Feed Your Soul with Kim

65: It Is All About the Love

February 16, 2022 Kim McLaughlin Episode 65
Feed Your Soul with Kim
65: It Is All About the Love
Show Notes Transcript

It is Valentine’s Day as I record this podcast and I am thinking of love. Not the romantic or familial love, I am thinking about Self-Love. 

We are using my book Feed Your Soul: Nourish Your Life! A Six Step System to Peace with Food as the jumping off point to discuss Self-Love. Did you know that Self-Love is so critical that it one of the steps in my Six Step System? Generally, Self-Love is seen as selfishness and if you have ever thought that you could not be further from the truth. 

Join us in this Feed Your Soul with Kim Podcast where we discuss:

  1. Three aspects of Self-Love that you might not have considered.
  2. Five ways to engage in Self-Love.  
  3. Get into action and get on the Love Train. 

 

Discover a new way of increasing your Self-Love by joining the Feed Your Soul Community: 

Join us on Facebook in our Feed Your Soul Community. Join for free here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1172488142887200/

 

Feed Your Soul; Nourish Your Life! The Six Step System to Peace with Food is available.
This is the book I talked about in this episode. It is a great way to increase your self-love and your peace with food. 
Get it now: https://feedyoursoulunlimited.com/fysnylbook/

 

Want more information? You can find out more about Kim McLaughlin at www.FeedYourSoulUnlimited.com

 

Kim McLaughlin, MA

Kim McLaughlin is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, inspirational coach, speaker, and writer. She helps people who feel frustrated overwhelmed and overloaded, and it shows up in overeating. She has a Master of Arts Degree in Clinical Psychology. Kim is a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, and she assists people to gain peace with food. 

We would love to get your feedback on this show and let us know what you would like to hear in upcoming shows. Email us at info@FeedYourSoulUnlimited.com

 

Thank you for listening.

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Thanks for listening to the Feed Your Soul with Kim Podcast.

Kim McLaughlin:

