Everyone feels guilty from time to time. Guilt is a hindering and oftentimes painful emotion that implies a sense of responsibility that can be hard to fulfill. The FizzUp trainer is here to give you tips on how to let go of guilt.
Just like happiness or anger, guilt is one of the most universal emotions, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This emotional reaction can be triggered when you’ve gone against your values or morals. It provokes tension, fear and unrest. However, it’s proof that you know the difference between right and wrong, but can often turn into a feeling with harmful consequences.
Typically, it’s hard to let go of guilt because it’s the result of a negative and serious outlook, where the line between imagination and reality is often blurred. You start to idealize certain people and situations. That’s why when you don’t live up to your own expectations, you see this as a serious moral mistake. Guilt can even lock you into a behavior that promotes failure because you didn’t live up to the idea of perfection that you created for yourself in your mind. So how do you compete with an unreachable ideal?
You may feel guilt when you want to lose weight because you’re trying to do everything you can to reduce your caloric intake. So you take it to the extreme when you decide what to eat. But when you’re invited out to eat or the holidays get here, you panic. You try your best to “resist the temptation” that surrounds you, and if you give in, you feel bad, guilty or even ashamed. But don’t! Who wants to live a life they can’t enjoy? No one. You should also forget the idea of how to eat the perfect diet. Enjoying your favorite foods from time to time should never make you feel guilty. Just say no to restrictive diets and any other source of food frustration. Why? Because they do more harm than good and only add to your idea of what the perfect body should be… that is, a lean body deprived of the joys of eating.
Guilt is a shame spiral that causes and even promotes weight gain. You might eat poorly, nibble too much between meals and have a low self-esteem because you keep telling yourself, “That’s bad for you. You shouldn’t eat that, but you can’t lose weight anyway.” This is you reassuring yourself while in a state of harmful do-nothingness. But there’s something you can do about it if you have the willpower.
It IS possible to keep enjoying a colorful and flavorful diet and lose weight at the same time. In collaboration with sports nutritionist Anthony Berthou, FizzUp has developed a nutrition guide to help you reach your goal to lose weight without feeling any guilt. By balancing out your diet and learning how to let your enjoy your favorite foods from time to time, you can easily melt the extra pounds.
Do you have difficulty recognizing your achievements? Do you feel like you don’t deserve them? Feeling guilty plays tricks on you because it has the power to spoil your moments of happiness. It sabotages your success and prevents you from enjoying your victory. Why? Because you feel like you can never live up to the ideal that you’ve had in your mind for so long, which is, sadly, far from being realistic.
You can feel guilty because you didn’t do well in school, while everyone around you has a degree. You can feel guilty because you can only do 10 squats, while your neighbor has no problem doing 60 in a row. You can feel guilty because you aren’t as strong as your dad, brother or friends. You can feel guilty because your stomach isn’t as sculpted as your neighbor’s. The list can go on and on. Stop wasting your time with negative thinking and unreasonably comparing yourself to others. Instead, ask yourself the question, “What are my strengths? What skills have I developed?”. Being too hard on yourself takes away from your enjoyment of life. See the good in yourself!
Tip from the FizzUp trainer: Find out Julien, the trainer’s secret to living the perfect life.
Guilt can also be created by refusing to take responsibility for your wants. In order to do this, you need to have a neutral sense of self-awareness and acknowledge your mistakes just like you acknowledge your wants. You can break this cycle by working on your ability to be assertive. If you accept the responsibility of your choices and actions, you will also be able to make those choices and do those actions more easily. Put these five tips into practice to let go of guilt.
The primary step to putting an end to guilt is to better understand how guilt works. Try to figure out where it’s coming from by thinking about your past experiences. Look at how your friends and family act around you to identify any possible incriminating behaviors. Everyone is different. The solution may also be found elsewhere. It will take some time to figure out, so you won’t find the source of this negative emotion right away. Never throw in the towel.
If you want to overcome your feeling of guilt, then step up your motivation to fight it. You need to strongly believe that you can change and let it go. On the other hand, if you think that guilt is impossible to overcome, you just need a little extra help and more time before getting started. Remember that nothing is unchangeable and that any unpleasant situation can be changed with healthy dose of willpower.
After you learn more about yourself and can say where your guilt is coming from, that’s when you should identify the emotions that paralyze you as well as the emotions that liberate you. Notice how they impact your thinking and wellness. How do these emotions influence them? Paralyzing emotions hurt your potential and limit your ability to make a change.
You’ll need to change your way of thinking if you want to let your guilt go. Step back and think about a situation that makes you feel guilty by adding humor to it and playing it down. Imagine that it’s not about you, but an actor. You’ll realize that your feeling of guilt takes on too much importance and that you overestimated the seriousness of the situation where you felt guilty of something you couldn’t fix. You’ll realize that you were blowing things out of proportion. You can break this mental conditioning with kind and positive thinking.
To let go of guilt, you need to know how to forgive yourself. Surprisingly, it’s easier to be hard on yourself than to forgive yourself. You’ve set such high expectations for yourself, that you forget that you do have your weaknesses. But you’re a human being, who (with the exception of Faust) isn’t all-knowing. Making mistakes is a part of life. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and grant yourself forgiveness. Accept your desire for success and wanting to get into painting or acrobatic rock ‘n’ roll or losing weight. By treating yourself with kindness, you’ll free yourself from the heavy emotional burden of guilt.
Freedom is waiting for you! You can take so much off your mind when you let go of guilt. Discover your potential with the help of your FizzUp trainer to feel more self-fulfillment every day and see life on the bright side.
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