Ep #296: Your Weight and Your Worth

Hi! Today I’m talking with you about your weight and your worth.

So many of us have them tied together so when our weight changes, so does our self-worth.

Usually how it works is that when our weight goes up, our self-worth goes down and when our weight goes down, our self-worth goes up.

And what that means when your self-worth is going up or down is that your opinion of yourself goes up or down.

Your opinion about how valuable you are as a person, how valuable your thoughts, opinions, ideas, and actions are, how good of a person you are, and how much respect you think you deserve.

And when your self-worth is low, you might not value yourself, your body, your ideas and opinions, your actions, what you do, and you might think you’re not a good person, or as good of a person, and you might not respect yourself or respect your body.

And when you’re thinking less of yourself like that, you’re going to feel emotionally lower, emotionally more negative and down, because your thoughts cause you to feel the emotions you feel, and when you feel low, negative, and down, you are not going to be showing up as your best self.

Those are the times when you’re more prone to inaction than action, when you’re less likely to engage in self-care, to work on your goals, to work on yourself, and to become better.

Those aren’t motivating emotions, those are emotions that will bring you down and hold you back from doing what you truly want to be doing.

So when your self-worth goes down, so will your emotions and your actions.

Then, you might look at what you’re doing, you look at your actions and inactions, and use that as evidence to prove how worthless you are.

That’s when you might be like, “Look at how lazy I am, look at how little I’m doing, look at how unmotivated I am, look at how fat I am, I’m worthless.”

And then the cycle continues! You think poorly of yourself, so you feel poorly, and you act poorly, so you think poorly, you feel poorly, you act poorly, and so on and so on.

So how do you get out of this?

The people who are tying their worth to their weight are going to think that they have to lose weight to feel emotionally and do better.

They think they have to lose weight to be better in general, to be more worthy, to be more valuable.

But how are you supposed to lose weight and better yourself when you feel so crappy? How are you supposed to do it when your emotions day after day are driving you to do nothing?

It’s going to be really, really hard.

And that’s why so many people don’t do it.

They want to change their body so they can feel and do better and be better and be more worthy and valuable but that’s not the way to do it.

The way to feel, do, and be better is to change your self-talk, to change how you speak to yourself, and to change how you determine your worth and value.

And yes, you determine your worth and value.

If you think your worth is determined by how much you weigh, it’s because you’re choosing to determine it that way.

And it’s not your fault that you have been doing that.

It’s what we’re taught.

We’re taught that being thinner makes you more valuable, more worthy of so many things like love, success, attention, admiration, good things, so many things.

We see it happen all the time in the media, in movies and on tv, in our day to day lives, in how we see people are treated and spoken to, and especially for those of us who have been in both thinner and bigger bodies, we’ve seen the difference for ourselves.

We see how thinner people, in lots of circumstances, are getting better treatment than people in bigger bodies.

And when we see it, we begin to internalize it.

We see how other people get treated, we see how we’re treated, we see how we and other people are talked to, and we then start doing the same things to ourselves too.

We then talk to ourselves in a certain way because we think that’s how we should be talked to, since that’s what’s been shown to us.

And we also believe what other people are saying.

We’re doing all of this instead of thinking for ourselves, deciding for ourselves, and having our own opinions.

Just because society thinks a certain way doesn’t mean that we as individuals have to think that way too.

And just because someone else doesn’t see your worth, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Just because someone else thinks you’re less worthy and valuable because of the size of your body doesn’t mean that you are in fact less worthy and valuable.

If they think that, it’s their opinion. It’s not fact.

And you don’t have to share their opinion.

So often people think they have a lower worth, lower value, because society or another person views them that way. But again, their opinions are not fact. Their opinions are not the universal metric for worthiness.

They are just one way of thinking, one perspective.

And the truth is, there are going to be so many other people who understand that your worth is the same no matter how big or small your body is.

And if more people adopt that perspective and opinion, then society as a whole will change.

But until it does, and until more people recognize the unchanging worth of people in all sizes of bodies, then we have to be the ones who live into that change we want to see.

And I bet you’re already doing that with other people in your life.

You’re already seeing their unchanging worth in their changing bodies.

And you are not different from them.

Their worth doesn’t change if their body gets bigger and neither does yours.

So just because someone may have expressed in some way that you are less worthy and less valuable if you have a bigger body, that doesn’t mean that you are.

We all have different ideas of what’s worthy and what’s valuable.

Some people are going to love you and value you so highly no matter what, and some people might not.

And it will be so much easier for you to move on from the people who don’t if you are also one of those people who value you and see you as worthy no matter what you body looks like.

And you can be one of those people because you decide your value, not those other people you may have been listening to.

It’s important to know that value is subjective. While one person may see a purse that’s priced at $500 and think it’s totally worth it, another may think it’s not.

And neither person is right or wrong, it’s just their opinion. The purse just is and the people decide it’s value. The person who created it decides it’s value, so does the person selling it, and so does the person buying it. And they may each have a different opinon.

And just because another person thinks it’s less valuable doesn’t mean that it actually is.

And to that person who think’s it’s worth what it’s priced at, that purse may be extremely valuable to them. They may see it as high worth.

And here’s a more relevant to this topic example.

Say you have a picture from a moment in your life that you treasure. That picture is extremely valuable to you, maybe even priceless. But for another person, it has no value.

Them thinking it has no value doesn’t take away your perception of its value to you.

And, that picture you find so valuable might get torn, or spilled on, or faded, and it is still worth so much to you.

It doesn’t matter what’s happened to it, it’s value hasn’t changed because there’s more to the picture than what it looks like. It doesn’t have to be a perfect picture in order for you to find value in it.

The same goes for your body.

Even if your body changes, that doesn’t mean that anything about your value and worth changes.

You are still a good person, you are still lovable, you still matter, you are still deserving of what you want, and you are still you.

When it comes to you as a person, your value and worth aren’t any less because your outside appearance looks different.

So choose to see your worth, and value yourself, no matter what society tells you and no matter what those other people tell you.

You can disagree, and you’ll feel so much better when you do.

And when you feel better, you’ll do better, and you’ll be more of the person you want to be.

There is no factual determinant, no universal metric, for a person’s worth. Only what we decide for ourselves.

And what you do and what you look like are not who you are.

Who you are is who you are, and you are a person full of worth and value.

You don’t need to earn your worth, you already have it.

Choose to value yourself and to see your worth, no matter what anyone else thinks and no matter what you look like on the outside.

Bye bye.