How do you become kind to yourself?

Mild tips if you want to lose weight

• Take your time. Those who die fanatically with a crash diet usually do not last and, moreover, you usually gain weight quickly afterwards.
• Aim for an attainable goal and a normal weight for your height and age. Calculate your BMI for an indication of what a healthy weight is for you.
• Allow yourself the occasional ‘wrong bite’, but eat it with attention: sit down and taste it. Research by Wageningen University, among others, shows that a small bowl of chips that is eaten with attention is just as satisfying as a whole bag that is eaten without attention. This way you keep the portions small and you still have satisfaction.

Mild tips for exercise

• Don’t be too hard on yourself and don’t give up right away if you let the sport slip for a few days. There is no need for an iron regime.
• Do not move too intensively. It is better that you train at about 60 percent of your maximum heart rate (you can still talk to it), because then you can last longer. You can calculate your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220.
• Movement gives you a good mood. So do it right if you feel lifeless or cranky and don’t feel like it. Afterwards you will feel intensely satisfied. Walking for an hour every day can also help enormously and is good for the condition.

Mild tips for your work

• Don’t compare yourself to others all the time, you’re not competing.
• Realize that everyone around you bluffs sometimes and doesn’t perform as great as you think.
• Accept that there are people who indeed do their jobs better than you and just admire them.
• Don’t ever think things will collapse without you. That is not true. Not really.
• Say ‘It’s just work’ to yourself every now and then.
• Don’t forget to look at what you are good at.
• Forgive yourself your own mistakes. Not everyone shows off with them, but everyone makes them.

To read

• Self-compassion by Kristin Neff.
• Mindfulness and self-compassion by Christopher Germer.
• Embrace yourself, the way to self-compassion by Gijs Jansen.
• Fifty ways to comfort yourself without food by Susan Albers.

Workshop

Margreeth Eisma and Mieke Meulmeester give the workshop self-compassion, developed by themselves in collaboration with Roos Vonk. Margreeth Eisma: “Participants are often very surprised when they see each other: all nice smooth people who they never thought would struggle with themselves. They are often the perfectionists among us, the people who want to keep all the balls in the air at the same time. and who think they should be good at everything, who suffer from an internal critic.”

If you’re working on yourself and trying to become more self-compassionate, it’s like an onion that you peel back and forth until you get to the core, says Margreeth Eisma. “The first thing to do is to recognize and sidetrack the internal critic in yourself. Who is it, what is he saying and where is he from? Instead, look at what you do want to make important.”

feeling happy

According to Margreeth Eisma, many people think that self-compassion is not good for you. That the end is lost once you start to accept that you are, for example, too fat – because then you will hang out on the couch with a big bag of chips and you will unconcernedly stuff yourself. “But that doesn’t happen at all. Anyone who criticizes themselves a lot feels unhappy. And whoever feels unhappy often has the inclination to eat or drink a lot for that reason alone. If you learn to love yourself, you will naturally take care of yourself. also good for yourself.”