#not 2 mention its taking money away from artists who could be getting a commission to make a /SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER/

[doodlboy]

Exploding every "make your own vtuber avatar dress up doll" app in the universe with my mind rn

[meruz]

Aforementioned long ask post please excuse me while i try to figure out tumblr's new text editor. I’ll get into the art meme questions first and then the rest at the end.

Ok first of all thank you all for sending in questions! Giving me an excuse to talk hehe. I’ll address these in number order. Here’s a link to the ask meme for reference but also I’ll restate the question for ease of reading.

1. When did you get into art?

Super cliche answer but I don’t remember a time where I WASN’T the weird art kid! I started keeping a dedicated sketchbook when I was about 12? But here’s a page from my kindergarten journal about what I want to be when I grow up.

2. What art-related sites have you ever signed up for? 

LOL this is a weird question. Not sure why so many people want to know. Anyways I definitely had a dA. more than one dA account. I used to browse oekakis when I was a kid but I think I was only signed up to some small ones that internet friends owned. What else...? Mangabullet,Tegakie, Paintberri, iscribble back when that was a thing, instagram if that COUNTs, I used to post art on livejournal and dreamwidth too. Patreon, I guess. Gumroad, inprnt, bigcartel, storenvy all for selling stuff.

In terms of resources.. I have a schoolism account that I’m sharing with friends. Used to take classes on coursera for free. I signed up to textures.com for work recently haha. I can’t remember if I ever had an account on posemaniacs. Did they have accounts...? I definitely used to visit all the time.

3. Show us your oldest piece of art you have on hand.

Alright here’s me actually logging into my old deviantart account. These are from September 2008 So I was 13 years old. I don’t have a deviantart account from before then because 13 was the required age for having an account and I didn’t want to lie about my age because I wanted people to be impressed by how young yet clearly incredible at art I was LOL.

4. What defines your artistic style?

You guys are probably more equipped to answer this than me but uh... I wanna say... Focus on colors. And... a slightly heavy hand? Like confident... not always well-considered mark making HAH...

Also I think I have a pretty healthy mix of american comics/manga influences. I feel like people who are into american comics always think my art is too manga and people who are into anime/manga always think my art is too american. And I’m taking that as a good sign.

5. Do you practice other styles/have you tried other styles in the past?

I like to think I switch it up a bunch! I mean, these are pretty different, right?

I think I’ve mentioned this before but one thing I really took away from art school is that, for an illustrator at least, art style shouldn’t be consistent. Your greatest weapon is changing the aspects of your style based on the task, the emotions and message you want to illustrate etc. So depending on the project I’m working on, the fandom I’m drawing for, whether I want something to be funny or serious or dramatic, I’ll change things about my style all the time.

One thing I don’t rly post on here is really tight polished work and that’s because I do that for my day job haha. If you’re not paying me... I’m probably not gonna color in the lines.

6. What levels of artistic education have you had?

I have a whole ass diploma LOL. Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration. from the Rhode Island School of Design. And I had a great college experience tbh. Besides the student loans. If any of you guys are thinking about art school feel free to e-mail or message me questions or concerns, I’ll be happy to help. Be as honest as I can be.

7. Show us at least one picture you drew or sketched recently that you did not put on a public site.

heres the wandavision kids. Uhh what else do I have...I feel like I’m rummaging for loose change here...

assorted valentines prep doodles

8. What is your favourite piece that you have done?

Well, obviously this is gonna change all the time and generally it’s gonna be my most recent piece LOL. So yeah, why the hell not. I’ll say it’s this one. I have a pretty short memory which I count as a blessing for an artist. I don’t dwell that long on older work and it keeps me moving forward.

10. What do you like most about your art?

I like that it’s something that only I would make! I had this thought fairly recently and I wrote it down in my sketchbook, it’s pretty cheesy and rambling but it felt revolutionary at the time:

So yeah. I like my art best when it’s the most me and for me. And I like it least when it feels like I’m just making something for social media or for other people’s expectations or whatever.

14. What do you like drawing the most?

Kids in baggy clothing are like my go-to LOL idk if that’s obvious. but also I like being challenged so lately I’ve really loved drawing multi-character compositions, environments, weird angles, etc.

oh i LOVE drawing the underside of shoes lol. And bandages. People that are kinda beat up.. I think it comes from getting a bunch of cuts all the time. I’m always patching myself up and I want to patch characters up too.

15. What do you like drawing the least?

mmm I try to find something to like in every drawing but lets see... I don’t like doing commissions of people’s dogs. Just because it’s normally like... a family friend and my mom volunteered me without my consent and I don’t even really know what they’re expecting me to draw and I don’t even get to meet the dog. Also I’m not that great at dog anatomy. Trying to learn though.

18. What is your purpose for drawing?

This could have a million answers! Uhhh to GIT GOOD??? But also to express myself... and also to make money... I mean it depends on what the drawing IS. I draw fanart mostly to connect to people in the fandom so if you ever see me drawing fanart please take it as like an open invitation to talk to me about the character haha. 

20. How would you rank your art? (poor, mediocre, good, etc.)

Good!!! I have a lot of self-confidence primarily born out of ignorance and a short attention span. If I don’t think too hard about how many other artists are mindblowingly unfathombly good... its easy to think I’m good too! LOL

In all seriousness though, I think the opinion a person has of their art is like a crazy balancing act, right? Like you have to think you suck enough to want to get better but also you have to think you’re good enough to not want to give up. I think we’re all walking that line, I know I am! But also I’m a glass half-full type of person so. Most of the time I feel good about it.

22. List at least one of your “artspirations.”

This is a good question because I’ve been trying and failing to put together one of those “influence map” memes for like a full month now. What’s giving me a hard time is I feel like none of these are actually really obvious “““influences”““ in my art? Like it’s hard to see a lot of them in the work I make...? But idk maybe you guys’ll see what I can’t.

And these are just a couple! God there’s so many more. I could talk about other artists for ages, from all different genres of art. Daumier, Rockwell like every illustrator out there, Dana Gibson, Alex Toth, Hiroshi Yoshida, a lot of the Brandywine School. Lots of current working artists too, Karl Kerschl, frikkin Masashi Kishimoto lol, Jake Wyatt, Richie Pope, Edouard Caplain, Matt Cook, Sachin Teng, - lots of big internet artists, Sophie Li, Freddy Carrasco, Milliofish, Angela Sung... like all my friends from art school too. I could just keep going but I’ll stop for now lol.

24. Do you have a shameful art past? (recolour sprite comics, tracing art, etc.)

I mean if that’s how we’re defining shameful?? sure LOL. It’s not sprite comics but I used to do pokemon sprite recolors all the time. And I used to trace manga panels and color them... Granted this was all when I was like under 12 yrs old so it’s not even embarrassing. Can you really call it shameful when a 7 year old wets the bed or whatever? Not really. In fact some of these are cool as fuck. Look

25. Draw a picture!

Man I’m so tired now but here.

I used to get a lot of compliments for drawing people smiling lol but I don’t think I’ve drawn a lot of smiling lately.. here’s proof I’ve still got it.

OK MEME DONE. onto the rest.

I read this ask first thing when i opened my computer in the morning and it made me really emotional.. I’m so glad my sketches could help you!!

I think a lot of artists on social media talk about the struggle of making art but imo not enough people talk about the joy! Like I know it’s corny but. I really meant what I said at the beginning of that sketchbook about re-contextualizing art around process and progress > product and perfection. I think its super important..! The strength of messy, unfinished, and energetic art! For the feeling of it, for the love it!

That's crazy!!! I hope you like 'em. The whole line of x-books is really good rn imo.

Hi! I totally have the answer for digital stuff on my faq lol. But in terms of drawing on paper.. it varies! I tend to use sketchbooking and any on-paper doodling I do as a way to loosen up/warm-up or experiment. But right now my go-to aresenal is:

from top > bottom

- kuretake no.55 doublesided brush pen

- tombow fudenosuke

- muji 0.38 ballpoint

- medium size poscas

- grey tombow double brush pens

- good ol bic mechanical pencil

not EXACTly sure which inking you referring to from my sketchbook but if I had to take a guess it'd probably be the kuretake no55. That's been my main inker, lately. Great for sketching with the thin end too.

You can print out and eat my art if you like. Just please don't mass produce or re-sell. <3

Thanks! I've come to accept that my art is always gonna be sort of gestural and painty naturally. It's getting it to tighten up enough to be legible that's hard lol...

uh yeah lol I agree actually. I think yolei is great.

I assume these asks are related? LOL

1) Yeah totally true. I love David.

2) I don’t take requests, sorry! But if you want to commission me to draw Legion i would be MORE than happy to. Just e-mail me at isellhotdogs@gmail.com.

<33333333333333333333333333

[yourkeeperoftherunners]

6/9: The Con(vention) Run-in

Rating: PG (Fake fight for photo op)

Characters: Convention Attendee!Bang Chan x Reader (any gender), featuring Convention Attendee!Felix and mention of other characters

Notes: The final day of my birthday surprise series. Normally I try to attend Comic Con or its sister convention WonderCon, but both were postponed due to current events. This is a non-idol AU. The Aussie line are imagined as cousins in this story. All content is fictional. Please do not repost anywhere!

                                                   ————–

llamajinnie

I can’t believe it... Sent 8:10 AM

bc1997

It won’t be that bad! Besides the tickets were free! Sent 8:12 AM

Chan looked up from his phone when he felt a tap on his shoulder. His cousin was holding out his badge he needed to wear to enter the convention and he thanked him. He put his phone away in a pocket and slipped the lanyard on over his head.

Instead of working on music like he usually did in his spare time, Chan was accompanying his cousin Felix to a comic convention. The latter won tickets through a radio contest and his parents couldn’t attend. Because his mom didn’t want him going alone, she asked Chan if he could spare a weekend and accompany Felix to the convention.

Most his friends were shocked he would tag along with the younger boy, especially since Felix was the one who was more into the nerd scene, namely anime and manga. Chan’s friend Hyunjin was convinced that the former’s aunt likely bribed him with money if he drove and chaperoned Felix for a weekend at the convention, but Chan insisted he really wanted to go. Sure he wasn’t a huge comic book or pop culture nerd like his cousin, but it gave him an excuse to wear that Captain America costume he spent too much money on from Halloween.

“Thanks again,” Felix said as he flipped his badge to the front, showing his name. “Mum said lunch and dinner is on her.”

“No, it’s fine,” Chan insisted.

Felix shook his head and replied that it was non-negotiable. The pair made their way to a line to enter the convention center and waited for security to wave them inside. They flashed their badges at the security personnel and stepped inside.

Felix adjusted his beret, which was starting to slide off his head, due to the long rabbit ears he put on top.

“So uh, who are you again?” Chan asked as he studied his cousin’s costume.

“Momiji from Fruits Basket,” Felix explained. “He’s the rabbit in the Chinese zodiac. Thought it made sense, since everyone thinks I’m still a kid with the baby face.”

“Plus the hair,” Chan added. “Okay, never saw the anime, but cool!”

Felix nodded as he fixed his backpack straps and dashed ahead to check out the tables in the art section of the convention. Chan tried to catch up and had to apologize as he weaved around other participants. He ducked as a Harley Quinn from the recent live-action film barely missed him with her toy bat, as she started to put it up for a photo op.

“Hang on Cap, can I get a picture?” a male voice asked.

Chan whirled around and saw it was a father with a young son, dressed as Thor. He smiled at the son and nodded as he removed his shield backpack off his shoulders to hold for the photo. The son hesitated, and shyly looked up at Chan.

“Come on Thor, we need you in the picture too,” Chan said as he motioned for the young boy to stand next to him.

The young boy skipped over to him and Chan knelt down on one knee. He held out his shield backpack, while the boy clutched his toy version of Mjölnir. The father snapped the picture with his digital camera and quickly checked the photo, before flashing a thumbs-up.

“Thank you,” Chan said as he stood up. He waved goodbye to the young boy and secured the backpack on his shoulders. He craned his neck, looking for Felix, who was several feet away, talking to one artist at their booth. He quickly walked toward his cousin and tapped him on the shoulder.

Felix whirled around and pointed to some example works of art that the artist had on display. “Perfect timing! Actually I was thinking about doing a commission with this guy. Who should I have done?”

Chan bit his lip and tried to think of any anime characters that he might know. He maybe watched a few as a kid growing up, but his mum made him go out and play or practice swimming, which was better than sitting in front of a screen in her opinion.

“Um...Goku from Dragonball Z? Naruto?” he offered, trying not to wince. “Sorry, it’s been a really long time since I’ve watched an anime.”

Felix nodded and flipped through the dossier on the table for inspiration for a few seconds. Eventually he settled on some character from an anime he wasn’t familiar with (Tower something?) and the artist scribbled a note in his notebook.

“It’s going to take me probably until 1 PM to do that,” the artist told Felix. “Someone is ahead of you with a two character commission, so that’s gonna be worked on first. I’d say come back around 2:30 and I might have it ready by then.”

Felix thanked him and dug out his wallet to pay for the piece. He passed over some bills and the artist made change for him.

                                                   ————–

“Is that Binnie you’re messaging?” Felix asked.

Chan shook his head as he looked up from his phone. “Hyunjin. He’s convinced I’m trapped and not having fun. But then again, he’s not big on crowds and comic stuff.”

“Oh...” Felix trailed off. He craned his neck and noticed there were two seats closer to the front of the room. “We should grab those before the next panel starts.” He pushed himself out of his seat and quickly walked over to the empty chairs.

Chan stood up and followed his cousin, eventually taking the aisle seat in their new row. The pair had walked the floor for a few hours and now they were sitting in a room to listen and watch a panel on some anime series that Felix watched regularly. This allowed Chan to sit and relax, as well as respond to Hyunjin about how things were going.

“I promise we can grab lunch after this,” Felix whispered as someone came on stage to introduce the panelists.

Chan flashed him a thumbs-up and pocketed his phone out of respect for the panel. He leaned back in his seat as the moderator introduced all of the voice acting talent and then they rolled a new trailer for the next season. Once the trailer ended, the moderator began asking questions to the members on the panel and the audience listened to their responses. Eventually the panel began accepting fan questions, and Felix decided to rush up to the mic to ask one.

“MOMIJI!” one of the female panelists yelled with a huge smile on her face. “Oh my gosh, you are precious!”

Felix blushed at the compliment and ducked his head, before composing him and asking his question. The deep voice shocked the panelists and Chan bit back a laugh as one of the male panelists joked that he wanted to trade voices with Felix. The comment made the room laugh and Felix laughed along with them, then stepped to the side for the next fan to ask their question.

                                                   ————–

The boys exited the panel room after Felix’s panel concluded and Chan began researching local restaurants they could get lunch at. Both decided against the convention center food, as it was pricey and Felix mentioned that Minho had tried it once during a cat convention, giving it poor reviews.

“There’s a cat convention? Oh wait, that’s rhetorical,” Chan mused as he pictured their friend walking every row of the cat convention with a content smile on his face. “Do you know if they had cats for adoption? Or was it products for your cat?”

“Both apparently,” Felix replied as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Minho went to look at special food for one cat, cause he needed to go on a diet, and then he wanted a fancy collar for his female cat.”

“That’s not where he got the third cat right?”

His cousin gave him a blank look and scrunched his brows. “Hang on, he has three now? I thought he only had two!”

“No he’s got three now,” Chan confirmed. “His Christmas card showed him with three cats plus him wearing Santa hats.”

Felix tried to recall if he got a Christmas card from Minho, while Chan went back to looking at restaurants. He paused when he found some options and started to show them to his cousin. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and he turned his head to see it was someone dressed as Bucky Barnes in his Winter Soldier attire.

“Hey Cap, could we get a fight picture?” you asked under your black mask.

He nodded as he slowly removed his backpack from his shoulders and held the straps so they wouldn’t show in the picture. He turned to face you and you balled up the fist with your “metal” arm.

“I’m going to punch your shield, okay?” you explained.

He nodded and positioned himself as if he was defending himself with the shield. You placed your fist on the center of the shield and adjusted your feet, so it looked more convincing.

Felix stepped between the two of you and asked if you had a camera or phone you wanted to use. You nodded and used your free hand to pull out and unlock your phone. You switched to the camera app and handed it to him, murmuring a thank you.

He took the phone and put in landscape mode, checking to make sure everything was in focus. He counted to three, before clicking the button your screen a few times, just so you had more than one. He then switched to his phone and took some pictures too. He passed your phone over and you thanked him before checking the photos over.

“Perfect, thanks,” you replied. You dug around in your tactical vest and produced a card with your name and Instagram handle on it. “If you’re on IG, feel free to tag me. I’ll be uploading pics later tonight.”

Chan accepted the card and thanked you with a smile. He put it away in his pocket and added that you did an amazing job with it.

“Thank you,” you replied. “The arm was the hardest part but it came out good. Not the most comfortable thing to wear, but it’s all good. You make a good Cap.”

Chan ducked his head and waved it away as nothing. “I bought my costume – wish I had your talent.”

