body image/health/fitblr sideblog

| Call me "AERO" | I had a fitblr a few years ago but lost access. i'm trying to carve out a space to challenge myself to grow in body, spirit, and self-esteem. i'm trying to cultivate a semi-countercultural space; i don't want to merely perpetuate unhealthy-disguised-as-healthy standards. i want to strive to admire/collect health & fitness concepts that are gentle to all bodies while narrowing in on my own personal goals and realistic expectations; but, this can cause tension and perhaps some inconsistency in this blog's messaging: i want to be body positive while I also want to change some things about my body that i've never been able to fully accept. this tension means this blog may not always avoid coming across as fatphobic or fatshaming, and will often contain before/afters. i'm still learning, every day, to reconcile my desire to support and positively regard all bodies while also wishing to change my own. just wanted that as a disclaimer/warning. i feel i will try to counteract some of this cognitive dissonance by now trying to focus more on activities, hobbies, and personal records related to stamina rather than lbs, inches, and the thief of joy: comparison. | North American cis-gender feminist w/ depression | | Taurus sun, Aquarius moon, Virgo rising | INFP | | 27yo | 5'3.75" | medium-frame | Target areas (insecurities) (i know spot reducing is a myth but still, hope to tighten up): Arms, armpits, "side boob," thighs, inside of knees - i've relinquished myself to the reality my tummy, buns and breasts will just be what they wanna be :P C25K | 30 Day Shred | Eventually: Hip hop dancing & aerial silks ! ! !

[self-excellence]

GUIDE TO:

FIX YOUR SLEEPING SCHEDULE (1-2 months)

Try to wake up earlier every day. Like 5 - 10 min earlier than the day before. Until you wake up any time before 8am or so…

If you struggle with waking up & snooze button is you bff:

Put your alarm clock as far away from the bed as possible.

Drink a glass of water right after you wake up.

Pour another glass of water on yourself right after you wake up.

Prepare some coffee the night before, leave it by your bedside, drink it after you wake up.

Have your blinds/curtains open, so that it’s bright after you wake up.

Try to go to bed 5-10 min earlier than the night before.

Track how many hours of sleep you’re getting. Aim to get at least 7h per day or 49h per week. 

Increase your sleeping hours incrementally. Aim to get at least 1h of sleep more than the previous week. For example, if this week you slept for 41hrs, aim to get an extra hour of sleep next week, so it’s 42h.Once you get enough hours of sleep and wake up early-ish.

Try to keep your sleeping schedule consistent. It is really important to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day.  Even if it’s weekend. Or even if that means, you getting less than 7hrs of sleep that day. I’d say waking up at the same time everyday is the most important step, which will help you the most with fixing your sleeping schedule.

START EATING HEALTHY (1-2 months)

This step really depends from person to person, but firstly I suggest you take some blood tests to see if you have any deficiencies, etc. Especially, if you struggle with cravings.  

Try intermittent fasting, if you struggle with binge eating or overeating. As it will help you to learn to listen to your body better: when it’s hungry, when it’s full, etc. It’s really simple, there are many methods of Intermittent fasting, but I’d suggest 16/8 for the beginners. (Google it for more info)

DRINK ALL THE WATER. Again, if you’re not drinking enough water, try to level up your water game incrementally. Download some water tracking app on your phone to help you. Drinking water will make you more energetic, increase your metabolism, and decrease you appetite (among many more benefits).

Track what you eating. I would really suggest tracking your meals for around a month. Because, most of the time people have no idea that what they’re eating is unhealthy. Again, download an app to your phone for that.

Make your own meals once in a while. Not only this will save you money, but it’ll help you to see what’s really going into your body.

Eat less meat and more veggies/fruits. Go to your local market and buy some veggies/fruits, you have never tried before. I’m sure you’ll find your new favs. Eat/buy less meat. Not only it’s good for the environment, but it is good for you, too. Get a veggie burger instead of the beef one, etc.

Cut dairy. Find your new favourite milk substitute. Advice: Oat milk is really good with the tea and oatmeal/porridge; hazelnut milk is amazing on it’s own; cashew milk goes well with cereals.

Learn more about nutrition in general. It will help you to make better food choices and it will make eating healthy much easier in general, because once you understand all the chemistry behind the food and what it does to your body, you kinda don’t want to make yourself feel worse. Here are some free resources: - Human nutrition course from Alison.com - Crash course Metabolism&Nutrition: Part 1 and Part 2 - The Health Nerd’s YouTube Playlist about nutrition - What I’ve Learnt YouTube Playlist - Human nutrition course from Alison.com - Crash course Metabolism&Nutrition: Part 1 and Part 2 - The Health Nerd’s YouTube Playlist about nutrition - What I’ve Learnt YouTube Playlist

GET PHYSICALLY FIT (2-6 months)

Define your goals. Do you want to lose weight, do you want to get stronger, gain weight, be able to climb stairs without losing breath, run 5k?

