DIANA: Hey. Hey, everybody. Welcome. I hope you are all doing well, feeling great, and I hope you’ve been working on, um, loving yourself. And speaking of loving yourself, sometimes there’s themes when I’m coaching people, and recently there has been a theme, and I’ve been helping several clients with loving their bodies, which is something that I think is super helpful and beneficial. And it goes a long way in accepting yourself and accepting others. Some people think I haven’t had to work on this myself, but trust me, I have. I’ve got the pooch belly and the stretch marks, and I’ve got some chronic pain issues and wrinkles, and I’ve noticed my arms flap around a little bit in the wind in the summertime. If I’m wearing short sleeves, there’s things I don’t love. It’s funny, when I was young and probably had a body that today I would think was super easy to love, if I had my 20 year old body, I’d think it was perfect. I know. But back then, I struggled even more to love my body than I do today with all the things going on. And that is because it was never about my body. It has always been and will only be about my mind. And it’s the same for you, too. Loving your body is a mind thing, and that’s awesome because it means you don’t have to change anything about your body to love it. And the more you love your body, the more fun and easy it is to take care of it.
One of the clients I was talking to said she’s finding it easier to eat better and exercise all the time. The more she practices loving her body, the easier it gets to do the good things for her body that she wants to do. She told me she was thinking of her body as her home. Someone had told her, I don’t know, maybe you’ve heard the line before, but it’s something like, your body is the only home you’re going to have here on earth. And she adopted that. And she’s like, this is my home. This is the only one I’m going to get, the one and only, and I want to take care of it. For some reason, when she was talking about that, it had my brain jump to thinking about my dad and his cars. My dad had decent cars when I was a kid. I only really remember two of the main ones at least when I was a kid age. Well, he did have a sports car for just a little while. I think it was a Pontiac Trans Am, brown tea top. He loved to, uh or I loved to have him open the tea top, and I would stand up on the seat, and he would drive slowly around the neighborhood. Anyway, after that, he had two cars I remember really well. He had a Buick, and then he had a Cadillac. And he didn’t buy them new. He always bought them slightly used so he wouldn’t have to be the one to take the hit on the depreciation. He’d let the guy who had the car before him take the hit. But they looked new when he got them, and he wanted to keep them that way. These were the only two cars I really remember from when I was a kid, because he drove them to, like, 200,000 miles before he would go get another one.
It takes a lot of years to put 200,000 miles on a car. He always took them in for their scheduled maintenance. He chose the premium gas, and he washed them a lot. And in summer and spring and fall, they would be washed by hand. And I was often the person washing his cars by hand. Don’t worry, it wasn’t, uh, forced child labor. He paid me and my sisters $3 an hour for the odd jobs that we would do around the house. And, hey, washing the car was one I liked. I got to play with the hose, and there was soap, and it was fun. The waxing I didn’t like as much. Well, putting the wax on okay. But I remember hours spent on the concrete driveway with a, uh, towel in one hand and a toothbrush in the other hand to get the wax off the car. Yes, a, uh, toothbrush. He had several in the garage with the waxing stuff, because the toothbrush was the best tool to get the little bits of wax out of the crevices. Don’t leave any wax gunk behind, right? This was a man who really cared about taking care of his vehicles. And I have to tell you, those cars ran and looked like new when they hit 200,000 miles. No rust, no repairs needed. Beautiful. His cars got him from place to place. His cars could be relied on. His cars didn’t break down. They worked well because he cared about them. He appreciated them and what they could do for him, and he wanted them to last. So guess what I’m going to do with the beautiful GMC Acadia that my dad left to me. I got it with about 26,000 miles on it, and I’m going to drive that thing to 200,000 miles. I’m, uh, not even halfway there after four years. And guess how I’m going to ensure that this car makes it to 200,000 miles and gets me from place to place and that it can be relied on and that it doesn’t break down.