“Ah who cares? It looks great and you do too,” you confirmed, flashing him a thumbs-up. Your phone buzzed in your hand and you groaned when you saw it was your alarm for your next panel you were hoping to see. “Shoot, gotta run. My panel starts in 7 minutes. Have a great con!”

Chan nodded as he waved goodbye to you, while Felix held up his phone to show off his pictures.

“They came out pretty good,” he noted. “I’m guessing they’re a professional cosplayer.”

Chan patted the pocket with the card. “I’ll have to look them up online when we’re done.”

[trickstarbrave]

Question, why are your dice so expensive? I could buy several chessex sets for the price of one set of yours and I don't see the appeal at all. Why are you making them so expensive and then expecting people to buy them up? If you wan't actual customers I just think you should pay more attention to the price dice actually go for than jacking them up so high. Not to mention this isn't a great time to be asking people to buy expensive things like that... It's selfish.

first of all these arent chessex dice. if you want mass produced dice go right ahead, i own a lot of them too. theres nothing wrong with buying and collecting just that and if you want a lot of nice sets theyre a good way to go. but mine are not mass produced, and the reason mass produced sets are so cheap overall is because they are, well mass produced. you make a lot of them. the molds to make them and the big machinery are investments larger companies make in order to make a lot of dice. when you divide up those costs between hundreds upon THOUSANDS of sets of dice its not that much. 

my dice are handmade. im not saying you should buy them because theyre handmade if handmade means nothing to you. but because theyre handmade i can do a lot of things mass production cant do, like different effects, inclusions, and having sharp edges polished. again theres also a lot of effects only mass produced dice can have as well, so its not like i can do anything and there are pros and cons to each. but if youre asking the appeal, well then there are certain things youre only going to be able to get handmade. 

and because theyre handmade theyre more expensive expensive. if i charged what chessex does for theirs done nearly fully by machine i would be paying myself 2 dollars or less per hour and thats not even factoring into costs of materials or equipment. i have to hand make the molds, hand mix and pour small amounts of resin, i have to hand place tiny little embeds, i have to cut sprues and sand edges all by hand (before i would use a power tool a bit and do for other things now). i had to buy custom masters 3-d printed. i had to buy a pressure pot and air compressor so i could stop having failed casts filled with bubbles because of temperature fluctuations. i had to invest in sandpaper, polishing papers, a dremel. i had to buy silicone, and failed at making molds sometimes and had to eat that cost. i had to learn how to cast resin, different mold making methods and why they worked, how to sand and polish epoxy, how to use different materials. i had to buy every inclusion, all the resin, all the pigments and mica powders. and this doesn’t include the time i have to take to make every listing, photograph dice, social media management, and more. this is something i like doing yes but i cant just spend so much money on equipment and then just give them all away for basically free. 

and lastly i do know dice prices. i kinda have to. every single price increase was due to better equipment and learning, better materials, and done to try and adequately pay myself for my labor. i’m still, at best, getting about 10 bucks an hour which in many places isn’t that great and isn’t enough to survive on. im making what is barely a livable minimum wage from years of training and experimenting and honing a craft. and its not perfect, no! my dice probably arent the best you can buy handmade. there are people better than me and people who have been doing it longer. which is why mine are about middle of the road for handmade sets. ive seen them go as cheap as 25 bucks a set to 150 bucks a set. 60-70 is about where i feel rn is comfortable for the amount of time i put into it and my skill level. 

again i also cant tell you to buy from me rn. i get money is tight. i get theres a lot going on. ive also made donations, ive been unsure of things during covid. many people have lost their homes, or dont have proper food. if you can afford my dice i am not mad at you or upset, right now shit sucks. maybe you can never justify that much money on a dice set, i get it. i dont know you and dont need your lifes story. i dont want to make you feel you need to sacrifice even more to buy them if you dont want to or even cant and im not trying to pressure you into it.

but i cant fix all of these problems and i am not some multimillionaire demanding you cough up as much money as possible so i can hoard more wealth like a dragon. im a disabled lesbian. i was trying to be employed before this though a work program and that was set on hold as most places closed down entirely, and i sure as hell am going to be one of the last people anyone wants to give a job to in reopening. this is basically all i have to make money atm. and while times are tough i feel for some people things like a want for art or entertainment wont die. theres still ppl buying video games and art commissions and nice clothes. just right now a lot of people who would probably love to cant. and since i have no money i cant buy any of that other stuff rn either (luckily my gf and roommate have jobs so we can afford things like, food and rent). 

again buy chessex or any other brand of mass produced dice if you want to. if you dont care for expensive kinds dont buy them. im not going to force you to or guilt you into it. spend your money how you want to. the post was mainly so people who like that kind of thing and have the money for it can see it and make that decision for themselves. and if you personally dont like my stuff you can buy from another handmade seller if you decide you trust them more, i dont mind. im just... tryin to get by. making some dice. seeing if anyone will buy them so maybe i can make more bc there Isnt Much Else I Can Do Like This. 

tl;dr: dont buy my dice then and buy cheaper dice it doesnt hurt my feelings if you dont want to/cant buy what i make im not your mom i cant tell you what to do???? i am just trying to get by im an artist and im disabled idk what u want ME to do exactly in this equation 

[padalickingood]

-NEED HELP MOVING OUT-

Hi everyone! This one’s gonna be a long one but I hope I can implore you all to take a quick minute of your time to read this and hopefully share it with others TvT. I’ve really been taking my time procrastinating from writing this because I never liked talking much about my own personal situation and dumping that on people, but I’ve unfortunately reached a point where I'm a bit desperate for any kind of help If I am going to try and make this happen.  

Recently I’ve started a serious goal of saving up enough money in order to move out by early next summer. I have attempted to make plans to move from my family home many times in the past couple of years and unfortunately have never managed to get anywhere near to achieving that goal due to my financial situation. Things have gotten increasingly stressful and emotionally exhausting in my current situation and I’ve officially hit that point where I’m willing to ask for assistance online.  

As a freelance artist, even with my Etsy, Patreon, ko-fi, and commission work combined I barely manage to make enough for basic living essentials which doesn’t include any sort of insurance or homeowner/apt owner expenses. Currently I do my very best to pay for as much as I can on my own and even so I still require support from my parents by them allowing me to live with them and them providing internet etc. What I pay for out of pocket is limited to things I need personally such as food, clothes, basic living supplies, art/store supplies etc. I’ve also recently limited myself from buying anything that is not completely necessary for essential living like eating out, movies, buying gifts over a certain price limit for friends, as well as canceling any travel plans from here on out. 

At this point I feel like It’s important for me to explain why I am a freelance artist as opposed to having any other type of job that could potentially be easier and pay better. This may be a bit of a tl;dr but I feel like it should at least be mentioned because the impact it’s had. Several years ago (I wanna say 2013 ish?) I dropped out of my community college because of essentially having a breakdown. The entire experience had left such a negative impact on me that my mood had very noticeably 180’d from high school to 2nd year of college. It was probably the closest I've come to being any level of depressed, which is not a word I throw around lightly as it’s something I don’t think I've felt anywhere near the level of those who struggle with it. Overall those years were so incredibly demoralizing and difficult for me that I made the tough decision of leaving school, something I had never even considered doing in my past (I never even skipped class in high school up until last day of senior year lol). Deciding to leave when I did though was probably the right decision because to this day, I still feel the lasting negative effects those years had on me. After I left school, I picked up a retail job and worked there for about a year and half. It wasn’t something I was really eager to do but was necessary as I wasn’t going to school anymore. With no degree though a minimum wage job was my only real option. Unfortunately, my experiences working weren’t all that positive either (as something I'm sure many of you also experience). I struggled to maintain motivation and continued to feel incredibly negative. It got so bad that it effected my relationships with family and friends as it kept me in a very antisocial mood. I ended up quitting that job shortly after and decided to try and go full freelance. Ever Since then I've worked on building up my store, commissions and anything else I could to try and make money from my art. To this day I still struggle with building up my online presence to the point where I can make a living off of it, but one thing that drastically changed for the better was my mood. My mental health has always been an absolute priority for me and I make a conscious effort to never force myself into anything that I know will have a negative impact on my health, which is why I dropped out of college and quit that job. I knew that if I stayed there it would have absolutely gotten so bad that It would have left much deeper scars than it has. And Although working in Freelance is no easy task and comes with its own degrees of stress, I find it far more rewarding and worth managing that stress. 

But as a result of those years I’ve been afraid of going back to either school or a minimum wage job. I know if I return to a job like that it will pull me back into a mental space that I'm just not willing to sacrifice myself to, and as far as College goes, I simply can’t afford it. However, with deciding to become a freelance artist I've dedicated my time to trying to build myself back up with my art and create a presence online where I can simultaneously do what I know makes me happy while also earning a living off of it. My progress has been slow and over the years I've felt like I've hit a standstill which brings me to my overall goal of wanting to move out. As I mentioned before I had been making attempts to move since around the time I worked in retail. Things haven’t panned out since then as I am still struggling to try and build up my store/Patreon/overall customer basis online. Unfortunately, also within these past few years tensions have been at a pretty constant high in my household because of it. There’s an added weight of still being so reliant on my parents after all these years and it being used against me, that the stress I’ve accumulated from it has kept me from being as productive as I would like. Recently with some current events I’ve just about hit a breaking point and am willing to do anything I can in order to save up so I can officially move out. I’m incredibly tired emotionally from still being here and I’ve started to take serious steps to making this move happen. Luckily I’ve been able to find a friend I can move out with so I won’t be paying rent on my own and I’ve calculated how much I could potentially make a month if I stick to a packed workload schedule. It’s not ideal but I’ve committed to this freelance work and I’m willing to work as hard as I can to reach my goal, and if all goes well then by this time next year i’ll be able to move out.

In writing this I hope that I can ask for support in helping me raise enough so I can try and move out of an unhealthy situation into hopefully something better.  

And to be clear I'm not doing a kickstarter or gofund me. That’s just simply not something this warrants. I know have options and I know that all I need to do is to work much much harder than someone with a 9to5 in order to earn what I need. The only reason I decided to write this out is to share WHY your support is so incredibly important to me and why sharing my work to anyone you can is very essential to my livelihood. Right now, I am very far away from earning nearly enough on a monthly basis in order to move out within a year, but I'm hoping that can change for the better. I simply ask for those who support my work to continue to do so and for those who haven’t and are absolutely financially able to consider supporting my work and share it with anyone you know. Whether it’s commissions, store merch, Patreon rewards, ko-fi etc. Every tiny bit helps me so much!  

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Here are the ways you can support me!

✪ Patreon: With the cheapest tier being 2$ a month you guys can get early access to all of my artwork a month in advance as well as other bonus content at the 2$ and above tier that is exclusive to patrons only. I have details about my rewards and goals on my Patreon that you don’t have to pay to view! Simply visit my homepage and browse through the rewards and bio to see if it interests you! 

✪ Ko-fi: I recently added a moving goal fund there which will show its progress with each kofi donation! The goal is ambitions and I don’t really expect to reach it but I wanted to just aim high and try and earn as much as I can. Also, I do sketch commissions there occasionally and may do other types of small commissions. So, if you’d like to support me while also getting something for yourself keep an eye out for my announcements on my twitter! 

✪ Commissions/adoptables: I’m going to officially be opening up my commissions soon but before that I wanted to try my hand at selling some adoptables! I’ll have more information about them after I finish up my current batch of commissions but I'm going to try and stick to those for now with some small YCH commissions sprinkled in between. After those though I’ll be opening up regular commissions again ^^ 

✪ Etsy:  I’m actually not sure If I'm going to keep my store up for much longer since I get charged a fee on each listing but before it closes you could help support me by buying merch from my store! 

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And lastly, I want to thank everyone who took the time to read through this and for those who follow me/support me in any way that you can. Even your reblogs/retweets on my work mean so much to me and help me so much I could never fully express how much I’m thankful to have such an amazing and lovely following of people <3 Thank you for your time

[the-blind-assassin-12]

Ryan: P: (3, 6, 14, 24), P/F: (10, 16), L: (4, 5), C: (3), F: (1, 4, 8), P: (6), V: (1, 3), DL: (1, 9)

I had a lot to say here… 

Ryan always makes me ramble.

Personality

3-Are they more optimistic or pessimistic?

Ryan is extremely optimistic. He’s not naive. He’s seen his fair share of hardship and struggle. But he looks on the bright side of every situation he finds himself in. He knows that life is short- unexpectedly so sometimes- and he knows that it’s better to have a positive outlook than a negative one because it makes that short time more enjoyable. He trusts his gut and usually things work out for him, so he doesn’t see a reason to change to a more negative outlook. He keeps his expectations reasonable and his baggage light, and the majority of the time, Ryan is a truly happy person down to his bones. 

6-What bad habits do they have?

Aside from smoking, which he’s told himself that he’d try to quit a few times now, the only other “bad habit” he has is that he can’t take a compliment well. He tries to deflect, claim that its the song that’s great, not his playing, or that the sound is only as good as it is because of who he’s playing with, all the while the skin between his beard and his eyes is blushing a rosy pink hue. It’s not a bad habit in that it hurts anyone, but he has to work on receiving praise, because he absolutely deserves it. 

14-What is their greatest fear?

Ryan’s not afraid of much. He doesn’t love heights, but that won’t stop him from climbing a roof that needs patching or looking out over the ledge of a bridge or balcony. He’s not the biggest fan of elevators, but he rarely ever has to use one so that’s not much of an issue, either. But there is one thing that will make his eyes go wide and the hair on the back of his neck stand straight up: Scorpions.

He’d run into them for the first time in Yuma, AZ, camping with Cowboy and Virginia. Sure, there were scorpions in Georgia, but not in the Southeast where he grew up, and certainly not poisonous ones. But a bark scorpion found its way into Ryan’s boot one night, and he almost shoved his foot right on top of it in the morning had Virginia not grabbed his arm and yanked the boot out of his hand. At first he was confused, but his mouth dropped open and an “oh, shit!” slipped out as she upended his shoe and a little yellow armored creature plunked out onto the stony, sandy ground, pincers raised and tail poised to strike.

“Always check your boots, Brenner,” Cowboy slapped him on the back as he came back to the campsite, a smirk on his face as he threw his friend a wink and kissed his girl on the cheek.

From that moment on, Ryan has never once put his shoes on without checking them.

Aside from scorpions he has another fear that really only started developing as he got older and the invincibility of his twenties started to fade, and that fear is of dying alone. His father, Oz, Cowboy… they were all alone in their last moments, and he couldn’t help but wonder: were they cold? In pain? Suffering? How long until someone found them? What was that like, those last few seconds of life with no one there as you entered the abyss? The thought gave him chills so he tried to push it from his mind whenever it cropped up, would call a friend or one of his cousins to distract from the fear. He also knew what the other side of that coin was like; remembered as clearly as if it were yesterday both calls from Robin and Virginia, and the guilt that he felt when he heard the news. He didn’t want Georgie or Louie or anyone else to get that call about him, to feel that guilt of “I shoulda met him in Tupelo or Jacksonville or Cheyenne.” He was careful, always trying his best to stay out of any dangerous situations- something that he knew Oz and Cowboy weren’t keen on, and something that he’d been told his father hadn’t been the best at either. He enjoyed traveling alone for the most part and didn’t let this newfound fear get in his way of that enjoyment, but it was particularly bad in the winter months when rails froze and black ice made for dicey footing when getting on or off of a moving train, when falling asleep when the temperature fell could mean not waking up.

24-What are their idiosyncrasies?

Ryan ties his shoes in a very specific way, double knotting with every pass of the looped lace, and tucking the loose ends into the third crossed lace along the tongue of his boots. If the lace comes loose, he undoes the whole knot and starts over. 

He isn’t comfortable if he can’t see the sky. He hates basements and rooms without windows, and he almost never picks a train car that doesn’t have an open top or at least one open side. 

He can’t stand still when he brushes his teeth. He paces around, not nervously, just casually, until it’s time to spit and rinse. 

 Past & Future

10- What smells remind him of his childhood?

Pine from his grandfather’s carving, salt air from time spent at the beach with his cousins, peaches bubbling and caramelizing in the oven from Aunt Holly’s cobbler, wood smoke from the bonfires the Brenner’s were known for, the earthy smell of skunks from that one time he, Jimmy, Patrick and Zach tried to domesticate one of the monochromatic mammals living under Uncle Max’s tool shed and ended up getting sprayed and subsequently laughed at by all the “told ya so” cousin’s watching from the porch.  

16- What past act is he most ashamed of?

Once, when Ryan was still new to the road and still learning how to get by on his own (just a few months after his 17th birthday), he found himself with no cash, no food, and no one to lean on for another two days until Cowboy and Virginia got into town. He held out as long as he could, but the fact was that at 17 he wasn’t nearly a good enough musician to make any real money on his own, and it had already been a full day on an empty stomach. So he did what he had to do, and grabbed a wrapped deli sandwich from the refrigerator case, stuffing it in his pocket and leaving the store before he could be seen. 

