Love thyself? Prove it

I've been putting off this post for a bit because I've been lazy and I don't want to do the research it really deserves.  I haven't suddenly grown some extra motivation, but I have figured out a way to write it without scouring the 'net for peer reviewed studies, so here we are.

I didn't spend a whole lot of time reading women's magazines before, and I still don't.  Nevertheless, I do remember an underlying theme of "Love yourself".  Mostly, I remember it being used as an excuse to splurge on eyeshadow and ice cream.  Occasionally, in my little world under a rock, I'd notice a refrain of something along the lines of "accept yourself for who you are.  Love who you are now, not who you want to be." And so on.  Now I freely admit that I wasn't doing anything like due diligence on those articles.  I rarely read them, and I wasn't striving for information retention when I did.  But I've decided that, aggressively uninformed as I am, I'm going to vehemently disagree with them anyway as an excuse to stand on my own soapbox.  See kids?  This is called politics.  It is in this country, anyway.

I never bought into the whole "love yourself" movement.  I thought it sounded dippy.  (Also, I tried and it never worked.  I still hated my tummy flab).  But now I've had time to think about it more and I realize that not only does it sound dippy, it sounds idealistic and uninformed as well.

If you love something or someone, you want it to be happy.  You want what's best for it.  You don't want it to come to any harm.  And specifically, if it's a someone and not a something, you'll go out of your way to protect it.

You don't destroy it.  You don't intentionally harm it.  In fact, you abhor the very notion of any of these things. 

So what is the logic in saying, "Love yourself.  Have some ice cream"?  How is that loving yourself?  Why not "Love yourself.  Have some spinach"?

The reason I'm harping on this, by the way, is that I noticed recently that I finally am much happier with myself, and I'm pretty sure it's due to the fact that I'm taking much better care of myself than I ever have before.  And it occurs to me that almost every time I try to justify ice cream/fried something/bacon grease with the "because you're worth it" reasoning, I feel worse after eating it than I did beforehand.  It's like I know I'm bullshitting myself and it wrecks the enjoyment of the food.

Moral of the story: treat yourself like you love yourself, and you might notice that you actually do.