How long are you going to hold this against you? Will you still be beating yourself up for being obese after you are at goal weigh? How long are you going to carry this around? What good do those feelings of guilt, failure, and disappointment do for you?

It's time to hand over your cat-o-nine tails.....know what that is? This is a huge ugly whip. Of course if you see one now a days it is usually in an adult toy store and they are not quite so fierce. But back in the day they were strips of leather bunched together, on the ends of each strip was some type of sharp hard item, like rock or glass. This is often deplicted in illistrations about the way Jesus was whipped before he was crucified.

Many of us has huge UGLY cat-o-nine tails. We are beating ourselves up all the time. It is time to turn those in. Get rid of the whip.

Find a quite spot where you can really focus, get a piece of paper and write down things that YOU need to forgive YOURSELF for. Write them all down, cry through them if you need to. Then you need to go down that list and one by one verbally forgive yourself for them. When you are done you need to take your list and burn it, for it is no longer yours, you got rid of it.

Get rid of your whips! You don't deserve them, and you cannot move forward if you continue to beat yourself up.

So totally going to do this tonight.

I AM going to do this tonight. Thank you

I don't know if I'm really ready to forgive myself for everything right now. I still disappoint myself on a daily bases. I still fail everyday. I still come up short of my full potential everyday... So everyday I'd have to forgive myself for yesterday's failures. Each day I regret sitting in front of the TV with a bag of chips & a bowl of dip when I was a child. Thats what got me here. Thats why it went so far. Why couldn't I have choose an apple for a snack back then?

Everyday I wish I would have stayed in public school, because I think it would have helped me in the long run with my weight problems. I was in 3rd grade when I decided I wanted to see what public school was like (up till then I was homeschooled, obviously). I was in public school for 1 semiester. During that time I made a few friends, and had a few good memories, but for the most part I remember being teased and hurt. Bad for my self-esteem, good for my weight loss. I wasn't obease then, but I was overweight. My mom pulled me out at the end of the semiester because she couldn't stand seeing me tortured like that. I had lost 38 pounds from august to december. Simply because I refused to eat. Because I didn't want to be made fun of anymore.

I don't remember being made fun of now years later. It became very quickly a lost memory. I put it out of my head the second I walked off those school grounds.

Then I started eating even more because I had gone so hungry for so long.

In the years to come after that whenever I felt truely hurt because of my weight I would simply stop eating. In my teens I battled everyday with food. I wouldn't eat for weeks. I would binge for weeks. A cycle that repeated many times over. Enough to pack the pounds on.

If I could have stayed in public school, I probably would have never started eating again. And I wouldn't be sitting in this fat body today....

Boy that does sound good. I can forgive to a point.. Forget is another story.
Since this is my 3rd time around ...loosing over 100 pounds the first two times.. I have a lot of forgiving to do..lol
One of my big problems is... I never really learned to love myself..
Heavy or slim I just never like what I see.

I don't know if I am ready, but I'd like to try. I think I will sit down and do some writting tonight, but I still have a long way to go before I am ready to forgive myself. I have other issues I need to work on too, right along side my weight loss journey. So maybe I can start along the path to self forgiveness and hopefully I'll get to my destination sooner, rather then later.

I haven't forgiven myself yet but I am working on it. I need to sit down and write that list. Thanks for the post.

I really need to do this. But, I don't know if I can forgive myself completely until I am back at a healthy weight. Sure, I look forward to the cosmetic, vain reasons for getting thin. But mostly, I look forward to being healthy. I remember standing on the scale at about 190 saying, "I will never get over 200 lbs again." One day I stepped on a Dr. scale and it read 317. I was crushed. Why did I let my body go for so long? Why did I put myself at risk?

When I fix what I messed up, I will fully forgive. Until then, I forgive myself for my mess ups for today. Tomorrow is another day!

