Stay Healthy—Love Yourself!

Previously, when I attended a Weight Watchers meeting we talked about ways to love yourself (and NOT the Justin Bieber kind of “Love Yourself”!). We did a fun name acronym activity.  We were supposed to come up with a positive attribute or descriptive word for each letter of our first name. It was funny how so many people had such a hard time with that.  They had a hard time either coming up with words that were positive to describe themselves, or they didn’t want to say them out loud because they felt like they were being arrogant or bragging.  Our leader was trying to encourage them that this is the right time to brag and that it was actually helpful to love yourself.

I wanted to yell out, “Don’t you know that God thinks that of you and sees you that way?!”  Then I realized that I wasn’t reading mine out loud either.  Oops.  It can be hard to love yourself sometimes and then especially to show that you love yourself out loud!  We’ve been trained not to speak highly of ourselves because we may come across as cocky and arrogant.  However, I think there are two ditches.  On the one side is the ditch where we ARE arrogant and speak and think too highly of ourselves.  This is obviously wrong.

“For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.” Romans 12:3 (NIV)

I like how the NLT translation of the verse reads though because it says “…Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us”.  It doesn’t say we can’t say or think good things about ourselves.  It just says we just need to give an honest evaluation by God’s measurement.  We need to see, think, and speak about ourselves based on how God sees us.  And guess what?  He does think we’re pretty great.  Therefore, we need to see ourselves as pretty great too! 

The other ditch is to speak badly of ourselves or to not speak at all (both in the same ditch).  This ditch is wrong too because when we speak or think negatively about ourselves it’s an insult to God.  Plus it’s just incorrect information because God says that we are HIGHLY valuable.  There should be a happy medium between the two ditches.  God WANTS you to love yourself and to have a healthy self-image. 

Back to the name acronym activity…Not only was the activity a good way to see ourselves how God sees us, but there was something else pretty cool about the positive words we came up with to describe ourselves.  We were able to see and discuss how we could tie in some of those same descriptive words and qualities into using them to succeed in weight loss (i.e. “teachable”, “resilient”, “achiever”, etc.) .  Really though, these same attributes could be used to succeed in any of our goals or to just become a better person altogether.  Our positive characteristics are built within to help us succeed.  God put them there.  He puts things into our hearts to accomplish His purposes.

“For God has put it into their hearts to accomplish his purpose…” Revelation 17:17a (NIV) 

Spiritual aspect aside, there is also a practical and scientific side to positive self-talk.  There is a connection between physical and mental health.  Studies show that positive psychological well-being can be directly linked to our health and can even protect against cardiovascular disease (*see footnote).  We can actually increase a positive psychological well-being through positive activities.  Even simple exercises and activities that promote positive self-talk can affect our health (**see footnote).  Therefore simple activities like the name acronym that we completed in my Weight Watchers meeting can have a beneficial impact not only on our emotional well-being but also our health! 

There’s something else I’d like you to see about loving yourself and positive self-talk based on what we’ve learned…

So we learned that positive activities and self-talk make us HAPPY.  We learned that being HAPPY keeps us HEALTHY.  We also learned that positive self-talk ties into our success, thus making us PROSPEROUS.  So you see…positive self-talk makes you Happy, Healthy & Prosperous! 🙂

Take a Practical Step to Love Yourself and Stay Healthy:

• Today’s practical step is going to be very simple. I’d like you to do the name acronym activity as a way to love yourself.  Get a piece of paper and write your name out.  Then write a positive characteristic or attribute that describes you for each letter (i.e. NAME: N-Natural, A-Admired, M-Meticulous, E-Excellent).  Be thoughtful about it too. If you’re feeling really daring, go ahead and do your full name! 

I’d also love for you to share them with us—Leave a comment with your positive name acronym and/or share them on social media with a link to this post.  I’ll put mine in the comments too if you want to see what I came up with!  

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If you have benefited from this post or if you know anyone that could benefit from this, please pay it forward and share this post with them via the sharing links below! “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 (NIV) 

*Source: Boehm, Julia K.; Kubzansky, Laura D. “The heart’s content: The association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health.” Psychological Bulletin, Vol 138(4), Jul 2012, 655-691. 

**Source: Lyubomirsky, Sonja, and Kristin Layous. “How Do Simple Positive Activities Increase Well-Being?.” Current Directions In Psychological Science (Sage Publications Inc.) 22.1 (2013): 57-62.