This section on body love is two-fold. First, the practical reality of choosing to do the right thing consistently enough to honour your body and be fit and well.
Second, getting clean on how you think about your body. Both can be massive sources of stress and unhappiness; one from actual ill-health or incapacity, and the other from chronically low self-esteem and body image. Which has the capacity to hurt us more? It seems to me that we tend to cope with health crises when they occur: an infrequent panic situation where we have the surgery, take the medication, take the time off work to heal. We then move past the health crisis.
We put it behind us.
Poor body image however - that's something we can carry all day, every day for almost the whole of our lives. We don't know how to put it down, to shrug it off. It can colour how we feel about ourselves from the minute we wake up to the minute we go to bed, for our whole life. In terms of the pain consequence, this can often be a far greater barrier to happiness.
Unpacking body image is huge. I have to confess I'd like to call time on the whole self-hating thing that the last few generations of women have got themselves trapped in.
