Do You Operate from Love or Lack?
No wonder you feel like you’re always chasing your tail.
In Western culture, the underlying, subconscious message motivating the vast majority of our actions is that you’re missing something.
Your face isn’t attractive enough, your body isn’t hot enough, you need a bigger house, a fancier car, a mountain of material goods, a more advanced degree from a more prestigious university so you can get a better job and make more money so you can spend it on more stuff and pay people to change all the things about you that aren’t good enough.
UGH.
No wonder everyone is so busy, so stressed all the time. If you subscribe to the above, you probably feel like you have a ton of work to do to get someplace better.
Meanwhile, you feel like shit because you’re so stressed out from running on the hamster wheel, drained because you don’t have time to take care of yourself, and disconnected because you don’t have time to invest in meaningful relationships and activities.
This is what it looks like when you operate from a place of lack, when you believe that you don’t have enough and that you are not enough. You end up feeling empty—both physically and spiritually. You feel unfulfilled, lonely, anxious, depressed.
The story of not enough is what drives so many people to believe they need to change their bodies.
But there’s another way.
Grace’s Story
Take my student Grace, for example (name changed for privacy).
Grace used to believe that in order to feel good about herself, she needed to lose 30 pounds. When we began working together, she was finishing a training program for a career change because her last job left her badly burnt out.
But rather than dieting in order to lose weight, Grace set a different goal: Build healthy self-care habits.
When she shifted her focus from shrinking her body to instead taking care of it, Grace realized something: she not only cared for herself, she cared ABOUT herself. Through her behaviors, she was building self-love. And here’s what happened:
The more she focused on eating foods that made her feel good, getting out for walks and runs, and resting after a long day, the better she felt. She worked on having difficult conversations and setting tough boundaries. And excitingly, asking for what she was worth. When her training program ended, Grace applied for a job, asked for a salary that felt like a stretch—and she got it.
Her journey wasn’t paved in gold, though. She still had nagging worries about her body, and at one point, even brought up the topic of weight loss. We had an honest discussion about whether it was a good time. She was in the middle of a major transition and was just about to begin training for a new role. “Do you really have the time and energy to devote to that?” I asked her. And her answer was no.
When Grace really dug deep, she knew she would be better served by GROWING rather than shrinking. That’s not to say that if you lose fat, it’s always a negative. Rather, we worked as a team to determine, given the context, whether it would be a good idea to pursue intentional weight loss or to focus on fueling the demands of her life in a healthy way.
And Grace decided the best way to take care of her needs was to NOT focus on the size of her body.
The truth is, you can cultivate self-love and self-care regardless of whether or not you love your body. To be honest, Grace didn’t love her body. But she didn’t need to wait for it to be any different because she wasn’t operating from a place of lack.
She was operating from a place of love.
The problem is, we’ve been convinced that losing weight is a form of self-care. Except that pursuing weight loss is not always good for your health, and frequently, it can lead to disordered eating behaviors—not a very good way to take care of yourself.
If you really want to engage in self-care and look after your health, ask yourself if you’re willing to focus on adding health-promoting behaviors, rather than how you can cut things out, punish, restrict, or deprive yourself.
If that’s where you get stuck, that’s okay. Again, you’ve grown up being told that your body isn’t good enough unless it fits a narrow vision of acceptable shapes, and that if it doesn’t look that way, it’s your duty to change it.
That’s where your mindset comes in…
Are you thinking about your body from a place of love or lack?
Here’s what’s happening when you operate from a place of lack:
You’re having thoughts about what your body should look like. This creates a gap. There’s what your body does look like, and what you want it to be. This gap fuels feelings of inadequacy, or perhaps embarrassment or shame. Those feelings drive the desire to lose weight, which motivates you to take actions like dieting.
But here’s what’s happening when you operate from a place of love:
You have thoughts about what your body looks like. You observe these thoughts without judgment. Because the thoughts are neutral, they don’t produce any strong negative feelings. In place of feeling inadequacy, you feel love, which drives a desire to take care of yourself. Those feelings motivate you to take health-promoting actions like cooking balanced meals and engaging in movement you enjoy.
Grace’s story and these examples are about the lack/love mindset in the context of your body and weight loss, but you can easily apply this to your material possessions, money, education, relationships, and so on.
Regardless of the goal, the solution is the same—which is as simple as changing your thoughts.
But that doesn’t mean this change is easy. If you’re looking for a strategy and support, community and accountability around changing your mindset so you can ditch the stress around food, exercise, and your body, a Food Body Self coach is ready to help you out.
When you operate from a place of love, you not only generate peace, calm, and happiness for yourself, you take actions that improve your health with ease.