I am going to care about this car. I am going to appreciate this car. I’m going to continue to feel grateful for it and treasure it the way I do. It was a thoughtful and special gift from my father and I am so grateful. And just like my vehicle was a special gift from my father, your body is a special gift from your father, your Heavenly Father. It’s the body you rely on to get you from place to place. And when we don’t love our body, it is really hard to be grateful and appreciate it. Have you noticed that? Have you ever seen someone’s car that they’re not grateful for the car and they don’t appreciate it? You open the door, there’s soda cans in the backseat, it’s dirty. It’s all get out. Rust puff of smoke comes out of the exhaust when they take off. The windows are dirty. And that sound wait, what is that sound? Is that the belt squeaking? And it makes a kind of grinding noise that couldn’t be good. Uh, that’s what it sounds like when you don’t take care of your car. They obviously wouldn’t even think about using a toothbrush to take care of their car. They wouldn’t even be waxing it. It might just fall apart if they tried to wax. With all that rust, no appreciation, no love. It’s obvious they don’t care about their car. I don’t know how long you hope to live if we want to make it like I want to make it to my nineties and I don’t want smoke puffing out of my exhaust when I get there. I want to run well.
So the question with loving our body is, do you care about the amazing vehicle your Heavenly Father gave you to get around in, to live in and move in and exist in? This body of yours gets you from your bed to the bathroom. This body of yours keeps pumping blood through your veins so your organs and vessels can get the oxygen and nutrients they need. This body of yours has lungs that breathe in and out and in and out to keep you alive. And you don’t even need to think about it. It just does it automatically. And I’m going to end this podcast with, uh, an exercise I do with some of my clients. Okay? I’ll do it with you. It’s a letter to my body. But before we do that, let’s think about a different way to think about our body. And I’m offering this to you because it might help loosen you up from stuck thoughts about your that you have about your body that aren’t nice. They probably sound something like this my belly is too big. My butt is too fat. My boobs are too small. My boobs are too big. I need a facelift. My hair is too thin. My hair is too curly. My body isn’t good enough. I look gross. All of those. You guys, they’re just thoughts.
None of them are facts. You don’t believe me? Rewind find one that is a fact. They’re not. They are pure perception, not reality. But when we think, then we get stuck. You know what yours are. You know what’s swirling around in your head that makes it hard to love your body. We want to try to shake them loose. So let me help you think about your body in a more scientific way. The only reason you are critical about your body is because you think it’s supposed to look or operate a certain way, and it isn’t. But you’re thinking it should be different from a place of opinion. It is not based on science at all. And who knows where you get your opinion from? The COVID of Cosmo, TV magazines? I don’t know. But by the way, let me give a quick kudos to, um, Old Navy, Victoria’s Secrets. Who else? That Soap, um, Dove Soap, and all the other companies that are showing more realistic representations of people. Awesome. Okay. But anyway, whether or not you’ve ever been on the COVID of a magazine or you would never be considered for the COVID of magazine.
Everybody has skin. Scientifically, we’re covered with skin. It’s an organ. All human bodies have it. I looked to see what Google said about it. The skin is the body’s largest organ, made of water and protein and fats and minerals. Your skin protects your body from germs and regulates body temperature. That’s what your skin is. That’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s not supposed to have stretch marks or not supposed to have stretch marks, or I mean, it’s supposed to have stretch marks because that’s how our skin, uh, expands to accommodate us. I mean, it’s doing what it’s supposed to. All right, here’s another thing. We have we have bones. You have bones. Bones are the structure. Okay? If we didn’t have bones, we’d just be a blob. Google says your bones make up the framework or I’m sorry, your bones are made up of a framework of a protein called collagen with a mineral called calcium phosphate. And that makes your framework hard and strong.
It’s just another thing in the body. I could do this for the whole body, the organs and the blood vessels and the veins and the nerves. You don’t want me to do that. But the reason I’m talking about it in this way is because so often we’re looking at our bodies and we’re like, I don’t like it, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. And I want to ask, why not? You don’t like having your skin? I like having my skin. It holds all my innards and all my goo in. I had arm surgery twice. I had a revision surgery, and I made the mistake of looking online at the surgery pictures. Have you ever looked at those or watched a documentary where there’s a surgery. Those pictures, when I looked it up, they’re burned in my head forever. Now, when you open up the skin on a body, it’s filled with goo and stuff in ligaments and bones and cartilage. Uh um, I remember in high school, my freshman year, we cut open a frog, and then I did advanced bio biology in, I don’t know, junior senior year, and we actually had to cut open a cat. If you haven’t done that, think about breaking apart a whole chicken or a turkey. Or if you’re a hunter or you have a hunter in your family taking a deer apart. Your body is the same stuff. That’s all it is. Do you look at a deer and you’re like, that one looks too skinny. That one looks too fat. That one the fur is not quite right.
