I’ve spent the last couple weeks talking to you about how to stop wanting to be thinner (see here and here) and today I want to give you three things you can do to really move on.

It bears repeating that the letting go process is part of accepting who you are now. But, it’s long and looks like a gradual loosening of a tight grip versus a full on release of your past or fantasy.

Here are 3 things you must do to move on from wanting to be thinner…

 Get clear on what’s important to you.

Get in touch with what you want and what is important to you today. Odds are good it’s different than when you were dieting and fixated on your weight.

For example, many of my clients would say that weight loss (and obsessing over food/exercise as a side effect) was the most important thing to them when they were dieting.

Now that dieting is done, you have to get in touch with what you want for yourself. Maybe it’s to free up time to go out with friends more spontaneously or to stop letting the size of your pants dictate your mood. Get in touch with why you are doing this.

Grab a pen and write down the answer to these two questions: What do you want? Why is that important to you?
Write these things out. Read them everyday. Keep coming back to this to remind you of why you are doing this work.

That fantasy of your life being better if you were thinner is going to keep creeping back (it’s a dieting minefield out there) and you need to be vigilant about reminding yourself about why you are blazing your own trail.

Forgive yourself.

We hold so much resentment and anger towards our past selves for not appreciating what we had or for making our current weight higher by dieting. Holding on to these feelings will only make you long after your former body more.

Listen up, woman: You didn’t know what you didn’t know.

Whatever happened in the past is the past. There is no time-travel phone booth that can make this situation any different. It’s time to close the resentment party down and move on.

One of the best ways to do that is to find things to appreciate about what you learned.

For example, I learned that dieting doesn’t work. I can appreciate that because otherwise I would have spent another 20 years trying to mould my body into something it’s not and cauliflower into a carb it’s not. I learned to stop being an asshole to myself. I learned that I need to start appreciating who I am in the present instead of always trying to fix or change myself. I learned that life is damn short and there are far too many things on my bucket list that I need to start doing instead of “waiting until the perfect time.” I learned that time slows down when you’re not obsessing over whether or not you can eat a banana.

I learned a lot from that thinner version of myself and even though the initial phase of gaining weight sucked, I’m a better person for having gone through it. You are too.

Get to know your current badass self.

When our body and dieting has occupied our mind for so long, we often don’t know who we are beyond those things. One of the reasons we find it so hard to let go of our past body is because there is uncertainty and unknown on the other side.

So many things change when we stop obsessing over dieting and our bodies: the things that we value in life, the people/places/things that are important to us, what brings us pleasure and the way we interact with others, etc.

Rather than seeing this as something to fear, see it as an opportunity to explore and get to know who you really are. There is a big blank chapter of awesomeness ahead of you and you get to decide what’s going to be in there.

Get to know who you really are because she is pretty rad. You may not see that right now, but it’s true.