Sometimes we cling to things we know when everything else is changing. So here we are, changing our eating styles, trying to get moving, hopefully our body is changing too........so we cling. Is there something else to cling to that is not destructive to your emotional being? We know the chips are destructive to our fat cells, we know we have to put them down. Those negative fibers, deep inside our hearts, are just as destructive (actually I think they are more so)

Forgive but dont forget, but truley forgive.

If you are a Christian, ask for God to help you release all these negative feelings, and be washed clean, a clean slate.........

It's not easy. And you have to do it over and over again, but eventually you will replace the positive feelings for those negative feelings you kick out of your heart

I don't excuse what happened in my life- but I understand why I made so many bad choices.

I think I'm on that road to forgiving myself- I am the same way thinking back to all those times I'd watch TV at night as a kid and each food- munching away at chips and candy and sunflower seeds and so on. Sometimes I want to be like mom why on EARTH did you keep that stuff around? You didn't eat it yourself- you bought it for me- and I ate it cuz I didn't know it was bad for me. Don't get me wrong- I'm not angry with her- she felt food was love- I'm not angry at myself- I didn't know better.

I know one day I'll be able to fully forgive myself- but right now I'm just proud that I've stuck to my goal of working out at least three times a week!

I don't know if I am completely ready for that. I have gained back about 30 pounds BUT I am back on track. I am still at 100 pounds lost. I REFUSE to gain back the weight. I refuse to EVER get bigger than a size 14. I am STILL fighting the battle. I am not sure if I am ready to look back at my past sins and forgive myself. I was so bad to myself. I have to pay restitution first before I even deserve forgiveness. It is a daily challenge but Iwill most certainly try. I am at work (on lunch break) forgive my spelling/grammar. Gotta go!

I still haven't forgiven myself for gaining over 100 lbs. I find myself walking on my treadmill and thinking " Why the **** did you let yourself get like this??" I really need to work on that, but I am sure it come in time.

Thanks for the post.

I think I've already done this without the list and burning it part though. I've done a lot of soul searching and reading the last year before I've started this journey. I take it one day at a time now and I know that I am human and I make mistakes and I can't beat myself up about it anymore and I just move on and start again and try to keep a positive attitude about it all! I wish everyone luck with this, it takes time.

This is such a great idea, but I'm not sure if I am quite ready. I still scream inside every time I slip up and either don't work out or eat something really evil. So, my first step would be to realize that I have to learn that mistakes happen, the important part is being able to pick myself back up and not let little mistakes complete derail me. Once I can do that I think I can start focusing on my bigger failures. I find that I have to live in the now and only remember my mistakes to learn from them and not repeat them.

I think there's a big difference between taking responsibility and condemning or beating on ourself for becoming overweight, especially for considering it undeserving of forgiveness (whether from ourselves or others). I'm fat, not a murdering pedophile. I'm a Christian, so I believe God has already forgiven me, simply because I asked Him to, I think doing less for myself is inappropriate (especially since I'm taught that the murdering pedophile is not exempt from God's forgiveness). It's a weird reverse arrogance to think that what we would forgive others for, is unforgiveable in our own eyes.

There ar a lot of factors that led me to be overweight or obese since age 5, some of them are (or at least now are) my responsibility, some of them were (and some are now still) out of my control. A lot of the reason I didn't put my health and weight at first priority in my life, was because I was doing other things, important things, often for someone else.

I do regret putting my health last, but I don't regret the good or good-intentioned choices I made instead. I do regret that I didn't understand sugar's role in my lack of control with food. If I had considered low carb eating earlier, I might never have reached morbid obesity. My parents and doctor did their best, but I find it frustrating even today that in everything that I was encouraged to attempt, that prescription amphetemine diet pills (at age 13 or 14) were chosen before low carb dieting or eliminating all sugar.

But I forgive my parents and doctor for not knowing better, and I forgive myself for not knowing better. Now I know better, so I do better. And change is still hard, so I focus and encourage myself on the changes I'm making, even though they're small. All I can say is that my weight loss has been very slow, but I don't have any doubts I'll eventually get where I need to be. And I've done a whole lot more with love and encouragement than I ever did with self-recriminations.