We don’t do that because we haven’t trained our brain to do that. We’ve just trained our brain to do it for ourselves. I’m saying we don’t have to. Scientifically, we’re flesh and bones and cartilage and nerves and stuff and goo, and it’s supposed to be that way. And we have organs inside of us that filter toxins and digest food and turn it into fuel, and oxygen gets extracted from the air and pushed through our bodies. I mean, it’s a, uh, really cool operation. And these bodies house, uh, our brains and our souls, the essence of who you are is in this vehicle, this home. Your body, it houses your brain and your soul, which is that’s your soul is who you are, not your body. And your body still was fearfully and wonderfully made. God crafted your DNA so that the way your house looks to hold all those body systems in goo would be the way it looks the color of your eyes, the color of your hair. And he decided if you would have a big space between your two biggest toes, or if they would be smooshed tight together. He decided if your voice would be higher or lower or how tall you would be. He made your skin to stretch and grow and shrink when you had babies or when you put on or lost a few pounds. He decided if you’d have freckles or birthmarks. God did all that. He did that on purpose. He made you and your flesh and your bones and your goo exactly as it’s supposed to be to house your mind and your soul. Wow. Ah. Wow. And sometimes all we want to do is just say how terrible it is. Uh, wrong way to think about it. I am amazed and I am grateful for this body of mine, and I hope you are, too. Or you can be, or you can work towards it, or we’ve loosened up your thoughts a little bit today so that you can make some space to appreciate the magnificence of what it is. If you’ve really struggled to love your body, at least for today.
I hope you can find some moments where you can have appreciation and feel gratitude for what your body does for you, m? And let these moments grow. And from that love, from that appreciation, it will drive what we do. This is what inspires us to take good care of our bodies. And I appreciate my body, and it inspires me to take good, uh, care of it. I want that for you, too. And now, this is the exercise I do with my clients after they’ve been with me a few months. It’s a letter to my body. And if you want to imagine what you might say to yours, but here’s my letter to my body. Dear Body, we start with I appreciate I appreciate all the things you do that I never think about. Sometimes I take them for granted. But not today. Today I will appreciate how you breathe in and out continually, and I don’t even need to think about it. I notice how you stand with balance so I don’t fall over. Thank you. When I sleep, you keep everything running while I’m resting. My brain processes and files all the information of the day. And you alert me when things don’t feel right. And you give me warm fuzzies when they are right. That’s so cool. Thank you for all you do.
The next paragraph is what we don’t want to be disappointed about anymore. I no longer want to be disappointed in you for the times that I have pain or don’t function like I did 20 years ago. You’ve been through a lot. I’ve put you through a lot. And you stick with me and still get me through each day. And that’s enough for me. I don’t want to be disappointed in you anymore, m. I no longer want to be disappointed in you for the wrinkles that reflect your age or the stretch marks that show your versatility and capability to adapt. The next paragraph is what I want to do for you. This is what we want to do for our bodies. What m I want to do for you today and going forward is to remind you how much I appreciate you. And going forward, I want to take good care of you, give you the fuel you need and the movement that keeps you strong. And I don’t need you to be different. I love you, body. You’re doing a great job. Love, Diana. All right, y’all, that’s it for today. I’ll catch you next week. Until then, take care of you.
As an advanced, certified life coach, I help Christian women trying to live their best lives, but they still feel unsatisfied and stuck. I teach thought management skills that work so you can enjoy life again and step into who God has created you to be. Don’t forget to head on over to Rympodcast.com to get my free resources or a free coaching call.
