Hi everyone!

I hope you all had a lovely New Year's Eve and an wonderful start to 2015!

Have you all been making New Year's resolutions? More importantly, are you going to be keeping your resolutions?? Not sure? Yeah, me neither. I am one of those people that makes a lot of great resolutions but never really sticks with them...

So this year I decided to do some research and see what science has to say about sticking to your New Year's resolution and I've complied a list of tips to help you stick to them.

Set manageable goals
Setting an unmanageable goal like 'I will complete a marathon in 3 months' when the last time you went running was 4 years ago will never get done. It just won't. It's great that you have such high hopes, but the sheer amount of work that would be involved in completing that would throw off nearly everyone. Although, saying that, if you have completed a goal like that, then kudos to you! I am in awe of your dedication! But for most of us, it's not going to work. Instead, try something like 'I would like to be able to complete a marathon and so to do this I will go running 3 times a week, for increasing amounts of time'. Or something like that. I don't run, so I actually have no clue how one would go about creating a running schedule.

Set measurable goals
This also fits in well with the previous tip. Having a vague goal like 'I will eat healthier' has no actual plan and so you are unlikely to stick with it. Also, the word 'healthy' is equally very ambiguous - what do you want to improve about your eating habits? Do you want to choose more organic and free range products? Do you want to reduce your meat consumption or increase your fruit and vegetable intake? Do you want to reduce your fat or sodium intake or increase your protein intake? Choose one on two things you can do to help reach your goal of 'eat healthier' and set a plan for it. So your new goal could be 'to have at least 3 meat free days a week and to choose free range meat whether possible'.

What I Liked About October

Hello beautiful people!

Another month over and that means it's time for another Monthly Favourites (shhhh... We'll just ignore the fact I didn't do any for August or September...).

Not quite my final look, but pretty close

Halloween
In case you hadn't noticed by my copious amounts of Halloween nail art, I rather like Halloween. Although, to be honest, I like anything that means I can throw a themed party, dress up in costumes and generally have a theme in which to base my life around for while.

Source

Scarecrow Deluxe Vampire Fangs in Small
I got these for my Halloween costume this year (I went as a vampire, in case you hadn't guessed) and I was thoroughly pleased with them. I got them from here on Ebay and I would recommend both the seller and the teeth. They were straight forward to apply and fit (although the paste was a bit gross tasting) and while I couldn't bite together with them in, I had no problems speaking. The teeth were a good size for my mouth and I would highly recommend getting the smaller ones as opposed to the larger ones if you are going to be wearing them for long periods of time.

Health at any Age?

Hi lovelies,

Would you look at me - another post after just two days! I am doing well, aren't I? Actually, I went a little gung-ho on the Halloween nail ideas and now I've had to boost up my posting frequency to make sure I get them all in. Also, isn't gung-ho the weirdest word to write down. When I first wrote it, I was convinced that it was actually made up, but it isn't, it's a real word. Anyway, moving on from the linguistics lesson, lets crack on with today's post, shall we?



I feel like this post might be a bit of a Unpopular Opinion one, but it's something that's been niggling at the back of my mind for a while now.

Can you be too young to be 'healthy'?

By itself, even I can see that's a pretty weird question. Being healthy and well is what we all aim for in life and so why would there be age restrictions on that?

Had you asked me that a year ago, I would have resolutely disagreed with my above question - health is for everyone! But now I'm not so sure...

Isn't this the cutest picture. Source

As some of you may know, I work in child care and a couple of months ago, one of the kids said something to me that sparked off the above question in my mind. I had been trying to get the kids up onto the oval because we had a soccer coach that afternoon and I was trying to get the kids enthused about going up playing with him. I had succeeded in convincing about half and was walking with them up to the oval. That's when one girl turned to me and said,

'I don't know why everyone doesn't want to come up to the oval and play sports. It's such a nice day and I love doing exercise because it makes me feel good and it makes me strong and it gets you healthy'

And I was like, 'Mmmmhmmm. That's nice, yes it's a nice day and I like sport too and what? Oh yeah, it does make you healthy, I guess?'

I don't even really know why I was so taken aback by the last bit. I guess because I wasn't expecting it. That's what I like about working with kids. They tell it like it is. They do what they want to do. And yes, sometimes that's infuriating, but for the most part, it's pretty refreshing. They don't have ulterior motives. They tell it too you straight.

