Hello there everyone!

Today I'm going to be wrapping up my Bra series with Part 3. Here is how to find your perfect bra size and a guide to different bra styles (Part 1) and some tips for shopping and shops for the non-mainstream bra (Part 2).

In Part 3 I'm going to be discussing some tips that I have collected over the years in dealing with non-mainstream sized boobs

There will always be people that don't understand and belittle your plight
Always. I can't decide whether my least favourite is the 'Oh no, such a terrible ailment, you have big boobs, that's such a hardship' (super sarcastic voice) type or the 'yeah right, I don't believe you. I think you're lying - they don't even make bras in that size' type. Thankfully, these people are pretty easy to deal with. To be honest, your best bet is probably to just ignore them, because they are never going to understand and you're only going to get angry with them if you try. But, if you want to retort, here are some options.

From Busty Girl Comics

For the first type, you could always try something like 'Well, when you put it like that, I suppose they aren't such a problem. I mean, there is the neck and the shoulder pain and not being able to buy cheap bras or swimsuits. And the issue of halternecks giving me a headache. And not being able to wear strapless dresses. And the problem of being constantly sexualised, all the time. But nah, you're probably right. I guess they aren't a problem after all.'

Or something like 'Oops you got me. (sheepish smile) They aren't a problem at all. In fact, they are amazing at getting me whatever I want. I can use these to make the mankind succumb to my every whim and desire. The magazines are right - big boobs are better!!' (happy smile while boob jiggling for effect)

For the second type just shove your boobs in their face and yell 'Are they real now?! Do you still think I'm lying?!?!?!' In my experience, this has a 98% success rate of getting them to shut up and leave you alone. Or course, it may also lead to assault charges and possible murder charges on death by boob suffocation, depending on how big your chesticles are.

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.

All About That Bass... Or Not

Hi everyone!

So, I don't know if you guys have heard of it, but I've heard a lot about Meghan Trainor's newest song and music video recently. And I have a lot of thoughts about it and I think the people around me are getting sick of hearing me talk about it, so I thought I might talk about it here. (And writing a post about it forces me to get my thoughts in a logical order so that the next time someone brings it up, I'll have a great list of concise and organised things to mention, rather than jumping around manically as I think of more things...)

In case you haven't heard the song or seen the video, I've conveniently added it here for you.



A couple of weeks ago, people kept telling me that I had to hear this song and it kept popping up on my social media sites, and everything was saying the same thing - that it was a great body positive song, that I'd love it so much and that we needed more songs like this.

Naturally I was intrigued. Of course I wanted to hear this amazing song that touted body positivity and made everyone that was not a conventionally attractive size feel great. And so many people loved. That meant that it had to be amazing, right? Especially since the people I surround myself with on my social media all tout positive messages and good stuff like that. It sounded almost too good to be true

And sadly, in a way it was.

Don't get me wrong, the song is still pretty good. It's really catchy and has some really good sections in it. I like that the people in it are fairly diverse and I really like some of the lyrics. And, it's a step in the right direction for what we do need in the music industry - particularly in the music video industry.

But, there were some elements about the song and it's video that I was really not keen on. This can pretty much be summed up in two sections, the skinny shaming and the emphasis on men as a decider of what sort of bodies are attractive.

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

I Had to Buy Pants for Fat People And the World Didn't End..

Hi lovelies,

Three weeks ago, I started my nail course in order to become a qualified nail technician. As part of the uniform, I had to go out and buy black professional pants and black shoes.

How I wished I would look in black pants. Source here

I was a little dubious as the last time I wore tailored pants was for school and the reason I stopped wearing them was that I thought they made me look fat. But, I was more excited about looking professional and starting the course than about how I felt 3 years ago. However, when I got to the shops and was perusing the racks, looking for pants that said 'short length', one pair stopped me in my tracks. They said 'short length, wide leg'.

My brain immediately went 'Pants for Fat People, Pants for Fat People! Put those down immediately! You'll get contaminated and ARGH! Run! Run far away! You really need to out them down! NOW!'

Thinspiration

Trigger Warning! This is not a happy post. This is a very long post and may be triggering to those with an eating disorder. If unsure, please do not click the 'read more'. Don't torture yourself if you think it may be triggering. Just back away. Take care of yourself. xx

I have a confession.

Last night, I did something I’m not proud of. Something I knew was wrong. Something that was not going to make me feel better. In fact, it probably made me feel worse. But I did it anyway.

I googled thinspiration and I googled pro-ana. I spent a good hour and a half trawling through tumblrs, blogs and help sties dedicated to becoming thin and how to live with an eating disorder.

Why?

Because I was already feeling like shit and I wanted to torture myself.

How stupid.

Thin

About 2 months ago, I was just beginning my recovery. I had finally acknowledged that I had problems with eating and that if I didn’t do something, really bad things would happen. I was at my lowest.

I was at about 45.8kgs. Way too thin. And yet, one morning, in homeroom, one of my friends said to me ‘Lissa, I have to say – you are looking really thin and fabulous’.

This floored me. It really did. I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t even know what she meant. I had just come to believe that how I looked then was terrible – I knew this. I hadn’t washed my hair in about 2 weeks, it was falling out and was dull and lifeless, I had permanent black shadows under my eyes from never getting enough sleep, my lips were chapped and chalky and I had this terrible yellow complexion. But I was thin. Really thin. And I looked fabulous? Were the two connected? Did I look fabulous because I was thin? Was she saying that I was thin, and therefore fabulous? Was she simply stating that I obvious – that I was thin – and then also commenting that I was fabulous. Did she have to use it as justification – a way to prove that her claim (of me being fabulous) was real? That if she said that I was thin, a hard core fact and indisputable, then she is also qualified to say that I am fabulous, a subjective judgement? I honestly don’t know. I still don’t know what she meant by this comment.

I don’t think I’ll ever know. But I do know she was wrong. Well, half wrong. I was thin. Deathly thin. That was indisputable. But I was not fabulous. I was emaciated. I was wasting away. I was barely even alive. That’s not fabulous. That’s scary, painful and sad. That was me, when I was thin.

Don’t get caught up in what society says is good. At 45.8kgs, I was thin. That’s good, according to society. But that’s bad, according to my body. Thin is not for everyone. Thin is subjective. For me, thin is scary. It's bony limbs, bruises everywhere and it being too painful to sit on the floor because of having no butt. It's sunken eyes, bad breath and a constant empty feeling in my stomach. It's restricting at every meal, counting and compensating for every single calorie and never being able to eat what I want.

Thin is something I am never, ever going back to.

xxLissa