Bikini season! (being happy with eating unhealthy... sometimes)

I rarely have opportunities to even wear bikinis since I rarely go to the beach. Not because I don't want to, it's just the weather isn't super warm yet, I am busy and I am also lazy in the summer. But that doesn't mean I don't have pressures to feel skinnier.

I'm still trying to figure my body out. I am 18, I'm still young, technically still a teenager even though I feel so much older at times. I still don't know what to think of the way I look.

I went through some rough negative self-image times in early highschool, and really the whole time. I would restrict what I ate to a non-comforting level, limit what I would wear because of the way I looked and really, just saw my body as something it was not. I always thought I had more fat than I did. I think that now, I see myself the way I actually am. 

I've worked out to become muscular, to be skinny and to be healthy. I know the difference between all of them. Now I workout as a hobby. Originally I worked out at the gym and ran and rode my bike to be thin. I never focused on a specific dress size I wanted, I just wanted less body fat. Soon, I became absorbed in the weightlifting world to be stronger and have larger muscles. Eventually this led to just choosing to go to the gym to be healthy. 

In addition to this, during my "skinny times" I would eat less, but still eat unhealthy. This is dumb. I would eat popcorn, ice cream and mac and cheese out the wazoo, except still eat equivalent to the number of calories I either needed or even less. I wasn't getting the nutrients I needed.

During my "muscle" times, I would drink a lot of protein shakes and load up on caffeine as well.

When I became healthy, I found a balance. But I almost became too healthy in the sense that I became unhappy. I would go to a restaurant (yay) but then order a garden salad and watch my family or friends eat a giant plate of lasagna. This is depressing, no matter how healthy you are being. You need to allow yourself a McFlurry once in a while.

Where am I now? I workout because it's just who I am. I just do it. I do it because I know it is healthy, may make me stronger and may make me thinner. But I am not super committed to it. I eat healthy most of the time and avoid things that are just insanely terrible for me. I eat good portion sizes as well. But I definitely eat ice cream a lot more, I order what I want to eat at restaurants and I just watch myself.

So what does this have to do with bikini season? Well. Let's see, I am 5'7'' and 131lbs. This is an average-good weight for my height. My body fat percentage is probably at around 24% which is also average-good. But I still log-on to Pinterest and see the boards I follow with super skinny girls in bikinis and then I want to stop eating unhealthy foods. 

But that makes me sad.

Despite me weighing about 10lbs more from this time last year and gaining maybe only 1 or 2% body fat, I look mostly the same. I can tell the fat is on my stomach, but I don't have a muffin top or anything. I am average. Well, average would mean I weigh more, I just mean that I am where I should be at. 

Yet, I still don't want to worry about sitting on chairs in shorts and having my thighs expand due to the pressure from the chair. I look hotter standing than sitting because my fat doesn't squish as much. 

I've learned so much about angling and lighting to do with taking... selfies (yes I said selfies) that I know how to make myself seem a lot skinnier. 

I am not skinny, I am not fat, I don't even want to call myself "average" or say I have an athletic body type. 

I think I can finally say that I like my body now. I have never been more confident in a bikini, and that has nothing to do with my size. It has to do with my outlook on the bikini. I feel more confident and mature now. I want to find a bikini that looks hot on me for the summer. I tried on a pair of bikini bottoms from H&M that were a size 6 and 8, and both were too small. I was actually HAPPY about this. I like my butt. I have a big butt, in a good way. This also means that whenever I go to buy a two-piece that I have to buy the pieces separately due to my butt requiring a larger size than my boobs. 

But I am happy. I think my boyfriend gave me some confidence in my body, but some of the confidence I also just found myself. 

Technology is making us L-A-Z-Y

Lately, I found myself often pondering on the idea of technological advancement.

When will it come to a halt/standstill or plateau?
Will it lead to the downfall of the human race, or any other animal?
Why is technology bad?
Why is technology good?
Does technology help us or hinder us?


My personal belief is that some technology is good and some of it is bad.

