Being fully connected in our bodies is key to being fully alive - open and available to the whole experience of life. 

Everything in your life actually starts with your own body and how you feel about yourself. 

The body is the container where life happens, it’s our connection to the experience of life and it’s the vessel that holds our history. 

It is highly overlooked how our body affects our experience of life, how we think, act, feel and how we show up. If we don’t take care of our body, and we are living with less-than-optimal support, it can be crucial for not only our health and our experience of life, but also our personality and our personal reality. 

The reason for this is that if we feel like shit, it will negatively affect our thinking. Everyone knows that being «hangry» is a real thing, to the extent that it has even become a well-known expression…

There is a universal understanding among us that when we get too hungry, low in energy and uncomfortable in our body, this negatively affects our mood through feeling the discomfort in our body, as well as being emotionally uncomfortable and less resilient. 

This of course also affects our thinking and mood in a negative way, and we tend to be less patient, more reactive and see the world through a more aggravated lens. The sum of this gives us a poor mental state and therefore - the expression of being hangry. 

Many people carry extra weight, aches, pains and illnesses in the body, and this often comes from the way we live our life. 

There’s  not many things we need to do consistently every single day to take care of ourselves, our body and our health: Regular and healthy meals, enough water to hydrate and not an overabundance of other caffeinated or artificial beverages, enough movement, enough sleep, resting in an awake state, time in nature or at least outside and stress management has the ability to bring us a long way.

But why is it that this is so hard to succeed with in the long run? 

It all starts with our relationship to ourselves and to our life, and that directly affects our relationship to our own body and how we show up and take care of it.

It can be the difference between using 20 minutes to cook a quick, healthy and homemade meal, or sitting around scrolling on your phone while 20 minutes for a frozen pizza to get done in the oven… life is about these conscious, intentional choices.

It can be planning your meals and grocery shopping, so that you have groceries for healthy and supportive meals available when you need it.  

It can be getting up from your chair at work, going for a walk and stretching 5 minutes every hour.

It can be switching 4 cups of coffee down to two, and then carrying a bottle of water with you everywhere you go. 

It can be wrapping up the evening at an earlier hour instead of lying in bed scrolling on your phone, or watching one more episode on Netflix, and getting one more hour of sleep at night.

So why is it so hard to manage to make these changes on a consistent basis? The answer to this lies in how our brain and thinking works when we are not taking care of ourselves and our body. And this comes down to both our stress-management, our mental skills and the relationship we have with ourselves and our body. 

If you have a habit of loathing yourself in negative self-talk and self-shaming, it will become even harder to make the shift and take care of ourselves. 

Imagine: If it was a person you REALLY despised in every way, would you then do your best to show up for this person and lovingly take care of him or her? 

Probably not…  

And this is the same attitude we walk around with regarding our own body.

What you do with and to your body, says so much about what’s happening inside of you and how it is to be you…

Many people want to change their life and their body, but it is extremely common that they try to start in the wrong place only to end up frustrated with the process and assigning blame on why things do not work.

When we want to create change, many people will start with specific actions and habits, such as working out, starting on a diet, less alcohol and so on. 

But these changes normally only stay around for a short while… 

The problem with these approaches is many and they are very often based on an outside-in approach, where you start doing something because society tells you that you should. 

But this is literally setting you up for failure because even when we do the right things for the wrong reasons, we tend to approach things in an extreme fashion, taking it in leaps and bounds, ignoring the holistic process of creating lasting change, and we end up NOT taking care of ourselves and supporting our bodies. 

In addition, if we start there, we haven’t worked on the relationship to ourselves and our body, and we haven’t evolved on the inside, so that means that we have tried to initiate change from our present personality only to wonder why we do not see the results we seek. 

This leads us straight into the vicious diet cycle, where we start a process “all in”, only to throw the baby out with the bathwater as soon as things don’t go according to plan or that we feel it’s not worth it… Only to feel cast adrift and off the wagon for some time and when we feel awful again reaching threshold, we start again on another cycle. 

And this habitual cycle is often rooted in the relationship we have with our body and having a negative body image. 

We try to shame ourselves into creating change, and we feel terrible about our own body due to this constant cycle of self-shaming. 

When we feel bad being in our own body due to our relationship with ourselves, and how we aren’t taking care of it, then this becomes a foundation for negative thoughts that it’s all too easy to add another brick to. 

Negative thinking gives us negative emotions, and negative emotions give us negative mental states. 

Negative mental states will over time shape our personality, how we view ourselves, and our personality creates our personal reality. 

• Feeling bad in and towards our body = negative thoughts
• Negative thinking = negative  emotions
• Negative emotions = state of being
• State of being = personality 
• Personality = personal reality

So therefore, if we want to create lasting change in our body, health and life, more of the old won’t give you the something new you crave. 

We have to start with the body and work on your relationship with your body if you want to create permanent changes. 

We have to grow and evolve into a new personality if we want to have a new reality. 

Otherwise, you’ll remain stuck in the cycle, repeating the same patterns and nothing will ever change in your life.