He’s been back through those parts a handful of times, and he always makes it a point to stop in that deli and leave a few extra dollars in the tip jar on the counter. 

 Love

4- When was the last time he had sex?

Well, it was with Jackie, so roughly a year ago. And before that, even longer. Falling into bed with Jackie as quickly as he did was very out of character for Ryan. Getting attached to people who are attached to where they live isn’t a good habit for someone like him- someone who goes where the roads and rails take him, when they take him, and has no need for a rear view mirror. Did he genuinely want to help Jackie when she got hit by that pickup? Yes, of course. Ryan is nearly incapable of walking away from someone who needs help, because he believes in karma and that when good goes around it comes around. Not that he only helps people if he thinks something good will come for him, he just firmly believes that the world would be a better place if we judged less and helped more. Did he really want much more to do with Jackie after that? Not really, but she offered to repay his kindness with dinner, and Ryan’s not really in a position to turn down a meal or a warm place to eat it. Staying the night? Okay, it was snowing, what did you want him to do? Freeze his poor little face off trying to hitch a ride? Like he said, who’s stopping for a stranger in a snowstorm? No one, so the kindness was extended to a bed for the night. Understandable.

Then the morning comes and he sees the poor condition that the roof is in, and two things happened at once: 1) having done so much repair work, roofing, and odd jobs in the carpentry field, he couldn’t walk away from that leak knowing that in a month or so the whole thing would collapse, and 2) that desire to help someone in need kicked in again. Should he have left it at the roof? Of course he should have, but Jackie just kept needing, and Ryan just kept giving. Support, comfort, help, kindness. And after so long on his own, a few days with someone who seemed to need and appreciate him was a big change…one that proved to be confusing for Ryan; nothing felt wrong, necessarily, it just didn’t feel right, and when Jackie asked if Southbound was “about her” when they were in bed together, that’s when Ryan first thought that he’d made a mistake: how could it be about her? I only just met her.

It was about someone, that’s for sure, but that someone wasn’t Jackie Laurel.

About a year and three or four months before Jackie, Ryan’s last real intimate encounter was with a girl named Chloe. Chloe was a year younger than Ryan, an artist that he met while he was out in Montana at Georgie’s uncle’s buddy’s ranch. They clicked instantly and before that 4 week period was up, Ryan was hypnotized by the girl with the feather earring and Chloe was goo for the boy with the guitar. They never labeled anything because to them, labels felt like limitations- not on what they could do, but on how they chose to be together. Chloe lived in Montana most of the year, but would spend months at a time traveling wherever the wind blew in search of inspiration for her next big project- she’s a sculpture artist specializing in naturally inspired pieces- and the semi-permanent living arrangement was really only so that she had a place to come back to work when she was ready to start slinging clay. But whenever she was “home” she’d let Ryan know, and usually he would make his way to Livingston if it was feasible. They’d even met up on the road a few times, and their relationship was easy and light regardless of whether it had been three months or three weeks since last they saw one another. For the first entire year, all anyone had to do was mention the other’s name and they’d both bloom bright red roses on their cheeks.

Heading into their second year of unlabeled bliss, Chloe started to get real recognition for her work, earning commissions for universities, libraries and other large organizations. Ryan was over the moon thrilled for her, and her excitement was palpable even over the phone. When she called to tell him that she’d be in Livingston, he couldn’t wait to get her in his arms, to kiss the corner of her smile, right where her dimples would form. He split off from Cowboy, Virginia and Georgie and hopped the first train headed west. They spent two whole days holed up in bed, tangled in Chloe’s crisp white sheets with golden summer light streaming in through the sun catcher in the window and painting their entwined bodies with blues and oranges and reds. Ryan realized then that he’d fallen in love with her, and he could tell that she had come to the same realization about him by the way she held him or by how her soft lips lingered against his bristly cheeks, or from the way her dark obsidian eyes would shine when she smiled at him. He realized then, that she was the first woman he’d ever really been in love with, and even though they hadn’t had one another constantly, they’d been constants in one another’s lives and he wanted that to continue. He wanted that to continue forever.

Chloe did, too, but then something happened.

Ryan stayed in Livingston with her for two weeks before circling back up with Georgie (Cowboy and Ginny had gone south to Utah to visit her folks for a while) but about two months later he was back after her tearful phone call letting him know that she was pregnant, but that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep the baby. Ryan couldn’t breathe or think or keep his heartbeat steady, so he told Georgie what was going on and dizzily hopped a train from neighboring South Dakota back to Montana and the forever that had suddenly started slipping through his fingers.

Chloe was a mess when he got there- couldn’t speak for the tears that were pouring from her eyes, couldn’t stop trembling from the fear that she was struck with, even as Ryan’s strong arms circled her small frame. Ryan never saw himself as a father, but he never saw himself falling in love, either, and in that moment he decided that he’d do whatever he had to to be the man that Chloe and their child needed. If that meant that he had to travel less, he was prepared to make that change. He’d always heard people say that love makes you do crazy things, and he finally understood what that meant. But it seemed that Chloe had been doing some crazy things of her own- she hadn’t waited for Ryan to get there after she called him. She’d gone to a clinic and made the decision already. That’s why she was racked with fear, because she’d made their choice without asking him, without considering what he’d want or think, part of her knowing how he’d feel. No, Ryan never saw himself as a dad or as a husband, but he never saw himself having his heart broken by the first woman he fell in love with, either. He tried to forgive her for making the choice without him, even though he was hurting, but she couldn’t forgive herself even though she didn’t regret her choice. Suddenly there was a chasm between them while they were standing in the same room, and the last time Ryan left Livingston was the last time he’d be back.

A few months before meeting Jackie, Ryan was traveling in Macy, Nebraska and he stumbled on one of the works she’d been commissioned to sculpt at a community college. He’d called her, just to congratulate her and to tell her how beautiful it was, and they’d caught up on each other’s lives: Ryan was still jumping trains and making music, she was still sculpting… and she’d met someone… someone who she hadn’t hurt like she’d hurt Ryan, someone who’d asked her to marry him, and someone she’d said yes to. She’d again expressed how completely sorry she was for how things had gone, and she finally accepted his forgiveness. Now, from time to time, Ryan will see one of her sculptures and a sad smile will cross his face for the life he almost had with her, but then the sadness fades and he’s happy for the life she has now, and for the possibilities still out there for himself.

Someone (ahem @its-my-little-dumpster-fire) asked if Ryan ever slept with Robin…and the answer is… yes, but it was a while back, before Chloe, and it was weird for both of them. Yes, there was always chemistry between them, even while Oz was alive (which was tricky but Ryan chalked it up to friendship and kindred spirits and the amount of time spent harmonizing) but they never acted on it. Robin loved Oz and was extremely loyal to him, and Ryan respected that. His death was hard on both of them, and when they saw one another afterwards, it just sort of…happened. But it was a one and done and never again type of thing- neither is embarrassed or has any sort of regret over it, and it didn’t change their friendship which is still very strong. And if you want more details on that… I have them but this is already long enough.

  5- What kind of sex does he have?

Hands covering every inch of you, but starting in the least likely of places- your shoulder, the crook of your elbow, or maybe your calf. Lips caressing your skin which is practically vibrating with need, but gently and slowly, deliberately. He brings your hand to his mouth to plant a kiss there, but not to your knuckles; right to the center of your palm where your lifeline stretches from your wrist to your fingers. He’ll leave one on your ankle bone as he helps free you from your jeans. He wants you naked, doesn’t need the theatrics of a strip tease or a high end lace bra. He wants you bare before him so he can appreciate every detail, each freckle, all the veins in your arms, the little scars that tell the story of you, the sum of your “imperfections” that set you aside from the rest of the world. When he looks at you it’s with hunger like you’ve never seen. He starts devouring you with his eyes but he doesn’t stop there, mouth finding every sweet spot on your body, not stopping until you’re nearly incoherent, finally entering you and basking in the feel of you surrounding him, in the look of awe on your face and the strained sighs escaping your lips…

That’s what it’s like to be loved by Ryan Brenner.

Ryan is an intense, sensual partner who thrives on a deep connection with those he chooses to be intimate with- this is why it was out of character for him to end up sleeping with Jackie, because they hadn’t known one another long enough to build the kind of connection that he usually looks for. He’s a little bit old fashioned in the thought that intimacy should go hand in hand with emotion, that it’s a language with which to communicate what can’t be said with words. That’s why his number isn’t very high- only 5- and why he doesn’t have a different girl in every city he’s visited. Ryan is extremely and acutely in tune with his partner, and is able to put the most raw, pure feeling into every touch and movement.

 Conflict

3- What is his kryptonite?

It’s always been the people that he cares about. Ryan doesn’t have a lot to his name, so in terms of material things he doesn’t have much to lose and there aren’t a lot of situations that he couldn’t recover from. He’s been robbed twice, went a week without making a buck once, even broke his guitar once on a bumpy dismount, but he bounced back from all of those situations. But the people he cares about- his cousins and Chase, his friends from coast to coast, even the new additions like you, Junebug- they mean more to him than he can put into words, and he’d do anything he could for any of them. 

  Favorites

1-What is their favourite animal?

Ryan has always liked birds. From small finches and jays to hawks, eagles and cranes, they’ve always fascinated him. To him they represent freedom and independence. They sing songs unique to themselves, they get to look at the world from a different perspective, they get to go wherever they want, whenever they want, and to Ryan it always seems like they’re having fun, swooping and diving, riding the wind, splashing in puddles or sand. 

4-What is their favourite song?

You cannot know how long I agonized over this answer. 

I finally landed on Into the Mystic by Van Morrison, because it reminds him of happy times with his parents before his father died and his mother remarried. Carolyn and Luke Brenner were very much in love, and there was always music playing in their home whether it was Luke strumming a guitar or banjo, or Carolyn singing along to the small radio on the kitchen counter. Ryan had a lot of memories of his parents singing and dancing, smiles on their faces and laughter in their eyes. He even remembers times when his father was away, and his mother would take his small hands and dance him through the living room with this song playing. When he hears it now (or plays it, which only happens occasionally when he has the right accompaniment- it’s a pretty piano heavy song…maybe Junebug can help him out with this one…) he feels light and happy, and hopeful that someday he might find something like what his parents had.   

8- What is his favorite food? 

Ryan’s favorite food is shrimp and grits, but not just from anywhere, specifically his Aunt Holly’s version of the dish. When Ryan came to live permanently among the Brenners a few years after His mother married his stepfather, he spent most of his time with his Gram and Granddaddy, and his father’s sister Holly, Jimmy’s mom and his Uncle Alan, though the whole family had a hand in raising him from 12-16. But most of that time was under Holly and Alan’s roof, and Holly was the best damn cook in town. Alan worked on a shrimping boat and was able to come home with freshly caught prawns at a fraction of the price that they’d run in seafood markets. At first, Ryan was skeptical of the shrimp because he’d never eaten something with so many legs or antennas, pushing them aside to devour the delicious, creamy corn grits that they sat atop. But eventually he gave in, seeing how much everyone else liked the funny looking sea creatures, and since that first sweet bite he’s been hooked. Holly always makes them when he’s home. He’s tried them a few times elsewhere, but there’s really no comparison to the family recipe. 

 Possessions 

6- What is in his pockets? 

I answered this one separately because it got lengthy: 

Turn ‘Em Out 

Values

1- What does he think is the worst thing that can happen to someone?

The worst thing in the world as far as Ryan is concerned, is feeling like you’re stuck; like you can’t control the speed or direction of your own life. He’s seen it grind people down until they break, and he’s seen it many times through his life.

He saw it first with his mother, when she married his stepfather. Their relationship was fine, but even Ryan at 10 could tell that they weren’t in love the same way his mom was in love with his dad. While he was mostly apathetic towards Ryan, his mother’s new husband treated her well enough, but Ryan never caught them dancing in the kitchen at 2am when he wandered out for water like he’d caught his father twirling his mother, a small radio playing on the counter. He never saw his mother jump into her new husband’s arms when he got home from work like she used to greet Ryan’s dad when he’d come home from his travels. Miles cared for and respected Ryan’s mother, but he didn’t go out of his way to do so, and Ryan had the sneaking suspicion that she only married him because she’d already had his child (Ryan’s half brother Chase was unexpectedly born 2 years before their wedding, and Ryan was thrilled about being a big brother having seen how much fun Tommy and Zach had growing up together. He didn’t care about the 8 year age gap.) and she felt like her chances of finding a second true love like Ryan’s father (especially with two kids) were running out. Miles was there, and even though things weren’t as great as they might have been with someone else, she wasn’t alone. But she wasn’t happy, either, and Ryan saw her smiles dwindle through the years.

He saw it with Chloe, when she found out that she was pregnant and the fear of being stuck was so great that she threw the choice away before even talking to Ryan about it. He saw the way that decision broke her down until it ruined whatever the two of them could have salvaged from that relationship.

He saw it happen to Cowboy when he and Virginia started on the same page with their son and ended up in separate books. Ginny was smitten with that kid the second he popped out, and Cowboy loved him, too, but staying put proved to be much tougher than he thought it would be. It turned him bitter at times and made him angry, and Ryan answered more than one shaky, tear filled call from Virginia after Cowboy’d taken his “stuck” feelings out on her. He’d tried his best to alleviate some of that burden, dropping by to visit the three of them as often as he could, trying to make it feel like old times, he and Cowboy playing together while Virginia rocked the baby in the corner. But eventually even that wasn’t enough, and Cowboy realized that he couldn’t stick it out, not for as long as Virginia needed him to, so at her urging, he unstuck himself. And then Ryan saw it happen to Ginny after he died- that boy means the world to her, and she doesn’t regret having to give up her lifestyle, she wasn’t so attached to having no attachments as Cowboy was, but Ryan knows that she feels stuck just like his mother did. A single mother with limited avenues for change.

He sees it when you’re sitting in your empty apartment and you tell him straight and honest that you’re stuck without direction. 

Ryan doesn’t judge people or pity them when they feel stuck in their lives. He simply hopes that they’ll be able to unstick themselves soon because he knows that life is too short to feel like you have no options, to feel stuck, to not take the wheel for yourself. 

3- When did he last lie?

 Ryan doesn’t lie often, and when he does it’s usually only to protect someone’s feelings. Like the time he told Taylor that the lemon squares she made were “really good” before turning and spitting the dry, tasteless clump into a napkin, Fitz and Jimmy snorting into their drinks.

But when he told himself that he could have the sort of thing with Jackie that he had with Chloe, that was a lie, and he knew it as soon as his boots were back on her porch and her arms were around his neck. Coming back to Jackie felt like obligation once he was there, something he never felt towards Chloe. Just give it some time… But the more time he gave it, the more clear it became- Jackie could never fully accept his part-time presence, and Ryan wasn’t ready to change his lifestyle for her. Within an hour of his arrival she’d asked him how long he was staying, expecting certain answers and showing real disappointment when he shrugged and answered with “a week, maybe?” She just wants more time… But he realized it would never be enough time unless it was all the time. He realized he’d never find something quite like what he and Chloe had, and that he’d never be able to have anything even close to that with Jackie. He realized that the real lie wasn’t even that he was telling himself that he and Jackie could work; the real lie was that he was lonely but he’d been telling himself that he wasn’t. 

  Daily Life

1-What are his eating habits?

Ryan is a messy eater and always has been. He doesn’t leave a mess behind, but if there’s sauce in what he’s eating it’s going to end up on his face and all over his hands. If it’s something that can create crumbs, they’re going to get trapped in his beard until he wipes his hand over his face. He has a set of silverware in his pack along with a can opener, half-used sterno, and a camp coffee filter, but he rarely uses the silverware because if he does then he has to find some place to clean them and he doesn’t always have access to water like that. He just digs in with his fingers most of the time, especially when he’s alone. He carries some food items with him- ground coffee, nuts, jerky, and a couple cans of tuna, beans or corn. He also has a jug of water that he can tie onto one of the straps of his pack. Space is limited, but he always makes sure that he has food for a day or two in case something happens and he either can’t afford or can’t get to a deli, convenience store, café or grocery store. Most days he eats two meals- breakfast and a late lunch/ early dinner. Ryan’s really good at only eating when he’s actually hungry, and he’ll eat a third or even fourth meal on days when he burns a lot of energy, like if he gets some side work in construction or agriculture. Along those same lines, he doesn’t overeat, only eating until he’s full. He always has to be ready to move, and quickly, so being weighed down by an overfull stomach isn’t a great idea.

When he’s home though? With all those family recipes and no need to worry about hightailing it to or from anywhere? He goes full on food coma, especially when he stops in to see his Aunt Holly. She’s never not had a peach cobbler cooling on her kitchen table for as long as Ryan can remember, and there’s always at least one pot going on the stove and something else in the oven.

Typical Ryan fare on the day to day is usually something that he can eat quickly, is easy to eat on the move, and has a lot of protein. He’ll stop in to a deli for a sandwich, grab a burrito from a food truck, or hit the “ready to eat” section at a grocery or convenience store.

