Welcome back! Yesterday we started our list of the 5 things you can do to help cultivate more self love and self acceptance. If you missed it you can read the first two items here. Today we will finish off our list. Lets get going!
3. Moderate Your Physical Activity:
Your body is designed for movement. This is a simple fact that many of us have tainted with ideas of 'exercise' and 'fitness' and all the idealized body image issues we have in our culture. To me, the idea of working out to get fit or to look a certain way has totally taken the joy out of physical activity. When you move, your body produces endorphins. Endorphins make you feel good. This is plain and simple science. Moving your body in a fashion that you enjoy on a regular basis is a fundamental part of any self care plan in my opinion. So many of us neglect physical activity because we have associated it with being uncomfortable, with not living up to body image standards and with something you 'have to' or 'should' do. Or we use it as a torture tool - killing ourselves in workouts we hate in order to try to achieve some sort of goal. 
I am going to encourage you to look at physical activity as a natural anti-depressant, anti-anxiety and self love tool. Physical activity is now something you use to express yourself, to release emotion, to show you that you love you, and to get a natural high. Choose an activity you actually like doing. I do not care if it is not what you think you should be doing for your health, fitness or aesthetic. You must choose something you like or this will just be another thing you use to punish yourself. Choose something you love, and decide to do it at least 3 times a week for 30 minutes. Commit to doing your physical activity with the mindset that you are doing it because you love yourself. You love your body, and you love what it does for you. Start to notice how your body moves you around this planet, how it serves you all day long. Really get inside of your own body and feel what it feels like to move with joy. This kind of joyful movement will help you to develop a new level of respect for your body, which is an essential step on this self love journey.
4. Get A Self Love Journal:
Writing down the things you love about yourself on a daily basis is one of the most powerful things you can do to start cultivating a loving relationship with yourself. You can think of this as writing love notes to yourself. Think about how rich and loving a relationship between two people would be if they took the time to write notes to one another on a daily basis expressing what they loved and respected in each other. Pretty amazing I would think.
You deserve this kind of loving attention, and you deserve it from yourself.
Start with where you are at - what you honestly feel in this moment. If that is that you love your left big toe, go with that. Commit to sitting and writing for at least 5 minutes a day - and to getting one or two things down each time you sit. This will get easier and easier as you go.
5. Re-Define Your Relationship With Food:
Lastly, you can use your relationship with food as a tool to help you express love to yourself, and to re-connect with your nurturing side. Food is nourishment, and it should feel like nourishment. It should not feel like a punishment or a reward. I am going to suggest to you something very radical right now - and I want you to just bare with me instead of fully rejecting this idea. 
I want you to decide right now that there are no foods in the world that are 'off limits' to you. No bad foods. No good foods. Just food. I want you to decide that for the next month you are going to allow yourself to eat whatever you want. I know your first thought is that you are going to sit and eat a packet of cookies a day every day for the rest of your life and become as big as a house if you do this. I can tell you, this wont happen. This wont happen because the second part of this exercise is that you must be fully conscious while you eat. You must tune in, taste your food, smell your food, be present while you are eating it. No eating while you read or watch tv or text. You must sit with your food and be totally in the moment. Then you must take into account how your food makes you feel. Be aware of how it feels in your body, what it does to your mind and emotions. As you develop this connection with your food and how it makes you feel, you are going to be developing a connection between your emotional state and what you desire to eat. You are going to notice how the foods you eat affect you, and you are going to be able to make more loving choices as you develop this awareness. Chances are, you will eat the packet of cookies one or two times, and then notice that how they make you feel does not really counteract the pleasure of eating them.
As you take away the "can" and "can't" around your food, you will start to develop your own personal sense for what feels nourishing and loving in your body, and what doesn't.
From here, you will be so much better able to truly nourish yourself with food. This will lead you down the path where you can better nourish yourself in general. This is self love 🙂 So, what do you think? Do you feel these tools will help you? Are you willing to give a few of them a try? <3