Exercise Can Be Really Scary. No, Really. | Exercise Part 3

Hi lovelies,

Today I'm going to be wrapping up my series on exercise and I'm mostly going to be discussing my current thoughts on exercise and what/why (if any) I doing right now.

I'm really sorry that this is so late but it wasn't coming together and I kept working on it and it just wasn't working. But finally, finally, I got it done. :)

If you missed the first parts of this series, here's Part 1 and here's Part 2.

Okay, so onto exercise.

After my epitome about exercise and suddenly realising that continuing to exercise as I was was going to end up killing me, I gave up exercise and for the first 2-3 weeks, it was really, really hard. My anxiety skyrocketed and the amount of nervous energy I was expending felt like it tripled. Equally, it was incredibly hard to keep myself still. I would have to literally force myself to sit down and not walk and pace and move constantly in order to keep expending energy. It also didn't help that my mother was not 100% behind my decision to stop exercise all together. Obviously, she supported my decision to do so, but she is a firm believer in the 'exercise makes you happy and healthy' and I had spent an awful long time convincing her that exercise was something I did because it made me happy, not as a way to lose weight and she was pretty desperate to see me happy again. Also, she is fairly fatphobic and didn't want to see me recover in an 'unhealthy' way.

Source

But, despite all that, I stuck to it and continued to abstain from exercise. And, surprisingly, after about a month, all the anxiety just left. It obviously was not gone all together, but all the extra anxiety, the exercise-related anxiety I had been experiencing for so long, it all left. For a while then, I felt more at peace with exercise than I had in a long, long time.

Exercise Can Be Really Unhealthy. True Fact. | Exercise Part 2

Hi lovelies,

Today we are moving onto Part 2 of my exercise series. If you missed the first part, you can find it here.

This post covers my experiences with exercise during my eating disorder and talks a lot about what I was feeling and my reasons and rationale behind my decisions at that time. If you are triggered by discussions of disordered thoughts about exercise, maybe this post isn't for you. xxx

Last time I pretty much gave a run down of my early experiences with exercise and I finished up with me being happy and jolly while doing Tae Kwon Do. However, unfortunately, that wasn't going to last.

After I had been doing it for about 2-2.5years, things started to head downhill. At this point, I was heading into my eating disorder and was a very stressed person. At first, Tae Kwon Do was a lifesaver for me. I was somewhere I went, twice a week and escaped every other bit of my life. The people that I met there were amazing, amazing people and were completely different from anyone else in my life. There were very few, if any people my age (16-17 years) and so I spent my time with a couple of girls and a boy about 13-14 and a few older men and women (probably in their late 30s or early 40s). This was so extremely valuable to me because these were people with whom I had very little in common with in regards to everyday life. I don't really care what other people say, there is a world of difference between the everyday life of a 13 year old and that of a 16 year old. The fact that they both go to high school is fairly negligible.

And those that did go to school were at schools that were very different from mine. One girl went to the local public high school and was in a constant battle to pass her subjects so that she would be allowed to stay on the triathlon team. For me, this was world's away from my struggles, although equally challenging, and it was a relief to be around these people. People that didn't care about school in the way I did and people that were just lovely, lovely people.

I Have Some Really Confused Ideas About Exercise | Exercise Part 1

Hi lovelies,

So, exercise. I have so many mixed feelings on exercise it's not even funny. Or mildly amusing. It's actually just very, very confusing.

And just on a quick, definition-y note before we get started, I'm talking about formal exercise here. The term 'formal exercise' refers to exercise that's done with the primary goal being to exercise, rather than to socialise or to get places or stuff like that. So I'm not counting things like walking to work/school and I'm not counting social outings. Like, I go ice-skating with my friend about once a fortnight, and while that is exercise (skating around in circles for a couple of hours does burn calories) we do it because it gives us a chance to catch up and do something a little different, and because it's fun. But it's for socialising, not exercise, primarily, so I'm not counting it under the umbrella term of formal exercise.

Got that? Yes? Okay, lets move on.

But before we crack all these different feelings, lets recap my experiences with exercise...

Fair warning - my exercise stories are not going to be happy jolly gold-tinted things and joy. Also, who even looks like when running. When you look like me, running fucking hurts! Source here