8-What is their soft drink of choice?

Ryan usually sticks to water, coffee and tea when it comes to non-alcoholic beverages, but every now and then if he sees a root beer- a good one- he caves and goes for it. His favorite happens to be Jones Soda Co. and he first tried that brand out in Oregon with Robin. Aside from the flavor, which is just sassafras-y enough and not too sweet, he was initially drawn to the bottle because the label caught his eye. Each one has a different black and white photo, most of them showcasing little glimpses of Americana. The one that caught his eye at the Sweet Street Deli (he and Robin had gone in to grab lunch and drinks for the group. They’d been playing together around the corner in front of the Tioga building, locals gathering around and dropping change and crumpled bills into the open instrument cases and walking away with smiles that they spread all over town.) had a photo of a rail crossing signal and Ryan laughed to himself as he wrapped his fingers around the cool neck of the bottle. He grabbed an orange soda for Georgie, a classic cola for Cowboy, and for Virginia, who had more of an adventurous palate than her partner, he picked green apple. Whenever Ryan sees Jones root beer, it reminds him of that first trip out to Oregon, of carefree summer days and easy, laughter filled nights.

[musicoccurred]

Pearl Jam -The Home Shows

Who: Pearl Jam Where: The Home Shows, Seattle, WA. When: August 8, 10 2018

I've said this before and it remains true. A Pearl Jam concert is much more than just a show. It's a celebration. A celebration of music, of a long relationship and of course, life. Very few places do I feel absolutely at home but a Pearl Jam show is one of them. Certainly we're all different people but for 3 hours we're one. These Seattle shows reminded me of a pilgrimage, I'm sure there were lots of Seattle folks there but most of the people I chatted with were from other places. For me it was a bucket-list item, to see Pearl Jam in their home city, a city that gave us so much music and so many iconic bands.

These concerts, "The Home Shows," given that name because the tour takes place mainly in MLB stadiums, had a similar feel to PJ20 the 20th anniversary shows in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin in 2011. No, there weren't multiple bands on the bill, but there were multiple activities and certainly a festive vibe. The Seattle Museum of Pop Culture, aka MoPop, had an exhibit dedicated to Pearl Jam opening on the Saturday after the shows but 10c (Ten Club, Pearl Jam's fanclub) members could gain access on Thursday during the day off between shows. London Bridge Studios where Ten was recorded also had Pearl Jam specific tours and legendary concert photographer Danny Clinch had a pop up shop with photos available for autograph and purchase. Did I mention it all took place in Seattle? Not only a great city but a city full of Pearl Jam history, we're talking The Off Ramp, Moore Theater, Benaroya Hall, Showbox, Easy Street Records, the list goes on!

Wednesday, Night 1

It has become popular again for bands to have artists make posters for concerts, particularly individual posters for each show. Pearl Jam is one of the few that's always done this. It is an expensive habit and the posters are treated as currency among 10c members. For these shows there were 5 unique posters all by artists Pearl Jam has used extensively in the past. A point of contention here, at their larger shows, the band has started setting up tents to sell merch throughout the day and even on days before and after the shows. Because they are open to the public, it's safe to say there are people there buying and going straight to eBay. The lines took many hours to navigate, there has to be a better way. How about when a 10c member buys a ticket through the band's website we get a code unique to us that allows us to purchase merch online and have it shipped to our homes? Place whatever quantity limits you want, something needs to change. A highlight of waiting around in the sun all day, I met a cool young man that had traveled from Tokyo to attend his first Pearl Jam show. There were people coming to Seattle from all over the world, this guy was in for a night he won't soon forget.

Several years ago Pearl Jam shows began lasting +- 3 hours. They always played a lot of songs but when this happened they finally shed the opening act. No complaints here. At 8:30 straight up the band took the stage to a loop of "Aye Davanita" from Vitalogy and ease into "Long Road." Now PJ's MO is that they play a quiet track or two then something noisy. Not on this night, Eddie wanted it to be an intimate gathering so "Long Road" led to "Release" followed by "Low Light" and crowd favorite, the singalong "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town." Genius. How do you transition from slow and quiet into something noisy? "Corduroy" that's how. Even though it's a song that PJ play pretty much every show it remains a favorite for me. Its long intro whips the crowd into a frenzy that continued with "Go,"  "Do the Evolution" and the Ramones-esque "Mind Your Manners." Each setlist is crafted by Ed with input from the band to fit the venue, audience and history of the band/city. Probably the most notable moment of the show was when Eddie broke down the meaning of "Evenflow." "Evenflow" is a concert staple, performed pretty much every time they play. In the 90s it was the song people liked when they didn't like PJ. Fast drums and guitars, weird lyrics just a fun rock song. But on this night, after the band had worked hard with politicians and local businesses to raise money and awareness for Seattle's horrible homeless problems Ed opened up a bit. When the band had just formed they spent a lot of time in the Belltown/Pioneer Square areas of Seattle. They befriended another Eddie, this one a homeless African-American Vietnam Veteran with mental health problems. He was known for his wild hair and wearing a tarp like a poncho. When he was mentally present he would tell them about Vietnam and his struggles with returning to civilian life. Other times, he simply wasn't there mentally. His visits greatly affected the band and when they came back from a tour they couldn't find him. Searching all over Seattle they finally found him sleeping on concrete under a viaduct. Returning from a later tour they again couldn't find him and discovered he had passed away. Suddenly "Evenflow" makes perfect sense, Ed held on to that story for 28 years. Other highlights, Ed performed a solo rendition of Jack White's "We're Going to be Friends" in honor of teachers everywhere. During the performance, his daughters danced with their favorite teachers (clad in Mariners jerseys with Vedder on the back) behind him. During the encore Brandi Carlile joined the band for "Again Tonight" a song PJ had covered for a benefit album. I love when other musicians join Pearl Jam on stage and look out at the giant crowd with wide eyes, Brandi ever the badass, threw her head back and screamed into the Seattle sky. They closed the show with "Rockin' in the Free World" and my least favorite live song, "Yellow Ledbetter" the show clocked in at 33 songs over 3 hours.

Thursday, Day Off

I snoozed on the London Bridge Studios tickets so that was out. I was looking forward to roaming around the city and attending the Pearl Jam exhibit at MoPop. Situated near the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project, MoPop is covered in tourists. Lucky for us this was a 10c event only. Jeff Ament is the de facto historian of the band keeping massive amounts of memorabilia in a warehouse. This band kept everything. I mean EVERYTHING. They have the cassettes that Stone/Jeff and Ed mailed back and forth to begin their relationship. Seeing these in person was powerful. Pearl Jam have provided the soundtrack to my life and quite literally if those tapes didn't exist I wouldn't have been standing there all those years later. Favorite moments: seeing the typed and written lyrics and loads of Ed's notebooks, the incredible statue of Andy Wood that Jeff commissioned (more on that here) as well as posters from every show. If you're in Seattle I highly recommend seeing this exhibit.

Friday, Night 2

Again starting at 8:30 PJ opens with three slow burners, "Oceans," "Footsteps" and "Nothingman" before blasting off with "Why Go" and "Brain of J." This was going to be awesome. I love the 2nd PJ shows, all of my needs are met by the first night. Nervousness is gone, just relax and enjoy the show. This show really focused on older material, only two tracks were post 2000. The band were much looser as was the crowd. The singalongs were louder and sharper, I refrained, choosing instead to just absorb the love and energy flying around the stadium. During "I Won't Back Down," a solo tribute to the great Tom Petty, Eddie asked the crowd to turn on their cell phone flashlights so Tom could see. The result was mesmerizing. The band also honored Chris Cornell by performing "Missing," a very rare deep cut. Speaking of Cornell, Kim Thayil joined the band for "Kick Out the Jams" and later joined Steve Turner and Mark Arm of Mudhoney (and Green River!) for "Search and Destroy" and "Sonic Reducer." Favorite moments: the aforementioned songs plus Ed hosing up the intro to "Rearviewmirror" to the point the band had to stop. Ed broke into "Fernando" by Abba saying that's what he was hearing. What can I say, the guy is hilarious. Other notable moments, Mike's solo on "Evenflow" was one of the best I can remember. What a beautiful night. 36 amazing songs over 3.5 hours in the glorious Seattle night.

Setlist Night 1:

Long Road Release Low Light Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town Corduroy Go Do the Evolution Mind Your Manners Throw Your Hatred Down (Neil Young cover) Lightning Bolt Given to Fly All Those Yesterdays Even Flow Help! (The Beatles cover) (snippet) Help Help Black Setting Forth Play Video I Am a Patriot (Little Steven cover) Porch Encore: We're Going to Be Friends (The White Stripes cover) (live debut by PJ) Nothing as It Seems Let Me Sleep Breath Again Today (with Brandi Carlile) State of Love and Trust Rearviewmirror Encore 2: Wasted Reprise Better Man (with “Save It for Later” tag) Comfortably Numb (Pink Floyd cover) Alive I've Got a Feeling (The Beatles cover) Rockin' in the Free World (Neil Young cover) Yellow Ledbetter

Setlist Night 2:

Oceans Footsteps Nothingman Why Go Brain of J. Interstellar Overdrive (Pink Floyd cover) Corduroy Rats In Hiding Whipping Even Flow Missing (Chris Cornell cover) (live debut by PJ) Daughter (with "W.M.A" and "It's Ok" tags) Immortality I'm Open Unthought Known Can't Deny Me Do the Evolution Lukin Porch Encore: I Won't Back Down (Tom Petty cover) (EV solo) Thin Air Better Man (with "Save It for Later" by English Beat tag) All or None Crown of Thorns (Mother Love Bone cover) Kick Out the Jams (MC5 cover) (with Kim Thayil) Spin the Black Circle Play Video Rearviewmirror (with "Fernando" (ABBA)… more ) Crazy Mary (Victoria Williams cover) Jeremy Leash Search and Destroy (Iggy and The Stooges cover) (With Kim Thayil, Steve Turner, and Mark Arm) Sonic Reducer (Dead Boys cover) (With Kim Thayil, Steve Turner, and Mark Arm) Alive Baba O'Riley (The Who cover) Yellow Ledbetter

-JS

[purplecoloredglasses]

Well over a year ago, I had the opportunity to attend a learning journey to Kansas’ largest city, Wichita, hosted by the Wichita Community Foundation. Kansas was the last place that I would have thought that I would’ve ended up for work, but my job has allowed me to reevaluate the way that I view cities around the world.

Wichita, once known as Cowtown, began as a trading post along the Chisholm Trail in the 1860’s. Prior to its development into a city, Wichita was inhabited by what Spanish explorer Francisco Vazquez de Coronado dubbed “Quivira,” or Wichita, people. The US purchased the land from the French via the Louisiana Purchase and it became part of the Kansas Territory in 1854.

Being along the Chisholm trail made the area a destination for cattle drivers traveling from Texas. The immigration that resulted because of this led to a speculative land boom and expanded the city. Several colleges came about, with one of the most notable being Wichita State University, which opened in 1886.

Fast forward to the 1920’s. The discovery of oil and natural gas led to a second economic boom and created the fortunes of oil moguls Archibald Derby and Fred C. Koch. Aviation and aircraft manufacturing developed, creating a third economic boom during World War II. They quickly became the “Air Capital of the World,” being the first city to mass produce commercial aircrafts. Growth slowed in the 70’s and then the city, along with local organizations, began working together to revitalize the city in the 2000’s. (Note: This is not a full historical overview. I’ve a provided link above for those that want to read a fuller history of Wichita.)

Those who know the history of Akron (my hometown) know that this is a similar timeline. Akron began as a pass-through area due to the canal and eventually a town cropped up around it. It went through economic booms due to the rubber industry and went into decline only for the local government, community members and area organizations to begin efforts to revitalize it.

Their current challenges reflect Akron’s, namely the need for more small businesses, lack of use of public spaces beyond special events, and the hurdle of reversing the trend of people moving away from the city centre. They’re not completely similar; in fact, Wichita has more than double the population that Akron has and their major industries and families continue to play an active role in its future. The largest employers in Wichita are still in aircraft manufacturing. But due to the similarities, I quickly felt at home and it made me want to learn more.

Geographically, the city is very flat with the large Arkansas River (host site for Wichita Riverfest) dividing the eastern and western parts of the city. Wichita’s history as one of the first organized lunch counter sit-ins (the Dockum Drug Store sit-ins) during the Civil Rights Movement appears to be relatively unknown to many. Sculptures tucked in a park off the main street tell the story of this important, but often forgotten time in our nation’s history. Student-led with little support from the area’s NAACP chapter, the protests lasted for a month before the owner finally allowed the black students to be served. But, as with the rest of the nation today, racial inequality is an ongoing problem.

The city’s complicated relationship with the Koch Brothers fascinates me. The Koch family has provided tens of millions of dollars to support area nonprofits in the arts, sciences, sports, and more. But they’ve also provided just as much money and influence on things less visible. The brothers are most often known around the nation as conservative mega-billionaires that have nearly unmatched power and influence.

During my trip, I got a chance to visit the WSU Innovation Campus makerspace facility, GoCreate, and it was incredibly inspiring and heavily funded by Koch. Open to the public through memberships, this facility is state-of-the-art, innovative, and community focused. They have spaces for woodworking, metal and welding, textiles, design (3D, graphic, etc), and electronics. There’s a co-working space, private rooms available for rent, mentorship opportunities, and classes to train people on the equipment and to better their projects, small businesses, etc. I’d be over the moon if we had something like that in my hometown.

The Positives

Flag: I think that my favorite thing about Wichita is their flag. Designed in 1937, it means freedom, happiness, and home. The Native American symbol for home sits in the center.

Public Art: Wichita has a lot of public art. My favorite is a collection of beautiful, interactive sculptures by Georgia Weber that stretches along Douglas Ave, commissioned by the DeVore Foundation. And I can’t mention public art without highlighting the Keeper of the Plains, a 44-foot tall statue at the meeting point of the Little and Big Arkansas rivers. It was created by Wichitan and Native American artist Blackbear Bosin.

Infrastructure: Unlike Akron, Wichita saved most of its old buildings. Small businesses have begun to pop up in downtown and development has started to grow.

Cost of Living: The cost of living in Wichita is well below the national average. A downtown 2-bedroom apartment will cost you around $1000 per month.

Industry Support: This is a city with deep roots in manufacturing that has stayed over time. The family of one of those businesses lives in the city and aids the city through financial support.

Engagement: From what I saw (because I was there for work), Wichita has a growing art scene full of diverse creatives who are engaged and ready to roll up their sleeves to make their community better. The Wichita Community Foundation has does some great work in supporting initiatives to get people engaging with others and public space. The ICT Pop-Up Urban Park is a prime example of that.

The Negatives

Downtown Living: Wichita struggles with getting people to live downtown and bridging that city/rural divide. I believe things are beginning to change, but it’s a common challenge with midsize cities.

Walkability and Public Transportation: The city’s walking, biking, and public transit could be improved. I checked into their WalkScore and TransitScore and they’re pretty low. This means that most errands need a car and there aren’t many bike lanes.

Industry Support: This one is a double-edged sword because that heavy investor in the city may have a lot of influence in the way the city takes shape. It could also leave the city vulnerable if they were to leave.

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Wichita and would love to go back to take a deeper dive into all that the city has to offer. Data USA, a website and visualization engine, has a deeper dive into Wichita’s story through public US Government data.

Have you been to Wichita? What are your thoughts?

Thanks for reading,

Travel Log: Wichita Well over a year ago, I had the opportunity to attend a learning journey to Kansas' largest city, 

[sarahzlukeuk]

23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness

Would you prefer to listen to this article? Use the player below, or you can listen to it on iTunes.

When I was a kid and my Dad asked how much peanut butter I wanted on my sandwich, the answer was always, “A lot!” The first bite would cling to the roof of my mouth thanks to the thick smear of roasted, peanutty goodness. I’d take a quick sip of cold milk to wash it down, then go in for the next tasty mouthful.

This article is like that delicious sandwich—only instead of peanut butter, there’s a hefty filling of sarcasm so thick that globs drip off the back as you sink your teeth into the first bite. (Enjoy, and perhaps keep a glass of milk nearby to help it go down.)

Cue the overly enthusiastic infomercial voice:

Disliking your body has never been easier! Follow one, or all, of these twenty-three simple fitness tips, and you’ll be sure to fight against your body for the remainder of your life while experiencing chronic dissatisfaction along the way.

1. Ping-pong endlessly between the extremes of doing it all or doing nothing.

Flexibility, enjoyment, and moderation are for fools. We know it’s about going all in, or not even trying until you can go all in. If it seems like lunacy, ignore your feelings. Being a slave to your regimen is the only way to make fitness worthwhile.

Say, for example, that your “blast the fat away” workout program has you visiting the gym four times per week. But your work schedule has unexpectedly become chaotic, making that gym routine impossible. During this busy time, you could still go to the gym twice per week. But what’s the point? If you can’t do exactly what your program requires, you might as well not do a thing. Instead of getting in workouts where you can, you’re better off just sitting on the couch until things calm down enough for you to start over and “go all in.” (At least until chaos ensues once more—then you’re back to doing jack squat).

