Ever think about why hospitals have ‘patients’? Why are they called that?

Patience is a vital skill to have in healing – spontaneous remissions are fabulous, but they are not part of everyone’s destiny.  In most cases, it took a LONG time of poor self-care and poor self-love to develop the conditions that are now manifesting in the body.  So, healing from those will not happen overnight.  It takes time for the body to realize that you really mean it – that you really are *changing* your lifestyle habits to one that supports it and its healing.  For good.  That you really are changing the very relationship you have with your body to that of respect and appreciation.  The body works hard to adapt to whatever lifestyle you have, it always ‘tries’ the best it can to provide the best for you given what you give it to work with.  Its not going to convert over everything for just a momentary blip of effort – it is, in a way, waiting for you to return to your old habits.  On a cellular level. Those habits, whether it be foods, or sedentariness, or internal dialogues and mood, are engrained into our very being.  These things take patience and acceptance to dissolve out. The body *will* adapt, it must, but it does so over time and repetition.

This is why fad diets, and most new year’s resolutions, fade out with time.  They don’t stick because the motivation is simply accomplishing one *external* checklist item. True lasting change always comes from within.  Then the internal change, the mindset change, can *lead* to the external changes that also add momentum and power to the process.

Acceptance of how you feel NOW is an important part of healing.  Learning to love yourself NOW, being grateful for all the things that ARE working, is an important milestone in the process.  This is typically the precipice where fad diets and resolutions typically fail.  We haven’t met our external objective in the external amount of time we decided it should take, we get discouraged, and we give up.  But when we set INTERNAL objectives TOO, we can keep sight of how much progress we are TRULY making, and keep sight of our TRUE goal, which really is to just love ourselves more and make each day better. Try to leave time and expectation out of the equation, be in the now. Find and love what’s working.