Remember - you’re half-way through. Being physically fit has a lot to do with what you put into your body. So, if you fulfilled the previous step of eating healthy - you are half way through!

Make a plan. A Reasonable plan. Be honest with yourself.

Start small. Like, 5 min exercise in the morning. Or doing 10 sit ups per day. Don’t do anything overwhelming, like running 5k everyday if you haven’t run for the past 5 years.

Make sure that you kinda like what you’re doing. If you absolutely hate running - don’t do it. Hate doing sit ups in the morning? Try some yoga instead.

Explore until you find what you like. You don’t have to go to gym to get fit, especially if you hate it. Find a type of exercise, which you actually like. Maybe it’s dancing or hiking, taking your dog for a walk. Sign up for several trial lessons of various sport clubs. Ditch ‘em if you have them until you find something that you love. Stick with that.

Do the small changes in your everyday life. Stairs>Escalator, Walk>Drive, Do some squats while brushing your teeth, switch from regular desk to standing desk, etc…  Find ways to incorporate being active into your everyday life

Track your effort instead of your progress. You cannot really control your progress that much (especially if your goal was to lose weight). However, you can always control your effort. So track it instead. This will leave you more motivated. As you will be able to see that you can do more and more everyday. Whereas, if you tracked your progress, you may not always get the result you hoped for, which might demotivate you and make you upset, wanting to quit.

BEAT DEPRESSION

Do the previous 3 steps and you’re half way through.

See a therapist/doctor. Depression is an illness, requiring medical treatment. So, get it. Remember: there is absolutely no fucking shame in having a mental illness.

Get some extra support. Talk to your friends or family. Or maybe someone on the internet.

Write it out. If you don’t want to talk - write down your thoughts. It can be just as helpful. It’ll help you to understand yourself better, see problems in your thinking, etc.

Distract yourself from yourself. Get someone/something to take care of, so that you can, for a moment, stop thinking about yourself and focus on something else. E.g, get a plant, or a dog, or a fish.

Self-care day. Dedicate at least one day per week for self-care. Take yourself out, either to a museum or some fancy cafe, do some stuff you like, whatever your hobbies are, do some physical self care: bath, face mask, manicure, etc., listen to some nice music, watch a film…..

STOP PROCRASTINATION

Celebrate your victories instead of mourning over your loses.So the only thing you’ve done today was write one sentence for your 20 page essay? Amazing! Buy yourself a candy for that!! I mean, you could’ve done nothing, but you didn’t - you wrote that one sentence and that’s worth celebrating.

Do it for only 2 minutes. If there’s an important thing you’ve been putting off for a while, tell yourself that you will only spend 2 minutes on doing it. If after 2 minutes you don’t want to do it anymore, great, stop it. However, after 2min. you actually might want to do more. No pressure either way.

Track your productivity. Track how much time you’ve been productive that day. Try to increase that time by a little bit every day.

Always forgive yourself. So, it’s been a week and you’ve done nothing? Don’t sweat it. Let it go. Blaming yourself will bring you absolutely nothing. Nothing good will come out of your negativity on yourself. So stop it. Forgive yourself and start again. And again, if you need to. Never stop trying. Always pick yourself after you fall. Beating procrastination and increasing your discipline is a skill. And all skills can be build on. There is nothing in you stopping you from changing. Remember that.

LEARN HOW TO DO TAXES (1h - 1 day)

Go to google.com.

Type in: “How to do taxes *the name of the country you’re living in*”

Read the results.

GET MENTALLY STRONG ENOUGH TO MAKE PHONE CALLS

Remember that just as with beating procrastination, making phone calls is a skill. And, again, skills can be learnt.

Get a new SIM card.

Top it up.

Dial some random numbers and pretend to be a salesman, selling whatever you like.. E.g., trying to sell broadband, cable tv, trying to get people to donate for some charity… Or whatever really… Me and some friends used to pretend we’re selling kittens or wood logs. Alternatively, you can pretend that you dialed a wrong person and talk about whatever, e.g. “Hey, Jess!! You wont believe what I saw today!! *start telling a made-up story*…”

If you get uncomfortable - just drop the call. No consequences whatsoever.

Repeat until you build up your game and your phone-call anxiety starts to diminish.

SLAY THOSE BITCHES Congratulations, now you’re ready to take over the world! Got get ‘em!!

[jeiasacads]

YO SIGNAL BOOST

[sanshofox]

Me and workout, a short summary

[fedis-coffee-deactivated2019082]

Ok but why is body positivity so focused on telling people that they’re beautiful, rather than telling them that beauty is not the highest achievement for human beings?