Say you “slip up” on your diet and eat a freshly baked, ooey-gooey chocolate chip cookie. Yep, that’s a screw-up—you just blew your entire diet with a single tasty treat. Eating that single cookie is a fully valid reason to eat seventeen more, and then follow it up with more less-than-ideal food choices, until you’re ready to eat “perfectly” once more.

Either you’re going to abstain from every treat and never miss a workout, or you should just quit and not do a damn thing until you can go “all in.” When it comes to health and fitness, it’s perfection, or nothing.

2. Your happiness and self-worth are directly proportional to your weight, body fat percentage, body shape, and ability to achieve specific outcomes.

It doesn’t matter that it’s the twenty-first century—you’re a woman, and that means how you look is still the most important thing about you. Happiness and self-worth are limited by arbitrary factors like the number on the scale or the sculpted perfection of your backside. Regardless of whether you’re a good person, wife, mother, friend, sister, employee, business owner, or any other role you fulfill, if you don’t look a certain way or attain the “proper” body weight, your effort and accomplishments are all for nothing.

3. Forget about building a body for yourself. What matters most is building a body for the sake of impressing other people.

Can you believe some people use fitness to build a body that serves them; a body that feels good to occupy? Fitness isn’t about what you want or think about your body. It’s about what other people think about your body.

Closely monitor the number of “Likes” you’ve received for your latest perfectly posed, optimally lit, flaw-concealing filtered selfie. This, after all, is why you eat well and work out: for the approval and admiration of other people. If a bunch of horny teenage boys follow your posts and request “more skin!” then be sure to indulge their cravings. Never under-value the acceptance and approval of total strangers.

Likewise, if someone makes a negative, cruel remark about your body, you should definitely give a damn. Remember, other people’s opinions about your body matter—the good but especially the bad. Absorb their remarks—let them seep into your bones and penetrate your soul—and keep striving for ways to please them, particularly those who feel it’s their duty to share negative opinions.

Remember, both those who Like and Dislike your photos are doing you a favor. I mean, how else would you know how to feel about your body unless these people were kind enough to divulge their valuable opinion? Like clay in an artist’s hands, so should your body be to the opinions of friends, family, and strangers alike.

So what if you’re internally miserable? You can overcompensate by chronically seeking external validation from others.

4. When you reach a goal, don’t be satisfied with your accomplishment—you can always be leaner, smaller, stronger, prettier, perkier.

No time to celebrate what you achieved—as soon as you hit a fitness milestone, move on to the next goal. So what if you performed your first unassisted chin-up, or deadlifted one-and-a-half times your body weight, or looked in the mirror and saw muscle definition for the first time ever? There’s no time to celebrate these accomplishments or to savor your hard-earned victories. Look to the next goal that will really take your body or strength to the next level.

And when you attain that goal, same thing—don’t stop to celebrate. Immediately look for the next thing to make you a better woman. (Hint: it usually involves fixing a flaw, whittling away some other part of your body, or getting a muscle to “pop” just a bit more.)

Yes, always working toward the next training goal or new body part to improve means you’ll be chronically dissatisfied with your body and performance. But so be it. This is just part of what it means to be a woman. You can never be satisfied with your body. You must always chase the elusive state of perfection.

5. Always take health advice from celebrities.

My doctor may have a medical degree, along with years of experience practicing and studying research and medicine, but Gwyneth Paltrow says I should steam my genitalia and stick egg-shaped rocks up in there. I mean, surely GP knows exactly what she’s talking about and can be trusted despite her lack of formal medical education when it comes to all things vagina.

An innocent Easter egg hunt or nourishing breakfast may pop into your mind when you see eggs, but the company Goop saw a shape that a piece of jade could be molded into, and then decided women should insert them in their vaginas.

Wealthy, perfect-looking celebrities must certainly know what they’re talking about when it comes to health, fitness, and what to insert in one’s nether regions. Despite some of their products costing hundreds of dollars, not to mention being refuted by scientific data, gynecologists, and prestigious medical groups, we know we can trust them. After all, they are willing to share information that medical professionals refuse to tell us; they clearly have our best interest at heart.

6. Always be dieting.

This one’s easy. You’re a woman, so you’re obligated to a lifestyle of dieting. You can’t simply eat—you must watch what you eat. Even if what you’re doing is “working”—properly fueling your workouts and producing the body composition changes you desire —you should always scan magazines, books, and headlines for the latest tips, tricks, and secrets to help you diet more successfully. Scrutinize every bite of food by the criteria of whether it’ll help you lose body fat.

7. Don’t conclude a workout until you’re exhausted.

The closer you are to puking your guts out, the better. If you’re not fatigued, sweating profusely, or waddling to the designated barf bucket after every workout, then you wasted your damn time. Completing a workout feeling accomplished, strong, and even energized? That’s a devastating waste of effort. So what if you improved your performance, set a new personal record, or feel amazing? The only thing that matters is working yourself into a sweaty, depleted heap. That’s how you know you did enough.

Moving your body shouldn’t be enjoyable, serve a greater purpose beyond aesthetics, or be its own reward. It’s punishment for having fat on your body, and for eating food.

8. Each passing year, dread your increasing age.

It doesn’t matter that age is a normal chronology of every living creature, a byproduct of not dying. You’re a woman, and that means you should feel terrible about that increasing number. Lie about it, hide it, or jokingly say it’s your twenty-ninth birthday with each passing year. Heaven forbid you see your age as a number that reveals your experience, knowledge, and longevity.

9. Spend heaps of your hard-earned money on supplements.

You know a pill is mandatory for success if the trainer at the gym swears by its magical power. Isn’t it lucky for you that he just happens to sell them? The fact that he makes a hefty commission off those supplements can’t be influencing his recommendation in the slightest.

Who cares if the pricey supplements have zero proof to back up their hyperbolic claims? Surely someone who received a personal training certification online last weekend knows what he’s talking about. I mean, just look at his biceps!

Disregard the fact that the few supplements scientifically proven to be effective are quite cheap (e.g., creatine monohydrate). What reason could a health company have to lie to you? Or, for that matter, use Photoshopped before-and-after pictures to peddle an unregulated product? If anything, the fact that those magical fat burners are so expensive is proof that they will produce the incredible results they promise.

10. Embrace the magical power of detoxes and cleanses, because your liver and kidneys clearly aren’t doing their job fast enough.

Have no fear! You can eat and drink with reckless abandon all you want, because the next glassful of the magical detoxifying elixir will flush it all away. Down the hatch!

Why would you simply want to eat mostly real, minimally processed foods, get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated, and be physically active, when you can slurp down a cayenne pepper/apple cider vinegar/maple syrup/leprechaun fart cocktail that has zero research to back up its claims of flushing harmful toxins from your body while healing every imaginable disease…and melting stubborn body fat?

And for extra measure, let’s not forget the vagina-gourd cleanse! Someone on Facebook said you should stick one up there to “cleanse and refresh your yoni.” So what if your vagina cleanses itself? So what if a cucumber is covered in fungi that can damage your vaginal lining and put you at increased risk of disease? All your friends are chatting away on Facebook about how magical and life changing and rejuvenating these cleanses are; you don’t want to be left out, and anyway, Facebook is the best place to get advice about what to do with your vagina, and vegetables.

Salad? No, thank you. This is for my vagina. I saw a meme on Facebook, so, I know this is legit and trustworthy, even though dozens of doctors are speaking out against this.

11. Don’t concern yourself with silly goals like being a woman of integrity and action. Your value is definitely not about your personality or character. (See #2.)

As a woman, the only goal you should strive toward is making sure your body is as close to perfect as possible. It’s about the superficial, not the substantive. Yeah, so what if we already covered this one? It bears repeating because how you look still matters more than who you are or what you do. Don’t expect this cultural mindset to change, and definitely don’t speak up against it. It will always be this way, so get used to it.

12. Actively label parts of your body as “flaws.”

You’re a woman, which means you’re not entitled to love your body. You have lots of flaws that you must loathe and try to fix (or, at the very least, conceal) despite the cost, time commitment, lack of effectiveness and potential side effects of gimmicky products designed to address them.

When not working to fix your flaws, you must bemoan them, publicly and privately. That cellulite on your thighs? Those stretch marks? Be ashamed of that. So what if it’s completely natural and something millions of other women have? We should all be deeply ashamed of our flaws and search for ways to fix them. Lucky for us, there are plenty of marketers willing to share their secret vanishing creams, invasive procedures, and special diets to help us improve.

And if by some chance you do love your body, like only a raging narcissist would, then you better find some part of it to enhance or improve. How dare you think it’s possible to be satisfied with your body?

13. Ask for permission to enjoy your favorite foods.

If you’re on a date, order a skimpy salad, lest you look as though you enjoy eating. Appearances are important, and it should look like your preferred foods resemble the eating habits of a rabbit. Instead, give every indication that you subsist on tepid water and salad. If you must, you can eat a real meal once you’re safely home alone, where no one can see you.

14. For goodness’ sake, when you break the previous rule—because you will—and eat something substantial, make sure you’ve earned the right to do so.

You better have performed a grueling, fat-torching workout earlier in the day. If you didn’t earn that food, then by golly you’d better work it off as soon as possible. You can’t just have a cookie because you want a cookie. You must earn that cookie ahead of time, and then burn it off later, chanting the “you ate it, now negate it” motto as you climb onto the stair-master.

15. Constantly compare your body to other women.

Fitness professionals. Celebrities. Award-winning athletes. Instagram models who take fifty-seven different photos before they get the perfect one to post for all the world to see. These should absolutely be your measuring stick for success. And definitely listen to women who spout motivational phrases like, “I have twelve kids, two full-time jobs, and a perfectly sculpted six-pack. What’s your excuse?”

We can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves what’s important to us, so we must always compare ourselves to every woman we admire. Feeling super shitty about yourself is the surest way to get motivated.

16. Always follow the pack, even if it makes you miserable.

What you enjoy doesn’t matter. If everyone you know is suddenly competing in powerlifting, you need to work out that way too. Yes, even if you hate it. If everyone is doing metabolic workouts that leave you dry-heaving into your gym bag on the car ride home, but you’d prefer to just pull some heavy deadlifts, tough tater-tots. If everyone is chanting about how boring cardio is, but running a few miles is your favorite way to wind down after work, you’d be advised not to do it. (Don’t let anyone catch you doing it, anyway.)

There’s nothing more rewarding than casting your desires to the side and blindly following others without any consideration of whether you even like that activity.

17. Make sure to complicate your approach to health and fitness as much as possible.

If you don’t rely on hardware, spreadsheets, and fancy apps to keep your health and fitness habits on track, you can be sure you’re doing it wrong.

Eating real food most of the time, getting plenty of protein, making sleep a priority, and managing stress? Right—as though something as complex as health and fitness could be minimized to those simple basics.

18. Turn the way you eat and work out into a cult-like identity.

You don’t “just” eat and work out a certain way—those activities define you. They’re not part of your life; they are your life. Make sure everyone knows that you define yourself by your diet and workout style.

Disregard the poor souls who use eating well and working out as a tool to enhance their life, instead of revolving their life around the one-true way that you’ve discovered. It’s a given that the food you put in your mouth and the workouts you perform increase your moral superiority over all others who don’t follow the same approach. If someone doesn’t adopt your exact health and fitness philosophy, they must be shunned.

19. Always strive to obtain the latest “it” body part.

Back dimples. A thigh gap. Ab cracks. Voluptuous curves. Whatever pops up next as the most desirable trait to flaunt, you’d better do your best to attain it. After all, if there’s one thing we know about beauty, it’s that beauty is defined by a single physical trait. Doesn’t matter that women come in various shapes and sizes and have different preferences. Do your best to cram your body into the one-size-fits-all mold.

20. Remember, the only goal you can have is fat loss.

You’re a woman, and that means the only health and fitness goal you can have is losing fat, dropping a few pant sizes, or whittling away parts of your body. Sure, choosing to focus on making the weight on the barbell go up instead of the number on the scale go down is fun and empowering, but fat loss is all that matters. Every action in the kitchen and gym must be made with this critical fact in mind.

21. Embrace dichotomous food labels.

“Good” and “bad” foods are a strong way to start. “Clean” and “dirty” are acceptable, too. But hell, don’t stop there! Select some “forbidden” foods to avoid at all costs, so that when you do slip up and eat them, you can be riddled with guilt and shame!

Food isn’t just food. It’s a value system for measuring our self-worth. Never lose sight of the fact that what we eat has the power to make us superior, or inferior.

22. When you overindulge or miss a workout, self-flagellation is the only appropriate response.

Remember what we addressed earlier regarding perfection? Well, when you fall short of perfection, you must beat yourself up. (Self-compassion is overrated.) When you make less-than-ideal food choices or miss a workout, make sure you tell yourself repeatedly how much you suck, how hard you failed, and how you’ll never be able to stick with a program. Really go the extra step to reinforce the belief that you’ll never be good enough—this negative self-talk has always worked for you and everyone else who has done it.

Nothing and no one is perfect, but despite that fact, we must still demand absolute perfection from ourselves at all costs and respond harshly when we fail.

23. Never be sarcastic in the way you talk about health and fitness.

It’s a lazy way of expressing your opinions and experiences. Not to mention appalling, unhelpful, and very unladylike.

Okay, then—that’s enough sarcasm for one article.

It’s Time for a Change

Undoubtedly when you read the title of this article, you wondered, “Why would anyone want to hate their body?” No one starts eating well and working out with the goal of disliking their body, or themselves.

So here’s the better question:

Why does much of the health and fitness world cause us to dislike our bodies?

Perhaps more importantly, why do we put up with it?

We shouldn’t. And if you have been, you can choose to stop. You can choose to take a different health and fitness path. Instead of a path defined by obsessive eating and exercise habits that dominates your life and makes you feel terrible about yourself, you can choose an empowering, enjoyable, sustainable approach that makes you feel great from the first day you start. You can choose a path that truly makes you happy as well as healthy.

If you’ve had it up to HERE with the nonsense that permeates the health and fitness world, and want a plan that’s sustainable, enjoyable, and empowering, then grab a copy of my new book Lift Like a Girl. Packed with practical advice on everything from boosting nutrition to combating negative mindset, the book offers step-by-step instructions for starting and building a transformative strength-training practice.

I’m so excited to get Lift Like a Girl in your hands right now, that I’m offering it for just $0.99. (That’s $9 off the shelf price.)

Click here to get your copy now.

The post 23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Sarah Luke Fitness Updates http://www.niashanks.com/23-tips-hate-way-fitness/

[joelandryus]

23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness

Would you prefer to listen to this article? Use the player below, or you can listen to it on iTunes.

When I was a kid and my Dad asked how much peanut butter I wanted on my sandwich, the answer was always, “A lot!” The first bite would cling to the roof of my mouth thanks to the thick smear of roasted, peanutty goodness. I’d take a quick sip of cold milk to wash it down, then go in for the next tasty mouthful.

This article is like that delicious sandwich—only instead of peanut butter, there’s a hefty filling of sarcasm so thick that globs drip off the back as you sink your teeth into the first bite. (Enjoy, and perhaps keep a glass of milk nearby to help it go down.)

Cue the overly enthusiastic infomercial voice:

Disliking your body has never been easier! Follow one, or all, of these twenty-three simple fitness tips, and you’ll be sure to fight against your body for the remainder of your life while experiencing chronic dissatisfaction along the way.

1. Ping-pong endlessly between the extremes of doing it all or doing nothing.

Flexibility, enjoyment, and moderation are for fools. We know it’s about going all in, or not even trying until you can go all in. If it seems like lunacy, ignore your feelings. Being a slave to your regimen is the only way to make fitness worthwhile.

Say, for example, that your “blast the fat away” workout program has you visiting the gym four times per week. But your work schedule has unexpectedly become chaotic, making that gym routine impossible. During this busy time, you could still go to the gym twice per week. But what’s the point? If you can’t do exactly what your program requires, you might as well not do a thing. Instead of getting in workouts where you can, you’re better off just sitting on the couch until things calm down enough for you to start over and “go all in.” (At least until chaos ensues once more—then you’re back to doing jack squat).

Say you “slip up” on your diet and eat a freshly baked, ooey-gooey chocolate chip cookie. Yep, that’s a screw-up—you just blew your entire diet with a single tasty treat. Eating that single cookie is a fully valid reason to eat seventeen more, and then follow it up with more less-than-ideal food choices, until you’re ready to eat “perfectly” once more.

Either you’re going to abstain from every treat and never miss a workout, or you should just quit and not do a damn thing until you can go “all in.” When it comes to health and fitness, it’s perfection, or nothing.

2. Your happiness and self-worth are directly proportional to your weight, body fat percentage, body shape, and ability to achieve specific outcomes.

