If you're having a bad body image day, these are some reminders that you need to hear.

You will not hate yourself into loving yourself, and your fear of gaining weight isn't keeping you thin. Those were two affirmations

that I repeated to myself when I was dealing with self-objectification, crippling body image

insecurities. I had to remind myself that that negative inner critic wasn't serving me.

I used to think that beating myself up and judging

myself and shaming myself was the way to motivate myself into taking action and being better

with food and working out and staying disciplined. And so I allowed that negative inner critic

to just be the loudest voice in my head. But what was

actually happening was it was creating so much internal pressure, that negative inner voice

was creating so much anxiety and so much fear and so much overwhelm and so much exhaustion

that it would lead me to shut down.

It would lead me into states of nervous system dysregulation where I wanted to just disassociate

to numb out with food or it would get me into such a state of hyper arousal.

That's a different state of nervous system dysregulation where I was overactivated

and I had intrusive thoughts and I was dealing with this catastrophic thinking even around my

body and fears that I had with my body and the anxiety sometimes was so crippling. All I could

think about were the things on my body that I didn't like,

and it was all consuming. And I think when we're struggling with negative body image,

it's often because we might still be clinging to an image of ourselves, a dream body, or a thin

ideal, or a version of our ourselves that we once were and we're

unwilling to be present in the moment with who we are right now or where our body is at right now.

And I think a lot of the challenges in making peace with our body is that we have this goal

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