Tag: honesty

How I Stopped Being Healthy and Started Feeling Human

Lauren8 Comments

Once upon a time, a girl started reading Healthy Living Blogs, became a runner, cooked almost everything she ate from scratch, and turned up her nose at anything that didn’t fit her description of healthy. That girl was me (surprise surprise).

Over time, this lifestyle started to feel isolating, stressful and just kind of deranged. And just like that, my heart wasn’t in it anymore.

My heart was into movies and literature and too many glasses of wine with friends and spontaneous ice cream cravings that could only be satisfied by the real deal.

Chia seeds, nutritional yeast, and a pile of roasted vegetables topped with hummus for lunch fell by the wayside and were replaced by things that probably don’t have half as much nutritional value, but that feel more authentic to who I am, how I was raised, and what feels normal for me.

I’m not saying green smoothies are a sign of disordered eating (I still drink them all the time!) or that eating 3 square meals and 3 square times every single day is only something people who have an unhealthy relationship with food do. But for me, eating had turned into a quest for perfection and that really wasn’t healthy for me. I realized I didn’t want to feel like I was better than everyone else or that I had it all figured out, because I don’t.

Nowadays, I sometimes eat muffins for breakfast and wash it down with a sugary latte, I order take out pizza, I sample fudge after lunch and sometimes on the weekends I eat a big breakfast and don’t feel hungry again till dinner! Gasp, unheard of in the HLB world. Hunger doesn’t make me anxious or angry. I don’t travel with snacks or schedule my life around meals. Sometimes I eat out more than I probably should and subsist off restaurant leftovers, without cooking all week. And you know what? The lack of order, or worry, or stress or anxiety, or planning feels really really good.

I won’t pretend it’s all rainbows and butterflies over here. Somedays I feel a real sense of loss of control, but I truly feel that letting go is the right path for me right now. I want to feel human, flawed and messy and happy.

 

Balance

Lauren10 Comments

Whoa, I just almost wrote this post through my old blog site.  Oopsie.

Anyways. I’ve just come to a very serious realization.  An epiphany, if you will.

All this time I’ve thought working out made me feel good, but it’s really just wearing comfy workout clothes that makes me feel good!  Okay in all seriousness, I do have something that I’ve been thinking about and finally just decided I should write about it.

I’m very aware that I’m the kind of person who gets stressed out extremely easily.  I don’t know where I get this from or if I’ve always been this way, but the smallest things can stress me out.  This includes TV shows piling up in my DVR, my jeans being an inch shorter than I want them to be and my food not being hot enough.  Stupid small things.

The result is that my skin freaks out, my dreams get all sorts of weird and I’m just in a bad mood.  So I cut back.  Cut back on a lot of the things I used to fill my days with.  Cooking, running, blogging, cleaning.  Just kidding about that last one though.  This doesn’t mean I stopped liking these things, I was just exhausted trying to fit them all in everyday.  These days, I only do those things a few times a week, as opposed to 5-6 days a week and it’s made my life so much simpler.  The trade-off, though, is that they’re harder.

I used to be a one post a day kind of blogger.  As soon as I graduated college and traded in a job where I could blog while I was working for a grown up 8-5 one, that became an unrealistic blogging schedule.  So I cut back.  And if you hadn’t noticed, lately I’m lucky to get one to two posts up a week.

I realized that while I love writing, taking time out of my too-short-as-it-is weeknight to sit behind a computer screen wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.  Especially when sudden invitations to burger night or catching up on episodes of Dexter and Revenge are much more fun.  The trade off is that I feel a lot less connected to this blog and my blogging voice in general.

Does that make sense?  I’m here so infrequently that it’s become a random jumble of weekly happenings.  Part of me is just fine with this.  It’s easier and I have a lot more to share.  But the other half of me hates struggling to put my thoughts together in a clear and organized way when I do write a post.  I no longer feel like I’m sitting down to tell a friend about my day.  Instead I feel uncertain of the things I write and like I’m losing my voice as a writer.  Like with anything, practice makes perfect and cutting back on practice makes less perfect.

When I started this new blog, it was because I wanted to move on from having one focus and because I was having some doubts about the community that I had targeted with the things I was writing about.  I wanted to be honest about the not-so-perfect, not-so-easy, not-so-one-dimensional parts of my life, and I feel that I haven’t done much of that.  I guess I’m just struggling to balance my need to have simplicity in my life with my desire to keep evolving as a writer.

Running and cooking are a whole different conversation.

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