75: Self-Esteem Is Not Found in Weight Loss

 Is your weight your barometer about how you feel about yourself? 

 Using weight loss to feel better about yourself is based on a fleeting idea. It is based on an external process. 

To really increase your self-esteem, there needs to be a connection with how you feel about yourself, which is an internal process- NOT the number on the scale. 

 The truth is you should have self-esteem no matter what weight you are at. 

 Rather than having a goal of weight loss, how about a goal of increasing self-esteem? 

 In this episode of the Feed Your Soul with Kim Podcast we discuss self-esteem and weight. If you have ever thought you want to lose weight to feel good about yourself- you NEED to listen today. 

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

• What is self-esteem REALLY? 
• Number 1 tool to measure self-esteem. 
• 3 Strategies to increase self-esteem. 

Emotional Eating Solutions

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

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Kim McLaughlin, MA

Kim McLaughlin is a psychotherapist. coach, speaker, and author. 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.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the feeder. So with Kim podcast, we are talking about self esteem and weight. Today, it is super important because we have often connected self esteem with weight loss. And I want to debunk that myth dispel that rumor. And let's look at self esteem in a different way. Let's get started Hi guys, welcome to the feed your soul with Kim podcast, I'm Kim McLaughlin your host. And today we're talking about self esteem and weight, we often connect self esteem with weight loss, right? We think that the way to increase our self esteem to way to make us feel better about ourselves is when we lose weight. And actually, what you'll find is when people talk about weight loss, they'll say, I feel better about myself, I have higher sense of self esteem. And that tends to be the connection that we think of the way to self increase self esteem is to lose weight. And I want you to think about this in terms of disconnecting the two. Because having weight loss as your barometer about how you feel about yourself makes weight loss, the only way you feel good about yourself, I know that there is this euphoria that happens when you lose weight, it is kind of this, you remember the diet cycle, right is you decrease your calories, probably increase your movement and exercise and going to the gym. And so you go into this deprivation mode, and you lose weight. And I'm sure that you all we all have have lost weight doing that. And there comes a point where you look at yourself in the mirror, you go, dang, I look good. And I look good, because I've lost weight. And we've we've connected this idea of how I feel about myself is based on my body size, how I feel about myself, is based on my body size. And I want you to think about whether your size is who you really are, is that the person that you see, or that kind of who you want to be using weight loss as a way to feel better about yourself, is this fleeting notion, it is based on this really external process of how I look in the mirror is how I see myself, self esteem is actually an internal process. It's a process of looking inside yourself and how you feel about yourself. It is not a number on the scale. What I think the truth is, is that we want to have high self esteem, focus on our self esteem, no matter what weight we're at. And that's a hard one to consider. Because we tell ourselves the only way I can feel good about myself the only way I'm going to be happy, the only way my life is going to be better is if I lose weight. And this is something that is a fallacy. It's it's fleeting, it's based on something that's very external. And it's not based on who you are as a person rather than having the goal of weight loss. Consider this. How about having the goal of increasing your self esteem? Think about that. And that's what we're going to talk about today is having the goal be increasing your self esteem. First, I want you to think about what is self esteem and I looked at the dictionary like I often do and and what they said is the dictionary said self esteem is confidence in one's own worth or abilities and self respect. And it's a sense of self worth. So self esteem is about confidence in your worth and your abilities. It's about self respect. It's about accepting yourself. And that comes into play that part where I said, accepting yourself no matter what weight you are, accepting yourself having positive feelings about yourself, embracing those qualities within yourself of confidence and enthusiasm, happiness, feeling successful. Having all of those be what you base your self esteem on is something that you are in charge of this internal process, when it's based on external that can come and go. Right, we know that from all the other podcasts we've done is we talk about decreasing weight, dieting, decreasing calories, we might lose weight, but then we gain it back. And we're basically basing how we feel about ourselves on this really external idea, rather than internal, which is really what self esteem is about, right? It says, confidence in our own worth, or abilities and self respect. And it's a sense of self worth. Nowhere within that definition, did it say you should lose 10 pounds, you should lose 50 pounds, you should lose 100 pounds. Nowhere within the definition of self esteem, doesn't say what weight you're supposed to be. Hi, guys, this is Kim. And I want to let you know that the emotional eating solutions eight week course is open. Now you can find it on my website at feed your soul unlimited.com. Go to the work with Kim tab and click on that. This is the time to get peace with food. And I know this course will