It doesn’t matter that it’s the twenty-first century—you’re a woman, and that means how you look is still the most important thing about you. Happiness and self-worth are limited by arbitrary factors like the number on the scale or the sculpted perfection of your backside. Regardless of whether you’re a good person, wife, mother, friend, sister, employee, business owner, or any other role you fulfill, if you don’t look a certain way or attain the “proper” body weight, your effort and accomplishments are all for nothing.

3. Forget about building a body for yourself. What matters most is building a body for the sake of impressing other people.

Can you believe some people use fitness to build a body that serves them; a body that feels good to occupy? Fitness isn’t about what you want or think about your body. It’s about what other people think about your body.

Closely monitor the number of “Likes” you’ve received for your latest perfectly posed, optimally lit, flaw-concealing filtered selfie. This, after all, is why you eat well and work out: for the approval and admiration of other people. If a bunch of horny teenage boys follow your posts and request “more skin!” then be sure to indulge their cravings. Never under-value the acceptance and approval of total strangers.

Likewise, if someone makes a negative, cruel remark about your body, you should definitely give a damn. Remember, other people’s opinions about your body matter—the good but especially the bad. Absorb their remarks—let them seep into your bones and penetrate your soul—and keep striving for ways to please them, particularly those who feel it’s their duty to share negative opinions.

Remember, both those who Like and Dislike your photos are doing you a favor. I mean, how else would you know how to feel about your body unless these people were kind enough to divulge their valuable opinion? Like clay in an artist’s hands, so should your body be to the opinions of friends, family, and strangers alike.

So what if you’re internally miserable? You can overcompensate by chronically seeking external validation from others.

4. When you reach a goal, don’t be satisfied with your accomplishment—you can always be leaner, smaller, stronger, prettier, perkier.

No time to celebrate what you achieved—as soon as you hit a fitness milestone, move on to the next goal. So what if you performed your first unassisted chin-up, or deadlifted one-and-a-half times your body weight, or looked in the mirror and saw muscle definition for the first time ever? There’s no time to celebrate these accomplishments or to savor your hard-earned victories. Look to the next goal that will really take your body or strength to the next level.

And when you attain that goal, same thing—don’t stop to celebrate. Immediately look for the next thing to make you a better woman. (Hint: it usually involves fixing a flaw, whittling away some other part of your body, or getting a muscle to “pop” just a bit more.)

Yes, always working toward the next training goal or new body part to improve means you’ll be chronically dissatisfied with your body and performance. But so be it. This is just part of what it means to be a woman. You can never be satisfied with your body. You must always chase the elusive state of perfection.

5. Always take health advice from celebrities.

My doctor may have a medical degree, along with years of experience practicing and studying research and medicine, but Gwyneth Paltrow says I should steam my genitalia and stick egg-shaped rocks up in there. I mean, surely GP knows exactly what she’s talking about and can be trusted despite her lack of formal medical education when it comes to all things vagina.

An innocent Easter egg hunt or nourishing breakfast may pop into your mind when you see eggs, but the company Goop saw a shape that a piece of jade could be molded into, and then decided women should insert them in their vaginas.

Wealthy, perfect-looking celebrities must certainly know what they’re talking about when it comes to health, fitness, and what to insert in one’s nether regions. Despite some of their products costing hundreds of dollars, not to mention being refuted by scientific data, gynecologists, and prestigious medical groups, we know we can trust them. After all, they are willing to share information that medical professionals refuse to tell us; they clearly have our best interest at heart.

6. Always be dieting.

This one’s easy. You’re a woman, so you’re obligated to a lifestyle of dieting. You can’t simply eat—you must watch what you eat. Even if what you’re doing is “working”—properly fueling your workouts and producing the body composition changes you desire —you should always scan magazines, books, and headlines for the latest tips, tricks, and secrets to help you diet more successfully. Scrutinize every bite of food by the criteria of whether it’ll help you lose body fat.

7. Don’t conclude a workout until you’re exhausted.

The closer you are to puking your guts out, the better. If you’re not fatigued, sweating profusely, or waddling to the designated barf bucket after every workout, then you wasted your damn time. Completing a workout feeling accomplished, strong, and even energized? That’s a devastating waste of effort. So what if you improved your performance, set a new personal record, or feel amazing? The only thing that matters is working yourself into a sweaty, depleted heap. That’s how you know you did enough.

Moving your body shouldn’t be enjoyable, serve a greater purpose beyond aesthetics, or be its own reward. It’s punishment for having fat on your body, and for eating food.

8. Each passing year, dread your increasing age.

It doesn’t matter that age is a normal chronology of every living creature, a byproduct of not dying. You’re a woman, and that means you should feel terrible about that increasing number. Lie about it, hide it, or jokingly say it’s your twenty-ninth birthday with each passing year. Heaven forbid you see your age as a number that reveals your experience, knowledge, and longevity.

9. Spend heaps of your hard-earned money on supplements.

You know a pill is mandatory for success if the trainer at the gym swears by its magical power. Isn’t it lucky for you that he just happens to sell them? The fact that he makes a hefty commission off those supplements can’t be influencing his recommendation in the slightest.

Who cares if the pricey supplements have zero proof to back up their hyperbolic claims? Surely someone who received a personal training certification online last weekend knows what he’s talking about. I mean, just look at his biceps!

Disregard the fact that the few supplements scientifically proven to be effective are quite cheap (e.g., creatine monohydrate). What reason could a health company have to lie to you? Or, for that matter, use Photoshopped before-and-after pictures to peddle an unregulated product? If anything, the fact that those magical fat burners are so expensive is proof that they will produce the incredible results they promise.

10. Embrace the magical power of detoxes and cleanses, because your liver and kidneys clearly aren’t doing their job fast enough.

Have no fear! You can eat and drink with reckless abandon all you want, because the next glassful of the magical detoxifying elixir will flush it all away. Down the hatch!

Why would you simply want to eat mostly real, minimally processed foods, get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated, and be physically active, when you can slurp down a cayenne pepper/apple cider vinegar/maple syrup/leprechaun fart cocktail that has zero research to back up its claims of flushing harmful toxins from your body while healing every imaginable disease…and melting stubborn body fat?

And for extra measure, let’s not forget the vagina-gourd cleanse! Someone on Facebook said you should stick one up there to “cleanse and refresh your yoni.” So what if your vagina cleanses itself? So what if a cucumber is covered in fungi that can damage your vaginal lining and put you at increased risk of disease? All your friends are chatting away on Facebook about how magical and life changing and rejuvenating these cleanses are; you don’t want to be left out, and anyway, Facebook is the best place to get advice about what to do with your vagina, and vegetables.

Salad? No, thank you. This is for my vagina. I saw a meme on Facebook, so, I know this is legit and trustworthy, even though dozens of doctors are speaking out against this.

11. Don’t concern yourself with silly goals like being a woman of integrity and action. Your value is definitely not about your personality or character. (See #2.)

As a woman, the only goal you should strive toward is making sure your body is as close to perfect as possible. It’s about the superficial, not the substantive. Yeah, so what if we already covered this one? It bears repeating because how you look still matters more than who you are or what you do. Don’t expect this cultural mindset to change, and definitely don’t speak up against it. It will always be this way, so get used to it.

12. Actively label parts of your body as “flaws.”

You’re a woman, which means you’re not entitled to love your body. You have lots of flaws that you must loathe and try to fix (or, at the very least, conceal) despite the cost, time commitment, lack of effectiveness and potential side effects of gimmicky products designed to address them.

When not working to fix your flaws, you must bemoan them, publicly and privately. That cellulite on your thighs? Those stretch marks? Be ashamed of that. So what if it’s completely natural and something millions of other women have? We should all be deeply ashamed of our flaws and search for ways to fix them. Lucky for us, there are plenty of marketers willing to share their secret vanishing creams, invasive procedures, and special diets to help us improve.

And if by some chance you do love your body, like only a raging narcissist would, then you better find some part of it to enhance or improve. How dare you think it’s possible to be satisfied with your body?

13. Ask for permission to enjoy your favorite foods.

If you’re on a date, order a skimpy salad, lest you look as though you enjoy eating. Appearances are important, and it should look like your preferred foods resemble the eating habits of a rabbit. Instead, give every indication that you subsist on tepid water and salad. If you must, you can eat a real meal once you’re safely home alone, where no one can see you.

14. For goodness’ sake, when you break the previous rule—because you will—and eat something substantial, make sure you’ve earned the right to do so.

You better have performed a grueling, fat-torching workout earlier in the day. If you didn’t earn that food, then by golly you’d better work it off as soon as possible. You can’t just have a cookie because you want a cookie. You must earn that cookie ahead of time, and then burn it off later, chanting the “you ate it, now negate it” motto as you climb onto the stair-master.

15. Constantly compare your body to other women.

Fitness professionals. Celebrities. Award-winning athletes. Instagram models who take fifty-seven different photos before they get the perfect one to post for all the world to see. These should absolutely be your measuring stick for success. And definitely listen to women who spout motivational phrases like, “I have twelve kids, two full-time jobs, and a perfectly sculpted six-pack. What��s your excuse?”

We can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves what’s important to us, so we must always compare ourselves to every woman we admire. Feeling super shitty about yourself is the surest way to get motivated.

16. Always follow the pack, even if it makes you miserable.

What you enjoy doesn’t matter. If everyone you know is suddenly competing in powerlifting, you need to work out that way too. Yes, even if you hate it. If everyone is doing metabolic workouts that leave you dry-heaving into your gym bag on the car ride home, but you’d prefer to just pull some heavy deadlifts, tough tater-tots. If everyone is chanting about how boring cardio is, but running a few miles is your favorite way to wind down after work, you’d be advised not to do it. (Don’t let anyone catch you doing it, anyway.)

There’s nothing more rewarding than casting your desires to the side and blindly following others without any consideration of whether you even like that activity.

17. Make sure to complicate your approach to health and fitness as much as possible.

If you don’t rely on hardware, spreadsheets, and fancy apps to keep your health and fitness habits on track, you can be sure you’re doing it wrong.

Eating real food most of the time, getting plenty of protein, making sleep a priority, and managing stress? Right—as though something as complex as health and fitness could be minimized to those simple basics.

18. Turn the way you eat and work out into a cult-like identity.

You don’t “just” eat and work out a certain way—those activities define you. They’re not part of your life; they are your life. Make sure everyone knows that you define yourself by your diet and workout style.

Disregard the poor souls who use eating well and working out as a tool to enhance their life, instead of revolving their life around the one-true way that you’ve discovered. It’s a given that the food you put in your mouth and the workouts you perform increase your moral superiority over all others who don’t follow the same approach. If someone doesn’t adopt your exact health and fitness philosophy, they must be shunned.

19. Always strive to obtain the latest “it” body part.

Back dimples. A thigh gap. Ab cracks. Voluptuous curves. Whatever pops up next as the most desirable trait to flaunt, you’d better do your best to attain it. After all, if there’s one thing we know about beauty, it’s that beauty is defined by a single physical trait. Doesn’t matter that women come in various shapes and sizes and have different preferences. Do your best to cram your body into the one-size-fits-all mold.

20. Remember, the only goal you can have is fat loss.

You’re a woman, and that means the only health and fitness goal you can have is losing fat, dropping a few pant sizes, or whittling away parts of your body. Sure, choosing to focus on making the weight on the barbell go up instead of the number on the scale go down is fun and empowering, but fat loss is all that matters. Every action in the kitchen and gym must be made with this critical fact in mind.

21. Embrace dichotomous food labels.

“Good” and “bad” foods are a strong way to start. “Clean” and “dirty” are acceptable, too. But hell, don’t stop there! Select some “forbidden” foods to avoid at all costs, so that when you do slip up and eat them, you can be riddled with guilt and shame!

Food isn’t just food. It’s a value system for measuring our self-worth. Never lose sight of the fact that what we eat has the power to make us superior, or inferior.

22. When you overindulge or miss a workout, self-flagellation is the only appropriate response.

Remember what we addressed earlier regarding perfection? Well, when you fall short of perfection, you must beat yourself up. (Self-compassion is overrated.) When you make less-than-ideal food choices or miss a workout, make sure you tell yourself repeatedly how much you suck, how hard you failed, and how you’ll never be able to stick with a program. Really go the extra step to reinforce the belief that you’ll never be good enough—this negative self-talk has always worked for you and everyone else who has done it.

Nothing and no one is perfect, but despite that fact, we must still demand absolute perfection from ourselves at all costs and respond harshly when we fail.

23. Never be sarcastic in the way you talk about health and fitness.

It’s a lazy way of expressing your opinions and experiences. Not to mention appalling, unhelpful, and very unladylike.

Okay, then—that’s enough sarcasm for one article.

It’s Time for a Change

Undoubtedly when you read the title of this article, you wondered, “Why would anyone want to hate their body?” No one starts eating well and working out with the goal of disliking their body, or themselves.

So here’s the better question:

Why does much of the health and fitness world cause us to dislike our bodies?

Perhaps more importantly, why do we put up with it?

We shouldn’t. And if you have been, you can choose to stop. You can choose to take a different health and fitness path. Instead of a path defined by obsessive eating and exercise habits that dominates your life and makes you feel terrible about yourself, you can choose an empowering, enjoyable, sustainable approach that makes you feel great from the first day you start. You can choose a path that truly makes you happy as well as healthy.

If you’ve had it up to HERE with the nonsense that permeates the health and fitness world, and want a plan that’s sustainable, enjoyable, and empowering, then grab a copy of my new book Lift Like a Girl. Packed with practical advice on everything from boosting nutrition to combating negative mindset, the book offers step-by-step instructions for starting and building a transformative strength-training practice.

I’m so excited to get Lift Like a Girl in your hands right now, that I’m offering it for just $0.99. (That’s $9 off the shelf price.)

Click here to get your copy now.

The post 23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Sarah Luke Fitness Updates http://www.niashanks.com/23-tips-hate-way-fitness/

[evajrobinsontx]

23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness

Would you prefer to listen to this article? Use the player below, or you can listen to it on iTunes.

When I was a kid and my Dad asked how much peanut butter I wanted on my sandwich, the answer was always, “A lot!” The first bite would cling to the roof of my mouth thanks to the thick smear of roasted, peanutty goodness. I’d take a quick sip of cold milk to wash it down, then go in for the next tasty mouthful.

This article is like that delicious sandwich—only instead of peanut butter, there’s a hefty filling of sarcasm so thick that globs drip off the back as you sink your teeth into the first bite. (Enjoy, and perhaps keep a glass of milk nearby to help it go down.)

Cue the overly enthusiastic infomercial voice:

Disliking your body has never been easier! Follow one, or all, of these twenty-three simple fitness tips, and you’ll be sure to fight against your body for the remainder of your life while experiencing chronic dissatisfaction along the way.

1. Ping-pong endlessly between the extremes of doing it all or doing nothing.

Flexibility, enjoyment, and moderation are for fools. We know it’s about going all in, or not even trying until you can go all in. If it seems like lunacy, ignore your feelings. Being a slave to your regimen is the only way to make fitness worthwhile.

Say, for example, that your “blast the fat away” workout program has you visiting the gym four times per week. But your work schedule has unexpectedly become chaotic, making that gym routine impossible. During this busy time, you could still go to the gym twice per week. But what’s the point? If you can’t do exactly what your program requires, you might as well not do a thing. Instead of getting in workouts where you can, you’re better off just sitting on the couch until things calm down enough for you to start over and “go all in.” (At least until chaos ensues once more—then you’re back to doing jack squat).

Say you “slip up” on your diet and eat a freshly baked, ooey-gooey chocolate chip cookie. Yep, that’s a screw-up—you just blew your entire diet with a single tasty treat. Eating that single cookie is a fully valid reason to eat seventeen more, and then follow it up with more less-than-ideal food choices, until you’re ready to eat “perfectly” once more.

Either you’re going to abstain from every treat and never miss a workout, or you should just quit and not do a damn thing until you can go “all in.” When it comes to health and fitness, it’s perfection, or nothing.

2. Your happiness and self-worth are directly proportional to your weight, body fat percentage, body shape, and ability to achieve specific outcomes.

It doesn’t matter that it’s the twenty-first century—you’re a woman, and that means how you look is still the most important thing about you. Happiness and self-worth are limited by arbitrary factors like the number on the scale or the sculpted perfection of your backside. Regardless of whether you’re a good person, wife, mother, friend, sister, employee, business owner, or any other role you fulfill, if you don’t look a certain way or attain the “proper” body weight, your effort and accomplishments are all for nothing.

3. Forget about building a body for yourself. What matters most is building a body for the sake of impressing other people.

Can you believe some people use fitness to build a body that serves them; a body that feels good to occupy? Fitness isn’t about what you want or think about your body. It’s about what other people think about your body.

Closely monitor the number of “Likes” you’ve received for your latest perfectly posed, optimally lit, flaw-concealing filtered selfie. This, after all, is why you eat well and work out: for the approval and admiration of other people. If a bunch of horny teenage boys follow your posts and request “more skin!” then be sure to indulge their cravings. Never under-value the acceptance and approval of total strangers.

