2) Acknowledge the Real Truth
Recognize that your past negative experiences could be a recipe of other people's opinions, labels, and insecurities. Negative messages may have been borrowed from another person's projections and are not yours to own. Create awareness with a mature and objective new light by sitting down with paper and pencil in hand.
Take a few minutes to journal the repetitive messages that you have often found yourself thinking in regards to your body. Then take a look at your writings and ask yourself, "Are these messages true for me today?" and "Do they have to be?" You will most likely find that they are either rooted in the past and do not have any relevance in the now, or are no longer what you will accept. Release the need to hold on to the old story.
3) Calibrate Your Mind-Body Connection
Be thankful of your body and show it gratitude by speaking kindly to it. Conceding to the false internal messages of the past is agreeing with them and keeping them alive. Practice re-training your brain with positive affirmations. Sit down in a meditative position. Breathe with the intention of connecting your emotions with the inhalation and exhalation of your breath. Repeat for just five minutes a day, "I love and accept my body." In the beginning you may find that you feel an adversity to accepting this affirmation as truth. For so long you've been 'feeding the animal' (so to speak). Keep at it; give yourself a new belief and it will become your truth.
4) Change your Vibration
Accept that your body is your body. Do so in the same loving way that you accept your best friend for who she is, and who she is not. You embrace both her best attributes and her faults, and love her with all your heart anyway.
The key to applying this principle to your body image, and making the shift from criticism to acceptance, is by focusing merely on your health. You can take your health to a new level by actively choosing to increase your heart rate, mustering up endorphins with new activities, take a yoga class and become more connected with your body from a new perspective. Move your body in new ways and surprise yourself with what you can do in the body you have.
By embracing what your body is capable of, you will find yourself loving it more. You'll shift your energies' vibration from the inside out and people will begin to respond to you differently as well. When you love and accept your body, so do others.
Sign up for a fitness class.