help you, you also can find the link in the show notes to the emotional eating solutions, eight week self study course. When we consider looking at self esteem in a different way, we actually become more empowered. We talk about that on this podcast a lot about how we become more empowered to be that better version of ourselves to be that person that we want to be irregardless of our body size. Because your body size is not who you are. And your body sizes does not show how valuable you are and or how you're not valuable. That is not what your body size is your body size is just reflective of your body size. Self esteem is pretty rich, it's a this kind of rich concept that is so valuable to really dig into. And it's based on how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about our abilities. And it does affect how we manage our lives and how kind of easily we move through our lives. When we have high self esteem, life feels good. We know how to manage life, we know how to talk to other people, we know how much we want to eat, we intuitively more often we know which foods are fitting well in our bodies and feel good, we want to have some kind of movement, we want to have others in our lives, we have large self esteem, high self esteem, it means that things are going really well. And they're going well internally, internally. So in order to determine where your self esteem is at, I like to consider that the concept of the one to 10 scale. I've talked about this, in my private work with my clients. I've talked about this on the podcast before but if you think about self esteem, you can think of it on a one to 10 scale one being I have really low self esteem and 10 being I have really high self esteem five is kind of where you're in the middle. So think about that have this kind of internal dialogue with yourself right now to see, how do I feel about myself? How is my self esteem? How is my worth? How worthy do I think I am? And where are you on that scale? And if you notice that you have high self esteem, like in that eight 910 area, ask yourself, How did I get here? What have I been doing to get and to keep my self esteem high? And what have I done in the past to increase my self esteem? This is that that idea of strength, like when you have something that you're already doing? Well examine it, so you can keep repeating it over and over again, to do more and more of it. Because if you have high self esteem, let's get more of that please. Yes, I want that. If your self esteem then is maybe in that middle range, maybe four or five or six. Then ask yourself similar questions. What's going on? How did I get here? And really wonder for yourself do you want to increase your self esteem does does being in this middle ground feel okay for for you. And and this is that reflection again that helps you determine where you would like to be. Self esteem doesn't have to be stagnant. And if we look at it beyond that idea of your weight, it's super magical because you can do things As to increase it, you can start noticing if it's there, if it's not there than noticing what you want to do to increase it. So if you're in that mid range, start noticing it. And notice how that feels. And would you like some more of that? Lastly, we can also look inside and see if our self esteem is low. And if it's low, how does that feel for you? Notice what's going on for you first, how are you feeling about yourself? How lovable Are you feeling? And how accepting Are you of yourself? Those are a lot of really good questions to start really digging in and wondering what's going on? Second, I would ask you, do you want to increase it? Would you like to have more self esteem? Does feeling does that low self esteem feeling? Is that okay for you. If it's not, then let's do something about it. And so thirdly, you can consider what you need to do think or be to increase your self esteem. These are things that are these general ideas about self esteem to notice if it's low, medium, or high. And then some reflection ideas, some reflection journaling, some are for reflections in your meditation or time of quiet solitude to determine how this might feel for you. When we're focusing on weight loss, it's not the way to increase self esteem, it actually can make you feel worse about yourself, because we have that time of, of dieting, restricting, and then you might feel good about yourself. You might feel like you like how your body looks. But what we know happens is at some point there has been gene, there's binging feeling bad about yourself. And then that moves into that shame cycle where we feel really bad. And dislike ourselves. As I've talked before, sometimes we feel like we hate ourselves. And the only thing we knew how to do, only thing we know how to do is to move back into that dieting mindset, and start that cycle all over again, where we're going round and round on the diet binge, shame, diet binge, shame cycle. When we're focused on increasing our self esteem, we take ourselves out of that cycle. And we focus on how we're helping ourselves feel better. When we feel better. When our self esteem is increased, what happens, we start being more physically present, we start noticing if we're hungry or full, we start being more of an intuitive eater, we start wanting to move our body because it feels good, we start feeling more present with the people around us. Well, all of that, that increases self esteem. That is the outcome of self esteem added increases self esteem. Thinking that reducing weight going on a diet is the way to increase your self esteem is really based on a false narrative on a false idea on a false story. So I'm hoping that I've made you think about a different way to look at self esteem and disconnect it from losing weight. If you find that you have low self esteem, or even that mid range, and