Likewise, if someone makes a negative, cruel remark about your body, you should definitely give a damn. Remember, other people’s opinions about your body matter—the good but especially the bad. Absorb their remarks—let them seep into your bones and penetrate your soul—and keep striving for ways to please them, particularly those who feel it’s their duty to share negative opinions.

Remember, both those who Like and Dislike your photos are doing you a favor. I mean, how else would you know how to feel about your body unless these people were kind enough to divulge their valuable opinion? Like clay in an artist’s hands, so should your body be to the opinions of friends, family, and strangers alike.

So what if you’re internally miserable? You can overcompensate by chronically seeking external validation from others.

4. When you reach a goal, don’t be satisfied with your accomplishment—you can always be leaner, smaller, stronger, prettier, perkier.

No time to celebrate what you achieved—as soon as you hit a fitness milestone, move on to the next goal. So what if you performed your first unassisted chin-up, or deadlifted one-and-a-half times your body weight, or looked in the mirror and saw muscle definition for the first time ever? There’s no time to celebrate these accomplishments or to savor your hard-earned victories. Look to the next goal that will really take your body or strength to the next level.

And when you attain that goal, same thing—don’t stop to celebrate. Immediately look for the next thing to make you a better woman. (Hint: it usually involves fixing a flaw, whittling away some other part of your body, or getting a muscle to “pop” just a bit more.)

Yes, always working toward the next training goal or new body part to improve means you’ll be chronically dissatisfied with your body and performance. But so be it. This is just part of what it means to be a woman. You can never be satisfied with your body. You must always chase the elusive state of perfection.

5. Always take health advice from celebrities.

My doctor may have a medical degree, along with years of experience practicing and studying research and medicine, but Gwyneth Paltrow says I should steam my genitalia and stick egg-shaped rocks up in there. I mean, surely GP knows exactly what she’s talking about and can be trusted despite her lack of formal medical education when it comes to all things vagina.

An innocent Easter egg hunt or nourishing breakfast may pop into your mind when you see eggs, but the company Goop saw a shape that a piece of jade could be molded into, and then decided women should insert them in their vaginas.

Wealthy, perfect-looking celebrities must certainly know what they’re talking about when it comes to health, fitness, and what to insert in one’s nether regions. Despite some of their products costing hundreds of dollars, not to mention being refuted by scientific data, gynecologists, and prestigious medical groups, we know we can trust them. After all, they are willing to share information that medical professionals refuse to tell us; they clearly have our best interest at heart.

6. Always be dieting.

This one’s easy. You’re a woman, so you’re obligated to a lifestyle of dieting. You can’t simply eat—you must watch what you eat. Even if what you’re doing is “working”—properly fueling your workouts and producing the body composition changes you desire —you should always scan magazines, books, and headlines for the latest tips, tricks, and secrets to help you diet more successfully. Scrutinize every bite of food by the criteria of whether it’ll help you lose body fat.

7. Don’t conclude a workout until you’re exhausted.

The closer you are to puking your guts out, the better. If you’re not fatigued, sweating profusely, or waddling to the designated barf bucket after every workout, then you wasted your damn time. Completing a workout feeling accomplished, strong, and even energized? That’s a devastating waste of effort. So what if you improved your performance, set a new personal record, or feel amazing? The only thing that matters is working yourself into a sweaty, depleted heap. That’s how you know you did enough.

Moving your body shouldn’t be enjoyable, serve a greater purpose beyond aesthetics, or be its own reward. It’s punishment for having fat on your body, and for eating food.

8. Each passing year, dread your increasing age.

It doesn’t matter that age is a normal chronology of every living creature, a byproduct of not dying. You’re a woman, and that means you should feel terrible about that increasing number. Lie about it, hide it, or jokingly say it’s your twenty-ninth birthday with each passing year. Heaven forbid you see your age as a number that reveals your experience, knowledge, and longevity.

9. Spend heaps of your hard-earned money on supplements.

You know a pill is mandatory for success if the trainer at the gym swears by its magical power. Isn’t it lucky for you that he just happens to sell them? The fact that he makes a hefty commission off those supplements can’t be influencing his recommendation in the slightest.

Who cares if the pricey supplements have zero proof to back up their hyperbolic claims? Surely someone who received a personal training certification online last weekend knows what he’s talking about. I mean, just look at his biceps!

Disregard the fact that the few supplements scientifically proven to be effective are quite cheap (e.g., creatine monohydrate). What reason could a health company have to lie to you? Or, for that matter, use Photoshopped before-and-after pictures to peddle an unregulated product? If anything, the fact that those magical fat burners are so expensive is proof that they will produce the incredible results they promise.

10. Embrace the magical power of detoxes and cleanses, because your liver and kidneys clearly aren’t doing their job fast enough.

Have no fear! You can eat and drink with reckless abandon all you want, because the next glassful of the magical detoxifying elixir will flush it all away. Down the hatch!

Why would you simply want to eat mostly real, minimally processed foods, get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated, and be physically active, when you can slurp down a cayenne pepper/apple cider vinegar/maple syrup/leprechaun fart cocktail that has zero research to back up its claims of flushing harmful toxins from your body while healing every imaginable disease…and melting stubborn body fat?

And for extra measure, let’s not forget the vagina-gourd cleanse! Someone on Facebook said you should stick one up there to “cleanse and refresh your yoni.” So what if your vagina cleanses itself? So what if a cucumber is covered in fungi that can damage your vaginal lining and put you at increased risk of disease? All your friends are chatting away on Facebook about how magical and life changing and rejuvenating these cleanses are; you don’t want to be left out, and anyway, Facebook is the best place to get advice about what to do with your vagina, and vegetables.

Salad? No, thank you. This is for my vagina. I saw a meme on Facebook, so, I know this is legit and trustworthy, even though dozens of doctors are speaking out against this.

11. Don’t concern yourself with silly goals like being a woman of integrity and action. Your value is definitely not about your personality or character. (See #2.)

As a woman, the only goal you should strive toward is making sure your body is as close to perfect as possible. It’s about the superficial, not the substantive. Yeah, so what if we already covered this one? It bears repeating because how you look still matters more than who you are or what you do. Don’t expect this cultural mindset to change, and definitely don’t speak up against it. It will always be this way, so get used to it.

12. Actively label parts of your body as “flaws.”

You’re a woman, which means you’re not entitled to love your body. You have lots of flaws that you must loathe and try to fix (or, at the very least, conceal) despite the cost, time commitment, lack of effectiveness and potential side effects of gimmicky products designed to address them.

When not working to fix your flaws, you must bemoan them, publicly and privately. That cellulite on your thighs? Those stretch marks? Be ashamed of that. So what if it’s completely natural and something millions of other women have? We should all be deeply ashamed of our flaws and search for ways to fix them. Lucky for us, there are plenty of marketers willing to share their secret vanishing creams, invasive procedures, and special diets to help us improve.

And if by some chance you do love your body, like only a raging narcissist would, then you better find some part of it to enhance or improve. How dare you think it’s possible to be satisfied with your body?

13. Ask for permission to enjoy your favorite foods.

If you’re on a date, order a skimpy salad, lest you look as though you enjoy eating. Appearances are important, and it should look like your preferred foods resemble the eating habits of a rabbit. Instead, give every indication that you subsist on tepid water and salad. If you must, you can eat a real meal once you’re safely home alone, where no one can see you.

14. For goodness’ sake, when you break the previous rule—because you will—and eat something substantial, make sure you’ve earned the right to do so.

You better have performed a grueling, fat-torching workout earlier in the day. If you didn’t earn that food, then by golly you’d better work it off as soon as possible. You can’t just have a cookie because you want a cookie. You must earn that cookie ahead of time, and then burn it off later, chanting the “you ate it, now negate it” motto as you climb onto the stair-master.

15. Constantly compare your body to other women.

Fitness professionals. Celebrities. Award-winning athletes. Instagram models who take fifty-seven different photos before they get the perfect one to post for all the world to see. These should absolutely be your measuring stick for success. And definitely listen to women who spout motivational phrases like, “I have twelve kids, two full-time jobs, and a perfectly sculpted six-pack. What’s your excuse?”

We can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves what’s important to us, so we must always compare ourselves to every woman we admire. Feeling super shitty about yourself is the surest way to get motivated.

16. Always follow the pack, even if it makes you miserable.

What you enjoy doesn’t matter. If everyone you know is suddenly competing in powerlifting, you need to work out that way too. Yes, even if you hate it. If everyone is doing metabolic workouts that leave you dry-heaving into your gym bag on the car ride home, but you’d prefer to just pull some heavy deadlifts, tough tater-tots. If everyone is chanting about how boring cardio is, but running a few miles is your favorite way to wind down after work, you’d be advised not to do it. (Don’t let anyone catch you doing it, anyway.)

There’s nothing more rewarding than casting your desires to the side and blindly following others without any consideration of whether you even like that activity.

17. Make sure to complicate your approach to health and fitness as much as possible.

If you don’t rely on hardware, spreadsheets, and fancy apps to keep your health and fitness habits on track, you can be sure you’re doing it wrong.

Eating real food most of the time, getting plenty of protein, making sleep a priority, and managing stress? Right—as though something as complex as health and fitness could be minimized to those simple basics.

18. Turn the way you eat and work out into a cult-like identity.

You don’t “just” eat and work out a certain way—those activities define you. They’re not part of your life; they are your life. Make sure everyone knows that you define yourself by your diet and workout style.

Disregard the poor souls who use eating well and working out as a tool to enhance their life, instead of revolving their life around the one-true way that you’ve discovered. It’s a given that the food you put in your mouth and the workouts you perform increase your moral superiority over all others who don’t follow the same approach. If someone doesn’t adopt your exact health and fitness philosophy, they must be shunned.

19. Always strive to obtain the latest “it” body part.

Back dimples. A thigh gap. Ab cracks. Voluptuous curves. Whatever pops up next as the most desirable trait to flaunt, you’d better do your best to attain it. After all, if there’s one thing we know about beauty, it’s that beauty is defined by a single physical trait. Doesn’t matter that women come in various shapes and sizes and have different preferences. Do your best to cram your body into the one-size-fits-all mold.

20. Remember, the only goal you can have is fat loss.

You’re a woman, and that means the only health and fitness goal you can have is losing fat, dropping a few pant sizes, or whittling away parts of your body. Sure, choosing to focus on making the weight on the barbell go up instead of the number on the scale go down is fun and empowering, but fat loss is all that matters. Every action in the kitchen and gym must be made with this critical fact in mind.

21. Embrace dichotomous food labels.

“Good” and “bad” foods are a strong way to start. “Clean” and “dirty” are acceptable, too. But hell, don’t stop there! Select some “forbidden” foods to avoid at all costs, so that when you do slip up and eat them, you can be riddled with guilt and shame!

Food isn’t just food. It’s a value system for measuring our self-worth. Never lose sight of the fact that what we eat has the power to make us superior, or inferior.

22. When you overindulge or miss a workout, self-flagellation is the only appropriate response.

Remember what we addressed earlier regarding perfection? Well, when you fall short of perfection, you must beat yourself up. (Self-compassion is overrated.) When you make less-than-ideal food choices or miss a workout, make sure you tell yourself repeatedly how much you suck, how hard you failed, and how you’ll never be able to stick with a program. Really go the extra step to reinforce the belief that you’ll never be good enough—this negative self-talk has always worked for you and everyone else who has done it.

Nothing and no one is perfect, but despite that fact, we must still demand absolute perfection from ourselves at all costs and respond harshly when we fail.

23. Never be sarcastic in the way you talk about health and fitness.

It’s a lazy way of expressing your opinions and experiences. Not to mention appalling, unhelpful, and very unladylike.

Okay, then—that’s enough sarcasm for one article.

It’s Time for a Change

Undoubtedly when you read the title of this article, you wondered, “Why would anyone want to hate their body?” No one starts eating well and working out with the goal of disliking their body, or themselves.

So here’s the better question:

Why does much of the health and fitness world cause us to dislike our bodies?

Perhaps more importantly, why do we put up with it?

We shouldn’t. And if you have been, you can choose to stop. You can choose to take a different health and fitness path. Instead of a path defined by obsessive eating and exercise habits that dominates your life and makes you feel terrible about yourself, you can choose an empowering, enjoyable, sustainable approach that makes you feel great from the first day you start. You can choose a path that truly makes you happy as well as healthy.

If you’ve had it up to HERE with the nonsense that permeates the health and fitness world, and want a plan that’s sustainable, enjoyable, and empowering, then grab a copy of my new book Lift Like a Girl. Packed with practical advice on everything from boosting nutrition to combating negative mindset, the book offers step-by-step instructions for starting and building a transformative strength-training practice.

I’m so excited to get Lift Like a Girl in your hands right now, that I’m offering it for just $0.99. (That’s $9 off the shelf price.)

Click here to get your copy now.

The post 23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Sarah Luke Fitness Updates http://www.niashanks.com/23-tips-hate-way-fitness/

[juliehbutler]

23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness

Would you prefer to listen to this article? Use the player below, or you can listen to it on iTunes.

When I was a kid and my Dad asked how much peanut butter I wanted on my sandwich, the answer was always, “A lot!” The first bite would cling to the roof of my mouth thanks to the thick smear of roasted, peanutty goodness. I’d take a quick sip of cold milk to wash it down, then go in for the next tasty mouthful.

This article is like that delicious sandwich—only instead of peanut butter, there’s a hefty filling of sarcasm so thick that globs drip off the back as you sink your teeth into the first bite. (Enjoy, and perhaps keep a glass of milk nearby to help it go down.)

Cue the overly enthusiastic infomercial voice:

Disliking your body has never been easier! Follow one, or all, of these twenty-three simple fitness tips, and you’ll be sure to fight against your body for the remainder of your life while experiencing chronic dissatisfaction along the way.

1. Ping-pong endlessly between the extremes of doing it all or doing nothing.

Flexibility, enjoyment, and moderation are for fools. We know it’s about going all in, or not even trying until you can go all in. If it seems like lunacy, ignore your feelings. Being a slave to your regimen is the only way to make fitness worthwhile.

Say, for example, that your “blast the fat away” workout program has you visiting the gym four times per week. But your work schedule has unexpectedly become chaotic, making that gym routine impossible. During this busy time, you could still go to the gym twice per week. But what’s the point? If you can’t do exactly what your program requires, you might as well not do a thing. Instead of getting in workouts where you can, you’re better off just sitting on the couch until things calm down enough for you to start over and “go all in.” (At least until chaos ensues once more—then you’re back to doing jack squat).

Say you “slip up” on your diet and eat a freshly baked, ooey-gooey chocolate chip cookie. Yep, that’s a screw-up—you just blew your entire diet with a single tasty treat. Eating that single cookie is a fully valid reason to eat seventeen more, and then follow it up with more less-than-ideal food choices, until you’re ready to eat “perfectly” once more.

Either you’re going to abstain from every treat and never miss a workout, or you should just quit and not do a damn thing until you can go “all in.” When it comes to health and fitness, it’s perfection, or nothing.

2. Your happiness and self-worth are directly proportional to your weight, body fat percentage, body shape, and ability to achieve specific outcomes.

It doesn’t matter that it’s the twenty-first century—you’re a woman, and that means how you look is still the most important thing about you. Happiness and self-worth are limited by arbitrary factors like the number on the scale or the sculpted perfection of your backside. Regardless of whether you’re a good person, wife, mother, friend, sister, employee, business owner, or any other role you fulfill, if you don’t look a certain way or attain the “proper” body weight, your effort and accomplishments are all for nothing.

3. Forget about building a body for yourself. What matters most is building a body for the sake of impressing other people.

Can you believe some people use fitness to build a body that serves them; a body that feels good to occupy? Fitness isn’t about what you want or think about your body. It’s about what other people think about your body.

Closely monitor the number of “Likes” you’ve received for your latest perfectly posed, optimally lit, flaw-concealing filtered selfie. This, after all, is why you eat well and work out: for the approval and admiration of other people. If a bunch of horny teenage boys follow your posts and request “more skin!” then be sure to indulge their cravings. Never under-value the acceptance and approval of total strangers.

Likewise, if someone makes a negative, cruel remark about your body, you should definitely give a damn. Remember, other people’s opinions about your body matter—the good but especially the bad. Absorb their remarks—let them seep into your bones and penetrate your soul—and keep striving for ways to please them, particularly those who feel it’s their duty to share negative opinions.

Remember, both those who Like and Dislike your photos are doing you a favor. I mean, how else would you know how to feel about your body unless these people were kind enough to divulge their valuable opinion? Like clay in an artist’s hands, so should your body be to the opinions of friends, family, and strangers alike.

So what if you’re internally miserable? You can overcompensate by chronically seeking external validation from others.

4. When you reach a goal, don’t be satisfied with your accomplishment—you can always be leaner, smaller, stronger, prettier, perkier.