[babyfairy]

https://instagram.com/p/BYbb-ScA34Q/ 🤤💕

[defectivegembrain]

Health isn’t beauty. You can be both unhealthy and beautiful.

Health isn’t morality. You can be unhealthy, even if it’s related to your own actions, and you can still be a good person.

Health isn’t worth. I can promise you that if you’re unhealthy, you’re still an important person.

[dynamicsymmetry]

istg, if you’re a fat person for most of your life and then for whatever reason you lose a ton of weight, culture tells you that it’s supposed to make your life all great and perfect, and what they don’t tell you is that it’ll fuck your ass all up in about fifty different physical and psychological ways.

Also most of my really cool t-shirts don’t fit anymore.

[thehappysatan]

This is me. I am fat. I am fit. And I am a badass, apparently. I know whoever’s following me is here for art, but bear with me. This is important to me. I’ve never seen myself portrayed as this cool fighter in the photo - so the fact that this is me, is a revelation to me. This photo was taken as part of an article about plus-sized women who work out for fun, not for weight loss. It’s an interesting article; it reviews recent scientific studies debunking myths about fat bodies, and includes interviews with 3 other women besides myself. It’s in Hebrew, though; here’s a LINK. I started practicing in Abada Capoeira 4 years ago. All these four years, I’ve been constantly struggling with crippling insecurities and self doubt, every single practice. But my struggles are working out for me. It’s slowly sinking in, that being fat doesn’t stop me from doing anything – I stop me from doing things. After all, just like everyone else in western culture - I was taught that fat people can’t do things. And I’ve always been fat. I’ve spent most of my life worrying about food, dieting, and forcing myself to exercise. It was clear to me that I, a fat person, could never take pleasure in sports, so I never sought out a pleasurable experience in my workouts. At some point, I became sick of torturing my body and my brain with haunting thoughts about food, with my seesawing weight and the depression following the inevitable weight gain. And I decided to give up. I quit my gym subscription. I quit the weight watchers thing I had been part of. I just existed with my body and tried to be ok with it. I wasn’t. My body’s always been a useless lump attached to my brain, holding me back. Giving up didn’t change that. My best friend had started taking capoeira classes. He’d been raving about this awesome sport for a few months, about how nice and communal and friendly it was. How creative and fun. He made it sound awesome. And I decided I’d take a venture outside my comfort zone, and give it a shot. My friend was highly skeptical. He knew that I was a proud couch potato, knew how much I hated working out - and capoeira is an intense fucking workout! But I tried it, and it was so hard, and so painful - but most of the time I didn’t even notice, because my big strong brain was getting a workout, too. And suddenly, I could do a one-handed cartwheel! I felt like a superhero! My friend stopped going a short while after I had started. But I stayed. Not because I was forcing myself, not because I had a goal. I stayed because I just liked being there. I liked the process, I liked the progress, I liked the people, I liked the person it turned me into. I did it for fun. And that’s my revelation for you guys - working out can be so much fun, even if you’ve always hated it. You just haven’t found the thing that engages you, yet. Get creative! Go outside your comfort zone! Try something no one expects from you! And forget about your dumb goals! Just have fun! So now I’m still fat. And I’m finally cool with it. Took me 30 years of living, but I’ve finally realized that my body isn’t a thing to be looked at. It’s a tool for me to use. A powerful tool. And it’s mine; I live inside of it. And when I give it a chance - it never ceases to amaze and surprise me. That’s it, bye.

[skepwith]

What your body does and how it feels is more important than how it looks.

[boarboy-old-blog]

Videogames: you can choose from twenty different eyelashes!!!! oh but you can’t be fat

[onsomekingggshit]

Yeah, whine about how you can’t have a fat character that can scale walls, or sprint. Please whine more.

[boarboy-old-blog]

you’re so right kiddo….. games are very realistic……. like the parts where you die and then come back again? classic realism. 

[prokopetz]

[warlock-enthusiast]

but we can’t have fat people in videogames because fat people are the real fantasy creatures and not like… the dragons. and of course, every thin person can scale a wall. sure sure.

[m0nsterbrains]

Y’know what, here’s something that’s been pissing me off for a while. 

Fat? Easy to gain. So so easy. Our bodies want to keep fat around, because we’re designed not to starve.

Dropping fat? NOT so easy. When people talk about “losing fat,” what they’re saying is “I need to override millions of years of genetics to convince my body I’m not dying and it doesn’t need this carefully-stored fuel.” Dieting? Your body thinks it’s starving. Work out like crazy? Your body thinks it’s in a situation where it needs to bring the hammer down on the regular, and that means you need more fuel – speaking just for myself, I want to eat the world after I lift. That shit doesn’t melt away, even if you’ve been training like a motherfucking monster for months and eating right, because the body wants to keep it.