you want to increase it, I have some ideas for you. Because in our podcast, feed your soul with Kim podcast, we love talking about duels about doing something different. We can talk about theories all day long. But until we do something different, nothing different is going to show up. So let me give you some ideas, I have three really big strategies that are pretty deep. And really, truly if you do any one of these, they're going to be super helpful. So let's go through them. First strategy to increase self esteem is to have more positive self talk. In order to have more positive self talk first, start noticing the negative self talk the things you're saying to yourself that are negative, where you're beating yourself up where you're calling yourself names, where you're calling yourself out where you're saying how bad you are. This is where we really rest a lot is in that negativity towards ourself. Remember when we talked about the diet binge shame cycle? This is the part where we can be in shame and really hating ourselves. I have so many people talk to me about their weight and how they feel bad about their body and feel bad about how they eat and say how much they hate themselves. We really have to disconnect from that negativity and really pour in this positive idea. The way I like to do It is to have positive self talk to me is pretty, it's pretty easy. It's a formula, and the formula is, I am. And you fill in the blank, three words, pretty much three words, right? I am kind, I am happy, I am I love, I am lovable, I am worthy, I am confident, I am successful, they need to be things that you believe, right, I wouldn't say I am thin. If I don't believe that, I don't even know that that's actually truthfully, that's not a good I am statement to have as part of your positive self talk, I am kind, I can see that most of the days, I am successful, I can say that some of the days, I am worthy. Sometimes I can say that. But come up with your statement, your positive self talk, that is something you can believe when you start seeing more positive things, you're gonna feel more positive about yourself. There are I don't know what there are some statistics. And I don't remember quite what they are. But there are statistics around about how many negative thoughts we have in a day, we have so many repeated negative thoughts. And if you spent time kind of contemplating all the negative things, you say, there would be a large amount of them probably 1000s, having more time to spend thinking about or stating the positive is going to increase that self esteem. And it's going to help you feel better. So that is the first strategy is have more positive self talk helps increase self esteem. The second strategy is let go of perfection. Perfection is this needing to be perfect, needing to do it right needing to do it a certain way. And we will never meet that bar. That bar is unreachable. Perfectionism is not it's not anything we can attain, you're never going to be perfect. So kind of like I think let's just let that one go. And acknowledge that I am the best I am. Right more positive self talk, I am the best me I can be. But when we start having this idea of perfectionism, that we literally can't reach, we're setting ourselves up, to not feel good about ourselves, right. And that's where our self esteem starts going low. So let go of perfectionism. Allowing your life to be messy and imperfect. And just the way that it is, is really a way of settling into being human, and to being who you really are. Because perfectionism is a bar that you cannot reach. And third strategy to increase self esteem is to forgive yourself. We've talked about this before, about forgiveness. And I think in terms of increasing self esteem, it's so so so powerful. Forgive yourself for not being perfect. Forgive yourself for not doing everything you think you should do. Forgive yourself for the negative things you've said about yourself. Forgiveness is this dial that turns you into being more accepting of yourself, and, and acknowledging that you're okay just the way that you are. So I forgive myself for whatever it is, is a great way to settle into increasing self esteem because it is the reality. And it is such a, you know, we have the six pillars, the six components to feed your soul. And one of those pillars is to have mindfulness. And to me forgiveness is part of that mindfulness of being really part of the universal flow. And forgiveness is part of that universal flow. We are into shaming all the time. And really the antidote to shaming is forgiveness. So I encourage you, I encourage you to be gentler with yourself and to forgive yourself as often as possible. In the end, notice where you're at with your self esteem. Is it low Is it high? Try one of these strategies have them be are doable have them be something that you focus on this next week. Use more self talk Lego perfection include forgiveness in every day, and start noticing if that number on the scale goes up on your self esteem from wherever the number is today, up higher and higher. These strategies really can increase your self esteem and It is a way to move out of focusing on your weight, focusing on having to be in weight loss and it puts you more in flow with your body and with your life. I encourage you to get into action around increasing your self esteem. And I want to know how it is for you. Send me an email, the email will be in the show notes. I would love to hear how this goes for you. Also, if you like our podcast, please like it, subscribe to it, tell your friends about it. We want to have as many people as possible listen to our podcasts to really focus on feeling better about themselves and feeling better about their lives. This is Kim McLaughlin from feed your soul with Kim podcast. I look forward to talking with you all next week. Bye