You Can’t Hate Yourself To Healing: Finding Sustainable Health That Lasts

You Can’t Hate Yourself to Healing

I see it all too often in my practice: people try to hate themselves into healing. This hatred can take on many faces, often revealed by how we talk to ourselves and how we treat ourselves during a health crisis. Finding health requires sustainable change, love, and grace.

I’m sorry to say, but we can’t use willpower or bully ourselves into making healthier choices and creating sustainable habits that stick. We can’t hate ourselves into slurping down a not-so-tasty cup of herbs every day. We can’t hate ourselves into healing.

It took me years to figure this out for myself. My own health journey has been long and winding, and the majority of it was fueled from a place of hate. I wanted to lose weight because I hated myself, my body, and how I felt. I wanted to rid myself of anxiety and depression because I hated that I struggled with those things. I would be angry with myself for not being someone or somewhere different. I would punish and bully myself into making really hard changes that wouldn’t stick. And when I inevitably fell off the wagon and the changes didn’t stick, I met myself with contempt and more hatred, fueling a vicious cycle that ultimately did not serve me.

I spent years stuck in this loop, engaging in dangerous and unhealthy practices because I hated my body. It took a lot of self-reflection and discovery to realize I could never achieve the health and happiness I was seeking from a place of hate.

It wasn’t until I shifted my mindset and rewrote the relationship I had with myself that I started to find true happiness and health. Instead of moving my body because I have to I move my body because I want too, it feels good and I want more good feelings. Instead of nourishing my body because I hate how it is, I nourish my body because I love everything about it. This newfound awareness and driving force allows me to create and maintain sustainable habits. I now orient myself to find what feels full of light and love, and that is usually the healthy choice. I get excited to take my herbs, my supplements, and do my daily health regimen because it feels good, and I crave more of that. With this as my compass I find the health I seek. 

I often want to know WHY my clients want to make the changes they seek. Why they want to get healthy, what that looks like, and what it means for them. I get a varying degree of answers—sometimes out of love, but often out of hate. I find people tend to punish themselves for being where they are. I have to show them that it doesn’t work.

You can’t use willpower, bullying, or hatred to find health. Because health is ultimately our want to feel good. And these tactics never feel good in the long run. Whatever health situation we are navigating—be it migraines or weight, mental health challenges or diabetes—we all have the same want: to feel good.

In order to achieve our health outcomes, we must shift our perspective and start loving ourselves where we are and how we are now. When we do things out of love, they are sustainable, they feel good, they stick, and they last. It’s the secret sauce that will allow you to actually make and sustain the changes you want to make.

When we shift to a place of love, we are sitting in a place of goodness. We do things because they make us feel good; we keep going because there’s light and grace in our approach. We are willing to give things up because we sit in a place of hope, possibility, and abundance.

It’s the difference between forcing yourself to work out and naturally and truly wanting to work out. It’s the difference between feeling deprived because you can’t eat your favorite food anymore and feeling empowered because you turn down your favorite food to cultivate more of that yummy good feeling you have going.

Our health journey is full of glimpses—glimpses of what it’s like to feel good, to get a win, to achieve a health milestone. We naturally want more of that because it feels good. We will gravitate towards making healthier choices when we are doing it from a place of love, grace, and understanding.

If you find yourself struggling to make sustainable changes, get curious about how you’ve been treating yourself. Where is the driving force behind your desire to make these changes? Is it stemming from hate or from love?

Start getting curious and zeroing in on how you’re feeling as you navigate all things related to your health. Trust that if you do it out of love, you’ll find the health, freedom, and authenticity you’ve been seeking.

Namaste,