So yeah, the “eat less move more” doctrine can fuck itself right in the face. 

There are very, very active fat people, fat people who are experts at every sport and physical activity you can imagine. But because fat rests on top of the muscle, you don’t know when we’re jacked. Oh, sure, sometimes you can get a idea, if a person is WILDLY active, like for a fucking living. Here’s Samoa Joe, the NXT pro wrestling champion who was literally dethroned last night: 

Yeah, you can see there’s a lot of power there. 

But a lot of times you can’t. Here’s Vince Wilfork, two-time Superbowl tackling champion:

And here’s Holley Mangold, 2012 superheavyweight division Olympian: 

These are people who fight (and flip, and do all kinds of crazy shit in Joe’s case), and run, and lift for a living. 

And they’re not unusual, as much as you’d like to think so. The world is full of fat powerhouses, of fat runners, of fat Crossfitters, and they’re just as good at doing the thing as their smaller counterparts. 

So realism? Fuck off. The only reason we don’t have fat game characters is because society is fatphobic as fuck. 

Also? Saints Row lets you be fat, *and hot,* so don’t even come at me with “nobody wants that.”

[thequantumqueer]

“fat people can’t climb though”

(Exhibit A: Fezzik carrying 3 people up a cliff)

“yeah but that’s fictional!”

and video games aren’t?

[kyraneko]

Apparently weight weighs differently if it’s fat instead of, like, eight different machine guns and a rocket launcher?

Video games let you carry all sorts of shit, they can let you carry your own body.

[fatphobiabusters]

(This got better) -V

[rihennalately]

Ok but they did THAT ..

[susiethemoderator]

Where do y'all find dance classes like this? I’m trying to join

[thentheysaidburnher]

Cellulite is a female secondary sex characteristic and should be celebrated as a rite of womanhood, not despised or eradicated.

[blackvulva-deactivated20150627]

it’s really a secondary sex characteristic?! 

[thentheysaidburnher]

It is. It has to do with the way our bodies network fat. Female bodies create sort of a mesh network to support fat (female bodies are MUCH more hardy in times of stress) and it can present as delightfully lumpy. More than 90% of women have visible cellulite, but all women store fat in this manner.

[blackvulva-deactivated20150627]

why did no one tell me this?!

[radiant-humble-deactivated20161]

You know why :/

[raspberry-mouse]

Spread this. I only just started to see mine and I started to freak out a bit. More people should/need to know about this

[shamelesslyunladylike]

Here’s an illustration of the aforementioned difference in fat storage.

Men’s lattice pattern collagen threads holds subcutaneous fat in a way that, when the skin expands because of the fat storage, it expands evenly. Women’s “pockets” expand unevenly when we accumulate fat, creating that orange peel effect. Our storage pattern means we can healthily store more fat than men. Like a woman with 25% body fat is average, a man with 25% body fat is chubby. Because of that, like OP said, women are hardier in times of stress or famine. It’s also one of the reasons why our bodies can survive pregnancy, which is a massive energy demand on our system.

And there’s absolutely NO “treatment” for cellulite that will work. They are all bullshit designed to separate you from your hard-earned cash. It’s a secondary sex characteristic, it’s perfectly normal and it’s not going away no matter what you do. Like I’m very lean myself and I work out 5~6 times a week, and I still have cellulite. Someone giving a woman shit for having cellulite is akin to giving her shit for having skin. It’s just a mixture of misogyny and corporate greed.

Love your lumpy skin, ladies. It means you are a badass surviving machine shaped by millenia of evolution.

[amtasical]

I did not know this, and I pride myself on knowing shit like this.

[fairycosmos]

i really REALLY wish the body positive movement had been “you don’t have to look good or be beautiful or pretty to be worth something and to make things happen for yourself and to be happy” rather than “everyone is beautiful!! don’t worry you’re still hot even if you’re not ‘conventionally attractive!!” bc that still puts this superficial idea of ‘hotness’ and ‘beauty’ on a pedestal when really it shouldn’t matter at all it’s literally just our outer meat sack it means nothing it’s going to rot anyway

[aerobicorea]

[aerobicorea]

[aerobicorea]

and Tutorial Link

[aerobicorea]

[beforeandafterweightloss]

@septemberissue submitted:

I’m not even done yet! 💪🏾 IG: @JasmaHaskins 

See more Before and After weight loss pictures  or  SUBMIT yours.

[bellahadidsnosejob]

she didn’t come to play with you hoes ☝🏿

[ithotyouknew2-deactivated201710]

Bethany better get it!