Examples of Good Technology are things that help people as well as the environment, other animals or the earth or possible the universe in general.
- Reading glasses
- Books (yes I am claiming books are technology)
- Telephones
- The bicycle

Examples of "Bad" Technology:
- Any piece of machinery that has to do with whatever Monsanto or any other company because they are polluting the earth and the plants (which are IRREPLACEABLE) with genetically modified crap and then making us pay for food which should be rightfully ours as members of this planet
- Cars (Do we really need to travel THAT far THAT often? Basically everywhere we go is in walking or biking distance but people are too lazy)

Too lazy. Let's just dwell on this point for a while. The reason why technology is becoming a "bad" thing is because it's making people lazier. Instead of farming we are going to work at a sit-down job and then run on a treadmill later to burn calories so we don't become obese. Have you noticed how obese we are all getting? We don't need this much food in our bodies yet with the combination of fast-food chains and video games, we are making it so easy to become unhealthy.

We are killing ourselves. We don't care enough to put a stop to our misuses of technology because, well, we are too lazy too! It is so easy to think something on the internet like what I am doing right now, talking about technology or Billy-Joe is on youtube commenting on some video saying "ABORTION IS BAD".

Is this where we are at? A society of overweight people who are too lazy to do anything about it other than complain on twitter or eat ice cream with genetically modified ingredients to console our natural emotions? Apparently.

I have also been dwelling on the idea of creativity lately. I think the internet has removed the ability to be creative. About half an hour ago I was trying to think of a title for something I was writing and I wanted it to have something to do with sadness/depression and something to do with happiness. The first word to do with happiness that came to my mind was "bunnies" and then my brainstorm session was over. Why? I decided to google "happy things". I immediately stopped in my tracks.

I was so lazy to creatively think of happy things that I googled "happy things". Do you see how lazy we are getting? This is just a really small thing but I immediately caught onto it.

Our laziness is taking over our creativity and minds. We would rather watch a TV show than write our own. We would rather google "how to run" than experiment with running ourselves. We are a cautious, lazy, scared society and I honestly want to do something about it.

But I am too lazy. This blog post will most likely end my journey of trying to get people to stop being lazy.

At least I do better than the people on youtube misspelling "craitionism" (creationism) and aborshun (abortion).

That leads me to another idea, the way we compare ourselves to each other; I am going to stick a pin in the idea of comparison and write about it another time.

#13 30 Day Writing Challenge - My Opinion of my Body

For today's challenge I am to write about "Your opinion of your body and how comfortable you are with it".

I have so many flaws and things I hate about my body. But I also have a lot of good aspects, I think. In the past I've stressed out a lot more about the way I look, but nowadays I am not as bad.

I workout and lift weights a lot, so quite often my "freak outs" are thinking that either I'm gaining more fat or that I am not gaining enough muscle. It is so easy to just slip out of the workout regime and my body changes so quickly.

It's not really noticeable, but my body is changing all of the time. My fat on my stomach is really where you can tell if I am gaining weight or not. My muscle size changes often, too. In the past 2 months, I have actually gained an inch around my shoulders. In the past 5 months, I have gained an inch in my calves. But this is muscle, it's not fat.

So really, I see my body as this fine tuned thing that can change so quickly.

Overall I like my body. I'm fairly comfortable with it. My main concern is the amount of fat on my stomach, though. I need to eat REALLY healthy if I want that to go down, and I don't know if I want to do that. I want to be able to see my abs, but it's a lot of dietary commitment. I'm not sure if I'm ready for that.

I don't want to be one of these people that says "Everyone has flaws, we need to accept it and focus on the good points". Although it's mostly true, I think that if someone has a flaw that bothers them a LOT they shouldn't have to accept it. They can work on to change it. This relates to this article I read over a year ago, about kids getting plastic surgery for things like their ears, because their ears were so big they got surgery to make them look closer to their heads. If tweaking your flaw to make it better makes you feel more confident, then go for it.