Welcome to the feed your soul with Kim podcast. This is episode 65. And it's all about the love. It's Valentine's day month, and we are talking about love. But we're not talking about romantic or familial love. We're talking about self love. In this podcast, we'll talk about three aspects of self love that you might not consider five ways to engage in self love and get into action and get on the love train. I've been thinking about that song. Let's start now welcome to the feed your soul with Kim Podcast. I'm Kim McLaughlin, your host, I am a author, coach and licensed psychotherapist. And I help people move from feeling overwhelmed and overloaded. And over eating into finding a place of peace with food and peace within your life. Today we're talking about love. It is February, which is a month about love and the heart. And generally what people talk about is romantic or familial love, you know, kind of being in love with other people. And I'm going to go in a radical different direction. And I want to talk about self love. Because self love really, as far as I'm concerned is the most important kind of love available, we often look at the love of the partner or the family and friends and leave out this really most important you because what we know is that when you don't have love for yourself, there's not going to be love for other people or not the love and the kind of way that you want it to be. I actually wrote a whole chapter about self love in my book, feed your soul nourish your life, I put self love in there actually, it was last chapter and I often talk about how I think it's the most important chapter and the most important concept. When we talk about overeating. I talk about six concepts physical, emotional, mental lifestyle, mindfulness, and self love. Self Love is the one that I think we don't want to talk about much because we'd rather talk about the physical components of overeating and how it feels to overeat. But we got to look back in on ourselves and what's going on inside of ourselves. And literally how we feel about ourselves. Getting ready for this podcast actually made me look over my chapter on self love. And there were a lot of great quotes in there that I want to spend a little time going over. What one of the quotes that I have from the book is self love can be a difficult concept to understand, because we often think of loving someone else, not loving ourselves. And don't you find that that's true that we think about having or wanting to have a relationship with other people. And that that's really what love is about most especially when we think about this, this time during February and Valentine's Day and loving people and and what I find is that on Valentine's Day, often it can be really difficult for people who have been divorced or in a bad relationship, a breakup single, and they feel that there's not enough love in the world. And what I want us to do is start thinking about how we can be more loving towards ourself. And that's actually what we're going to talk about a lot today. We live in a society that is super negative, that there is a lot of negativity around. And I don't know about you, but I found that there's more negativity, or it seems to be on the rise since there is the internet. And some of us are young enough, don't remember when there wasn't as much of an internet presence as there is now. But there was a time when there was less negativity or or this unfiltered comments, I find that there's so much negativity in those areas that it can be hard to get to that loving aspect. And what I find is that I've got to come from this loving perspective, or I actually don't feel good, I don't feel good in my body. I've been doing some daily meditations. I started January the first end of this year, and I've been doing it daily. And what I find is that there's so much more positive feelings that I have. And I actually don't want to be around people who are negative or listening to negative things because I really enjoy that positive feeling. What I know is that when we are more in this loving aspect of ourselves and engaging in more positivity, that actually we invite more of it food isn't as much of a an interest or we eat more intuitively because we're feeling much To better about ourselves, you might wonder why self love is really important. And I think it's good to talk about it. I noticed in my, in my book what I thought about when I wrote about self love, I noticed three different areas that are much more than that. But they're the three areas that I focused on in my book. And there are three, what I termed three different aspects of self love. One of the aspects is self esteem. And self esteem goes into self love, because self esteem is how you feel about yourself, your sense of value, and good feelings about yourself. If your self esteem is low, it's probably going to be harder to feel more of that self love, and, and be engaged in more positive behaviors towards yourself, you know, does self esteem come first, and then self love or self love and self esteem? I don't know. But they certainly do seem to be wrapped up in each other. When we talk a little later about some things that we can do to create more self love, it definitely will increase your self esteem by practicing more self love. Another aspect that I've noticed was self love is self worth. And it's this sense of how you see value in the world, how you how do you see yourself as being valuable? Do you think that you have a right to exist. And this is a difficult concept, because when we have food and weight issues, we often think that we don't deserve to be at the table that we don't deserve to have take up space, and that we take up more space than we need to, because of our body size. And then we have this sense of poor self worth, that we don't have value in this world. And I think you can see that if you think about self worth, then it's really intertwined with self love. Because if you don't think that you're worthy, or have value, how do you then see yourself? How do you see yourself as loving towards yourself. And if you're not loving towards yourself, then you start to see yourself as not worthy and have that low self esteem. And when we go to that perspective, then life just feels like crap, it doesn't feel good. And what we're looking for, or what I think we're looking for is more love, more peace and more joy in our lives. And that's where self love really plays a big part. Start noticing if you feel that you're valuable, if you have these really good feelings about yourself, I find that we've been beat up so much about our weight, about overeating, about dieting, about not being good enough, that then that gets translated into not thinking that we're lovable. We noticed this in very young kids that think that they're not lovable, most, especially when there's been any kind of notice or comment about their body and their body size. I want you to think about then how much do you see yourself as lovable? And, and it's not? I guess what I want you to consider is is couldn't we move it from a space of being about what other people feel about you and move into this idea about how you feel about yourself? Is there a way for you to to see yourself as more loving and see yourself in a loving manner. So now that we've talked about self love and self esteem, self worth body image, and looked at that, and I really encourage you to look at that for yourself, let's talk about ways to engage more in self love. Because I think that it's it's an issue that we all are it's a an idea that we all can embrace more of that. I don't know that there's anybody that has too much self love, I don't know that you can ever have that. And I really want to get into some actionable items, some ideas of what we can do, to be more loving, or for you to be more loving towards yourself means to be more loving towards myself. My book Feed Your soul nourish your life, a six step system to peace with food is really going to be so helpful for you. I want to encourage you to get the book, there is a link in the show notes about how to get the book but it is really my story and the story of a lot of other people about how we can use a six step system to having peace with food. I really encourage you to get it it will be the way that helps you move forward on this journey of looking at food differently. Well now we talked about self love, self esteem, self worth and body image. Let's get into what can we