Diet and Self-Love are Interrelated. Here’s how!
If you’ve been actively using social media or are a millennial or gen Z, self-care, self-love, and related terms might sound familiar. These two words have been flying around like a buzz for all the right reasons.
Over time, several ways have been devised that can is acts of self-love. But first, let us understand what is meant by self-love. Self-love, as the name suggests, is the act of loving ourselves. How do we do that? By doing activities that are good for our physical, spiritual, and mental health. These include regular skincare, working out, meditating, and anything and everything that enriches your soul.
Lately, the focus has been on the proper diet as a way of self-love and self-care. As for most people’s first step toward self-love is improving their lifestyle and losing weight. While workouts are not hard to incorporate into your daily routine, improving your diet can seem arduous. But, you know what they say, activities transform you from the outside, but food habits change you from within, aka help you lose weight. Believe it or not, one loses weight in the kitchen. Hence, your diet and self-love are directly linked to each other. This technique, in turn, helps in increasing your self-esteem.
While no magic confidence-boosting foods exist, your eating habits and self-esteem are interrelated. Healthy eating and self-esteem go hand-in-hand. In this blog post, we will discuss how you can incorporate a healthy diet to help you along your way to self-love.
1.Practising mindful eating
We completely understand that reforming your diet can be a challenging task. This is why we recommend eating mindfully. What is mindful eating, you ask? Well, mindful eating is all about being aware of what you’re eating, the surroundings, how your body feels, how your taste buds think, and the like. It’s the state of holistic awareness. Practising mindful eating can help you be way more aware of your body than you’ve ever been. Your body will talk to you about when it’s hungry, when it’s complete, etc. This can also help resolve over-eating issues and eating at odd times in the day. Once you start with mindful eating, your diet automatically reforms. When your nutrition is proper, you’re bound to feel good from within and show self-love and care for yourself and your body.
2. Pay attention to what your body says
Once you start mindful eating, you learn to communicate with your body. However, whether you can listen to it or not, the task falls on you. Hence, pay attention to what your body says. When we say this, we don’t only mean it in terms of eating habits. Your body is intelligent; it can foresee many things that can be good or bad for you. One fine example of it could be your gut feeling. Listening to your body can help you figure out when you’re genuinely hungry and when the mind is just tricking you into mindless eating.
Moreover, it even communicates when it can work out and when it can’t. Yes, pushing yourself is essential, but don’t test your limits so that you can’t get out of bed the next day. Hence, always pay attention to what your body has to say. A direct line of communication with your body will help you reform your diet and deepen your self-love.
3. Let go of that need to be perfect
There is never a ‘right time’ or a ‘perfect way to do/start anything. All the beginnings are wobbly, haphazard, and all over the place. This does not mean perfection is unachievable; it simply means one can’t accomplish it immediately. Your need to be perfect can lead to procrastination, or it can throw you off the wagon right from the get-go. While striving for perfection is healthy, making it an absolute necessity can be detrimental. Take baby steps and take it one day at a time. Achieving your goals perfectly doesn’t define your worth. You’re already enough. Start with baby steps, and reform your diet little by little. It’s about loving yourself; self-love doesn’t have to be perfect. Acknowledge yourself as a human.
Final thoughts
It might sound very cliched, but self-love is instead a journey than a destination. Practice makes it better over time. Your diet and nutrition are just one way to help you practice self-love. Do what you love and what enriches you from within. Soon you’ll realize that the destination was always you, and you’ve always been here. You just had to find a way.
