Loving your body means listening to your body

Thank you Gina for your amazing post today for what I didn't even know was National Love Your Body Day! For those of you who are too busy and/or lazy to click on that link, here are the two main take-aways from that article I think everyone including myself should listen to:

1) "Our bodies are always talking to us and it's up to us to actually stop and listen to what they're saying."

I totally agree with this and I think that this is the most important thing of all. We think we know our bodies but half the time we are too busy listening to our egos to figure out what are physical bodies are actually asking for. Most people ask me why I went vegan, and even more people ask me why I went raw... the honest answer is, my body told me to. There's nothing more to it than that. I just woke up one morning and knew that's what I had to do. It was only after I became vegan and more recently raw that I looked into all the additional environmental/health/ethical/physical perks I was getting for making those choices.

It's also much more than that, listen to your body and it will tell you when it's actually hungry and more often when it's thirsty. It will tell you want nutrients you may be lacking that will draw you towards certain foods (heavier foods vs. fruits, veggies versus protein, etc.) Your body knows! Listen!

2) "Not only do we need to be grateful for all the physical beauty we each possess, but also take the time to care fo the one body we have."

More so than loving every body type the human form is capable of creating (because I will stand by belief that if you love yourself, you should not nor cannot let yourself have an unhealthy body), it really is about taking care of yourself and as Gina said, "loving" by "nurturing". You should love yourself, and that doesn't mean doing whatever the hell you want because you love yourself, but taking care of that one body you have.

I'm going to go all metaphysical on you again, but we only have one body, it was given to us by whatever chance/universe/religious entity you choose to believe in. Whatever way you choose to look at it, at the end of the day we each got this incredible gift. When you receive something, you don't just trash it right? You keep it safe, you want it to be as beautiful/functional for as long as possible, and you can achieve that by doing something very basic: loving yourself through personal respect and care. 

How to achieve those things is simple for me:

1) Eat right

2) Exercise

3) Pursue hobbies/activities that keep you spiritually/emotionally at peace (whether that's spending time with your friends and family, practicing yoga/meditation, dancing, drawing, going out clubbing, whatever...) 

It took me a while to fully understand that, I don't fully grasp it yet but I'm trying. Everyone is on their own journey and we each take a different amount of time to understand and realize certain things and that's totally fine. But still, however you want to do it, everyone should take the time to stop and just be. And whoever or whatever you find you are in those moments you take for yourself, be happy that's what you are right now because that's where you are, and it's part of the steps of who you get to be tomorrow.