. But that all changed when I started to love myself. I lost weight, without even making lot of dietary or exercise adjustments. When I let go of the stress of trying to look a certain way, my fitness improved. 

LOVING YOURSELF MEANS LIVING A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE.

When you don’t love yourself, you can start to do unhealthy things to change your appearance. This lies at the root of all sorts of eating disorders and addictions.

Finding a healthy body image through loving yourself means not settling for a diet of fast food when your body deserves something healthier. Sometimes it means saying no to the convenience store and yes to something with real nutrition. Why? Because you are worth more than processed meats, fats, salts, alcohol and refined carbohydrates.

You most likely will not find love on television. Nor should you wait for someone to hand you a rose to give you validation this Valentine’s Day. You are most beautiful when you love yourself exactly the way you are. Once you find acceptance in yourself, all the other pieces seem to fall into place. When you see yourself as having high value, you demand higher standards, in your food, in your body and in your relationships.