do to start engaging in self love because I'm all about understanding, but then I'm super into how we get into action, how do you get into action. And I want to give you five different ways to engage more in self love, starting now, actually. So one of the ways what things I like to do is I like to start and then the day saying something positive to myself, this sets up my day for my mind and spirit to be in that positive direction. I know you can do it more during the day, but it's let's start the day out saying something positive. And it when I do it, it makes me smile, actually, when I wake up, and I look at something positive. For my day, I am then excited and ready to go. I know that when I have negative thoughts, when I wake up about how hard the day's gonna be, or all these things that I have to do that I don't like, I actually set myself up to not feel good and actually want to just put the covers back over my head and knock it out of bed. So I'm gonna encourage you to start the day, tomorrow with something positive that you say to yourself, and end tonight, and tonight saying something positive to yourself, What could that be things like I love myself, notice something good that you did during the day, notice something that you want to do, as the day goes on. And just say nice things, what we know to be true is positive increases the positive, positive increases the positive, negative increases the negative. So if we want to get into self love increasing that positive is the best way to go about doing it. A second way to engage in self love is stop the judgment of yourselves and others. There is so much danger in comparing yourself to others to having that judgmental ideas about other people because what what happens when you start putting out that negativity or, or having judgments about somebody else is actually not uplifting, it doesn't uplift you. And it doesn't uplift anybody else. I don't know about you. But when I have a judgmental thought, I find that I'm a little more snarky, and I don't say things that are very nice. And I really challenge myself, to move out of judgment. And to just be more kind. And to think of people in a positive way, I find that as I look at others in a more positive manner, I actually look at myself as in a more positive manner, when I'm uplifting. Thinking about others than letting go of that judgment, I actually don't have judgment towards myself, that I think is one of the main things that we do is that will end up being judgmental towards ourselves, that is a killer to love. It just doesn't increase love. So focus on how you can stop judgment and let go of that judgment of others. A third way to engage in self love is to be at peace in your mind. Look at how you think about yourself. Remember, I talked about the six step system, that your mental that how you think how you see things is, is a really critical component. And it's how you think about yourself. Remember, we're just talking about judgment? Well, judgment is a lot of things that we think. And so now let's go a little deeper and start thinking about how we think about ourselves, and what are the things that you say to yourself, how do you ruminate or focus on what's wrong and what's bad and being critical. Those are killers of love. They they do not increase self love. And they actually just like I was talking about before is they make they make it. So there's less love and less peace and less joy. One thing I really like to do that helps with my peace of mind is I love conscious journaling. And this is the type of journey journaling where you just journal what you're thinking it's it's also called Morning pages by Julia Cameron, she coined the term mourning pages, but it's where you write three pages long hand of just conscious journaling what you're thinking in your head, I find it is an extraordinary way to get out all of those negative thoughts, all the things that negative that I'm thinking about myself and others, I literally put it to the paper and it's so freeing to get it out of my mind and then I look at it and and realize how ridiculous it is to carry around all those all those thoughts and literally, I can leave it on the page. And so it's like putting out the negativity putting it on the page and then it doesn't have to rest in my head. In my head or in my heart, and it is this fabulous way of letting go of those negative thoughts. So, conscious journaling is a super great tool to use to increase self love. Another way to increase self love is to set limits and boundaries and say no to people say no to people, places and things that you need to say no to say no to the chaos. Say no to people that aren't kind. Self love means I invite people to be with me to be around me that are loving and kind to me. And I can't, I am not being loving to myself, if I allow that negativity to come towards me. I was we were just talking a little bit ago, remember about the internet and social media and the negativity. One way to cancel out that negativity is to stop paying attention or stop reading social media. Don't engage in any cruel talk or or allow people around you to talk cruelly and and move on. You know, unfriend them. Don't, don't read things that are negative and toxic. Those opinions really. They they infiltrate your brain, and they will not make you feel better about yourself, really, the negativity is toxic, toxic, I encourage you to say no, create those boundaries to people's places and things that are not yours and that are not loving towards you. The last thing I have is, notice the negative statements that you make about yourself. So if you want to engage in more self love, negative statements are not loving. And this goes back to when we talked about being having peace of mind, stop judging others stop judging yourself. And this last way to engage in more self love is to start noticing those negative statements about yourself that you say to yourself, they are love killers, they kill love. A way to combat that, or a way to look at it differently is if you notice yourself saying something negative. And sometimes what people will Tommy is they'll say, Well, Kim, I can't stop seeing those things. I don't know what else to do, or what else How do I talk to myself. And what I tell them to do is to consider how you would talk to your child, a niece or a nephew, some cherished child that you know, and think of how you would talk to them that if they said those negative statements that you say about yourself, what would you say to them, and talk to yourself the way that you would talk to that cherished child, it increases the love and it when you think about it, being loving towards that child self within you. It then gives you ideas about how you might engage differently with yourself. Because the more you are loving and kind to yourself, the more you're loving and kind to yourself. And that is the goal today, I really would love to have you take on one of those ways of increasing self love as a challenge for you this week, you can either start and stop the day with something positive, saying something positive to yourself. Stop judgment of yourself and others. Be at peace in your mind. Say no to people places and things that need that you need to say no to. Or notice some negative statements that you make about yourself and change them around and start seeing more positive things to yourself. The more you're in a loving place, the more you're in a loving place. And the starting spot for love has to be with yourself. I can't say it any any better than that. But you've got to start with yourself. And I want you to know that I care about you. And I'm so glad that you listened to this podcast. You listening through to this podcast tells me that you want to increase self love in your life. And I really encourage you to do that. You can get the book like we talked about earlier, feed your soul nourish your life. A six step system to peace with food definitely will help you increase your self love. Start using some of the tools we're just talking about. Make a commitment to try and do something differently. Not even try to do something differently. Because the more you do something different you're going to be different. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I know you will get something good out of it. And please like, subscribe. Tell your friends about this podcast. We want more people to hear these great messages. Thanks everyone. I'll talk to you later.