tips and tricks for how to love yourself

I asked you all on my instagram (@victoriashaz if you want to join the fun) what advice you would like to see from me. There was an immediate and RESOUNDING response of “self love”.

Which, yeah, I get that.

So I made a podcast episode about it, but I know some of you prefer to read…so here we are.

Welcome to the definitive list of “things you can do to learn to love yourself”. I’ve said this before, but this isn’t an easy process. It’s hard work. It requires rewiring your brain to believe something that you’ve struggled with in the past.

But do you know what else it is? Worth it.

I’m not going to drone on. Let’s just get going:

Read, A Lot

Seems obvious, right? But I’m serious. My first foray into the world of self love and body positivity was through intersectional feminism in university. I read the Beauty Myth and watched a Laci Green video and it literally felt like my brain was imploding. I could feel my brain rewiring to understand that society doesn’t WANT you to like yourself. The most radical thing you can do is to challenge that. To tell society that you love yourself despite the fact that they don’t think you should. I watched documentaries, read body positivity books, educated myself on intersectional feminism and then started doing the work. But before that, came education.

Listen to podcasts, read books, watch documentaries, and discuss it with your friends. Find out how they’ve been affected. Expand your mind and learn about nuance.

Follow the Right People

Social media is pervasive. It’s a massive part of all of our lives, whether we want it to be or not.

In the 90s and 00s when I was growing up, I didn’t have a say in the media I consumed. J14 and Seventeen magazine printed articles about clothing certain bodies should and shouldn’t wear, it would airbrush and photoshop bodies to be smaller. Curvy bodies weren’t portrayed on TV as anything but negative or a joke.

Social media lets you control the people you see when you’re scrolling (for the most part). We can follow bodies that look like ours, and let me tell you… that helped me immensely.

That’s where I started, but it’s not the final step. What’s even more important than following people who look like you who also love their bodies, you need to follow people that look differently that also love their bodies. A person that looks different and is also beautiful will help you realize that all bodies are perfect just as they are.

It’s important to not just love your body as it is right now, but to learn to be able to love it through all of the changes it might have.

Daily Practices & Actions You Can Take Today

You can follow everyone you can, you can read a million books, but without doing the work to actually change your mindset, you’re not going to progress as much as you can on the self love front.

I want to caveat right away — you don’t NEED to love your body. Body neutrality is just as valuable and can be an effective tool for those struggling with self love.

But, if you’re looking to heal your body relationship and learn to love it, here are the things I did, and the things I recommend for you:

Mantras — This was a big thing in 2016/17 and I was a FULL supporter on the bandwagon of mantras. I don’t need them as much now, but a specific mantra was a lifeline for me as I started to heal my relationship with my image.

I stole it from Ashley Graham, it was “I am bold, I am brilliant, I am beautiful”. I think what struck a chord with me the most here was that it was highlighting two things I already believed about myself. I knew I was bold, I knew I was brilliant and smart and funny and kind, I knew all of these things about me. The only one I didn’t believe, was in my beauty.

For me, saying something positive about two things I already believed allowed me to convince myself more of the final aspect that I was working on believing. In time, it did.

It’s Your Home — Once I started believing in my mantras, I started to see a change in my mindset but was still having a lot of critical thoughts about my body. I started to remind myself of how my body is my home. It’s the home I’ll have for the longest period of time. And like homes we live in, the home of my body will change. If I wanted to live happily, I knew I needed to find peace in the home I was going to have.

Treat your body like a friend — Something that really helped me was acknowledging when I said something negative about my body, and then challenging it. Would I like it if someone said that to a friend? Would I like it if a friend said it about themselves? No. So why was I saying it about myself.

With time, and a LOT of faking it until I made it, I eventually believed in the beauty of my body. It took a lot of work. A lot of adjusting the content I consumed (no more magazines!), and a lot of rewiring my brain over many years.

And guess what — if you’re healing or healed, you will still have bad body image days. Sometimes your body will change and you’ll need to work on this again.

All of that, and I mean all of it, is ok. Once you’ve got the tools, you always know how to use them. It’s like riding a bike.

Good luck, work hard. I believe in you.