No time to celebrate what you achieved—as soon as you hit a fitness milestone, move on to the next goal. So what if you performed your first unassisted chin-up, or deadlifted one-and-a-half times your body weight, or looked in the mirror and saw muscle definition for the first time ever? There’s no time to celebrate these accomplishments or to savor your hard-earned victories. Look to the next goal that will really take your body or strength to the next level.

And when you attain that goal, same thing—don’t stop to celebrate. Immediately look for the next thing to make you a better woman. (Hint: it usually involves fixing a flaw, whittling away some other part of your body, or getting a muscle to “pop” just a bit more.)

Yes, always working toward the next training goal or new body part to improve means you’ll be chronically dissatisfied with your body and performance. But so be it. This is just part of what it means to be a woman. You can never be satisfied with your body. You must always chase the elusive state of perfection.

5. Always take health advice from celebrities.

My doctor may have a medical degree, along with years of experience practicing and studying research and medicine, but Gwyneth Paltrow says I should steam my genitalia and stick egg-shaped rocks up in there. I mean, surely GP knows exactly what she’s talking about and can be trusted despite her lack of formal medical education when it comes to all things vagina.

An innocent Easter egg hunt or nourishing breakfast may pop into your mind when you see eggs, but the company Goop saw a shape that a piece of jade could be molded into, and then decided women should insert them in their vaginas.

Wealthy, perfect-looking celebrities must certainly know what they’re talking about when it comes to health, fitness, and what to insert in one’s nether regions. Despite some of their products costing hundreds of dollars, not to mention being refuted by scientific data, gynecologists, and prestigious medical groups, we know we can trust them. After all, they are willing to share information that medical professionals refuse to tell us; they clearly have our best interest at heart.

6. Always be dieting.

This one’s easy. You’re a woman, so you’re obligated to a lifestyle of dieting. You can’t simply eat—you must watch what you eat. Even if what you’re doing is “working”—properly fueling your workouts and producing the body composition changes you desire —you should always scan magazines, books, and headlines for the latest tips, tricks, and secrets to help you diet more successfully. Scrutinize every bite of food by the criteria of whether it’ll help you lose body fat.

7. Don’t conclude a workout until you’re exhausted.

The closer you are to puking your guts out, the better. If you’re not fatigued, sweating profusely, or waddling to the designated barf bucket after every workout, then you wasted your damn time. Completing a workout feeling accomplished, strong, and even energized? That’s a devastating waste of effort. So what if you improved your performance, set a new personal record, or feel amazing? The only thing that matters is working yourself into a sweaty, depleted heap. That’s how you know you did enough.

Moving your body shouldn’t be enjoyable, serve a greater purpose beyond aesthetics, or be its own reward. It’s punishment for having fat on your body, and for eating food.

8. Each passing year, dread your increasing age.

It doesn’t matter that age is a normal chronology of every living creature, a byproduct of not dying. You’re a woman, and that means you should feel terrible about that increasing number. Lie about it, hide it, or jokingly say it’s your twenty-ninth birthday with each passing year. Heaven forbid you see your age as a number that reveals your experience, knowledge, and longevity.

9. Spend heaps of your hard-earned money on supplements.

You know a pill is mandatory for success if the trainer at the gym swears by its magical power. Isn’t it lucky for you that he just happens to sell them? The fact that he makes a hefty commission off those supplements can’t be influencing his recommendation in the slightest.

Who cares if the pricey supplements have zero proof to back up their hyperbolic claims? Surely someone who received a personal training certification online last weekend knows what he’s talking about. I mean, just look at his biceps!

Disregard the fact that the few supplements scientifically proven to be effective are quite cheap (e.g., creatine monohydrate). What reason could a health company have to lie to you? Or, for that matter, use Photoshopped before-and-after pictures to peddle an unregulated product? If anything, the fact that those magical fat burners are so expensive is proof that they will produce the incredible results they promise.

10. Embrace the magical power of detoxes and cleanses, because your liver and kidneys clearly aren’t doing their job fast enough.

Have no fear! You can eat and drink with reckless abandon all you want, because the next glassful of the magical detoxifying elixir will flush it all away. Down the hatch!

Why would you simply want to eat mostly real, minimally processed foods, get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated, and be physically active, when you can slurp down a cayenne pepper/apple cider vinegar/maple syrup/leprechaun fart cocktail that has zero research to back up its claims of flushing harmful toxins from your body while healing every imaginable disease…and melting stubborn body fat?

And for extra measure, let’s not forget the vagina-gourd cleanse! Someone on Facebook said you should stick one up there to “cleanse and refresh your yoni.” So what if your vagina cleanses itself? So what if a cucumber is covered in fungi that can damage your vaginal lining and put you at increased risk of disease? All your friends are chatting away on Facebook about how magical and life changing and rejuvenating these cleanses are; you don’t want to be left out, and anyway, Facebook is the best place to get advice about what to do with your vagina, and vegetables.

Salad? No, thank you. This is for my vagina. I saw a meme on Facebook, so, I know this is legit and trustworthy, even though dozens of doctors are speaking out against this.

11. Don’t concern yourself with silly goals like being a woman of integrity and action. Your value is definitely not about your personality or character. (See #2.)

As a woman, the only goal you should strive toward is making sure your body is as close to perfect as possible. It’s about the superficial, not the substantive. Yeah, so what if we already covered this one? It bears repeating because how you look still matters more than who you are or what you do. Don’t expect this cultural mindset to change, and definitely don’t speak up against it. It will always be this way, so get used to it.

12. Actively label parts of your body as “flaws.”

You’re a woman, which means you’re not entitled to love your body. You have lots of flaws that you must loathe and try to fix (or, at the very least, conceal) despite the cost, time commitment, lack of effectiveness and potential side effects of gimmicky products designed to address them.

When not working to fix your flaws, you must bemoan them, publicly and privately. That cellulite on your thighs? Those stretch marks? Be ashamed of that. So what if it’s completely natural and something millions of other women have? We should all be deeply ashamed of our flaws and search for ways to fix them. Lucky for us, there are plenty of marketers willing to share their secret vanishing creams, invasive procedures, and special diets to help us improve.

And if by some chance you do love your body, like only a raging narcissist would, then you better find some part of it to enhance or improve. How dare you think it’s possible to be satisfied with your body?

13. Ask for permission to enjoy your favorite foods.

If you’re on a date, order a skimpy salad, lest you look as though you enjoy eating. Appearances are important, and it should look like your preferred foods resemble the eating habits of a rabbit. Instead, give every indication that you subsist on tepid water and salad. If you must, you can eat a real meal once you’re safely home alone, where no one can see you.

14. For goodness’ sake, when you break the previous rule—because you will—and eat something substantial, make sure you’ve earned the right to do so.

You better have performed a grueling, fat-torching workout earlier in the day. If you didn’t earn that food, then by golly you’d better work it off as soon as possible. You can’t just have a cookie because you want a cookie. You must earn that cookie ahead of time, and then burn it off later, chanting the “you ate it, now negate it” motto as you climb onto the stair-master.

15. Constantly compare your body to other women.

Fitness professionals. Celebrities. Award-winning athletes. Instagram models who take fifty-seven different photos before they get the perfect one to post for all the world to see. These should absolutely be your measuring stick for success. And definitely listen to women who spout motivational phrases like, “I have twelve kids, two full-time jobs, and a perfectly sculpted six-pack. What’s your excuse?”

We can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves what’s important to us, so we must always compare ourselves to every woman we admire. Feeling super shitty about yourself is the surest way to get motivated.

16. Always follow the pack, even if it makes you miserable.

What you enjoy doesn’t matter. If everyone you know is suddenly competing in powerlifting, you need to work out that way too. Yes, even if you hate it. If everyone is doing metabolic workouts that leave you dry-heaving into your gym bag on the car ride home, but you’d prefer to just pull some heavy deadlifts, tough tater-tots. If everyone is chanting about how boring cardio is, but running a few miles is your favorite way to wind down after work, you’d be advised not to do it. (Don’t let anyone catch you doing it, anyway.)

There’s nothing more rewarding than casting your desires to the side and blindly following others without any consideration of whether you even like that activity.

17. Make sure to complicate your approach to health and fitness as much as possible.

If you don’t rely on hardware, spreadsheets, and fancy apps to keep your health and fitness habits on track, you can be sure you’re doing it wrong.

Eating real food most of the time, getting plenty of protein, making sleep a priority, and managing stress? Right—as though something as complex as health and fitness could be minimized to those simple basics.

18. Turn the way you eat and work out into a cult-like identity.

You don’t “just” eat and work out a certain way—those activities define you. They’re not part of your life; they are your life. Make sure everyone knows that you define yourself by your diet and workout style.

Disregard the poor souls who use eating well and working out as a tool to enhance their life, instead of revolving their life around the one-true way that you’ve discovered. It’s a given that the food you put in your mouth and the workouts you perform increase your moral superiority over all others who don’t follow the same approach. If someone doesn’t adopt your exact health and fitness philosophy, they must be shunned.

19. Always strive to obtain the latest “it” body part.

Back dimples. A thigh gap. Ab cracks. Voluptuous curves. Whatever pops up next as the most desirable trait to flaunt, you’d better do your best to attain it. After all, if there’s one thing we know about beauty, it’s that beauty is defined by a single physical trait. Doesn’t matter that women come in various shapes and sizes and have different preferences. Do your best to cram your body into the one-size-fits-all mold.

20. Remember, the only goal you can have is fat loss.

You’re a woman, and that means the only health and fitness goal you can have is losing fat, dropping a few pant sizes, or whittling away parts of your body. Sure, choosing to focus on making the weight on the barbell go up instead of the number on the scale go down is fun and empowering, but fat loss is all that matters. Every action in the kitchen and gym must be made with this critical fact in mind.

21. Embrace dichotomous food labels.

“Good” and “bad” foods are a strong way to start. “Clean” and “dirty” are acceptable, too. But hell, don’t stop there! Select some “forbidden” foods to avoid at all costs, so that when you do slip up and eat them, you can be riddled with guilt and shame!

Food isn’t just food. It’s a value system for measuring our self-worth. Never lose sight of the fact that what we eat has the power to make us superior, or inferior.

22. When you overindulge or miss a workout, self-flagellation is the only appropriate response.

Remember what we addressed earlier regarding perfection? Well, when you fall short of perfection, you must beat yourself up. (Self-compassion is overrated.) When you make less-than-ideal food choices or miss a workout, make sure you tell yourself repeatedly how much you suck, how hard you failed, and how you’ll never be able to stick with a program. Really go the extra step to reinforce the belief that you’ll never be good enough—this negative self-talk has always worked for you and everyone else who has done it.

Nothing and no one is perfect, but despite that fact, we must still demand absolute perfection from ourselves at all costs and respond harshly when we fail.

23. Never be sarcastic in the way you talk about health and fitness.

It’s a lazy way of expressing your opinions and experiences. Not to mention appalling, unhelpful, and very unladylike.

Okay, then—that’s enough sarcasm for one article.

It’s Time for a Change

Undoubtedly when you read the title of this article, you wondered, “Why would anyone want to hate their body?” No one starts eating well and working out with the goal of disliking their body, or themselves.

So here’s the better question:

Why does much of the health and fitness world cause us to dislike our bodies?

Perhaps more importantly, why do we put up with it?

We shouldn’t. And if you have been, you can choose to stop. You can choose to take a different health and fitness path. Instead of a path defined by obsessive eating and exercise habits that dominates your life and makes you feel terrible about yourself, you can choose an empowering, enjoyable, sustainable approach that makes you feel great from the first day you start. You can choose a path that truly makes you happy as well as healthy.

If you’ve had it up to HERE with the nonsense that permeates the health and fitness world, and want a plan that’s sustainable, enjoyable, and empowering, then grab a copy of my new book Lift Like a Girl. Packed with practical advice on everything from boosting nutrition to combating negative mindset, the book offers step-by-step instructions for starting and building a transformative strength-training practice.

I’m so excited to get Lift Like a Girl in your hands right now, that I’m offering it for just $0.99. (That’s $9 off the shelf price.)

Click here to get your copy now.

The post 23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Healthy Living http://www.niashanks.com/23-tips-hate-way-fitness/

[crystalgibsus]

23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness

Would you prefer to listen to this article? Use the player below, or you can listen to it on iTunes.

When I was a kid and my Dad asked how much peanut butter I wanted on my sandwich, the answer was always, “A lot!” The first bite would cling to the roof of my mouth thanks to the thick smear of roasted, peanutty goodness. I’d take a quick sip of cold milk to wash it down, then go in for the next tasty mouthful.

This article is like that delicious sandwich—only instead of peanut butter, there’s a hefty filling of sarcasm so thick that globs drip off the back as you sink your teeth into the first bite. (Enjoy, and perhaps keep a glass of milk nearby to help it go down.)

Cue the overly enthusiastic infomercial voice:

Disliking your body has never been easier! Follow one, or all, of these twenty-three simple fitness tips, and you’ll be sure to fight against your body for the remainder of your life while experiencing chronic dissatisfaction along the way.

1. Ping-pong endlessly between the extremes of doing it all or doing nothing.

Flexibility, enjoyment, and moderation are for fools. We know it’s about going all in, or not even trying until you can go all in. If it seems like lunacy, ignore your feelings. Being a slave to your regimen is the only way to make fitness worthwhile.

Say, for example, that your “blast the fat away” workout program has you visiting the gym four times per week. But your work schedule has unexpectedly become chaotic, making that gym routine impossible. During this busy time, you could still go to the gym twice per week. But what’s the point? If you can’t do exactly what your program requires, you might as well not do a thing. Instead of getting in workouts where you can, you’re better off just sitting on the couch until things calm down enough for you to start over and “go all in.” (At least until chaos ensues once more—then you’re back to doing jack squat).

Say you “slip up” on your diet and eat a freshly baked, ooey-gooey chocolate chip cookie. Yep, that’s a screw-up—you just blew your entire diet with a single tasty treat. Eating that single cookie is a fully valid reason to eat seventeen more, and then follow it up with more less-than-ideal food choices, until you’re ready to eat “perfectly” once more.

Either you’re going to abstain from every treat and never miss a workout, or you should just quit and not do a damn thing until you can go “all in.” When it comes to health and fitness, it’s perfection, or nothing.

2. Your happiness and self-worth are directly proportional to your weight, body fat percentage, body shape, and ability to achieve specific outcomes.

It doesn’t matter that it’s the twenty-first century—you’re a woman, and that means how you look is still the most important thing about you. Happiness and self-worth are limited by arbitrary factors like the number on the scale or the sculpted perfection of your backside. Regardless of whether you’re a good person, wife, mother, friend, sister, employee, business owner, or any other role you fulfill, if you don’t look a certain way or attain the “proper” body weight, your effort and accomplishments are all for nothing.

3. Forget about building a body for yourself. What matters most is building a body for the sake of impressing other people.

Can you believe some people use fitness to build a body that serves them; a body that feels good to occupy? Fitness isn’t about what you want or think about your body. It’s about what other people think about your body.

Closely monitor the number of “Likes” you’ve received for your latest perfectly posed, optimally lit, flaw-concealing filtered selfie. This, after all, is why you eat well and work out: for the approval and admiration of other people. If a bunch of horny teenage boys follow your posts and request “more skin!” then be sure to indulge their cravings. Never under-value the acceptance and approval of total strangers.

Likewise, if someone makes a negative, cruel remark about your body, you should definitely give a damn. Remember, other people’s opinions about your body matter—the good but especially the bad. Absorb their remarks—let them seep into your bones and penetrate your soul—and keep striving for ways to please them, particularly those who feel it’s their duty to share negative opinions.

Remember, both those who Like and Dislike your photos are doing you a favor. I mean, how else would you know how to feel about your body unless these people were kind enough to divulge their valuable opinion? Like clay in an artist’s hands, so should your body be to the opinions of friends, family, and strangers alike.

So what if you’re internally miserable? You can overcompensate by chronically seeking external validation from others.

4. When you reach a goal, don’t be satisfied with your accomplishment—you can always be leaner, smaller, stronger, prettier, perkier.

No time to celebrate what you achieved—as soon as you hit a fitness milestone, move on to the next goal. So what if you performed your first unassisted chin-up, or deadlifted one-and-a-half times your body weight, or looked in the mirror and saw muscle definition for the first time ever? There’s no time to celebrate these accomplishments or to savor your hard-earned victories. Look to the next goal that will really take your body or strength to the next level.

And when you attain that goal, same thing—don’t stop to celebrate. Immediately look for the next thing to make you a better woman. (Hint: it usually involves fixing a flaw, whittling away some other part of your body, or getting a muscle to “pop” just a bit more.)

Yes, always working toward the next training goal or new body part to improve means you’ll be chronically dissatisfied with your body and performance. But so be it. This is just part of what it means to be a woman. You can never be satisfied with your body. You must always chase the elusive state of perfection.

5. Always take health advice from celebrities.

My doctor may have a medical degree, along with years of experience practicing and studying research and medicine, but Gwyneth Paltrow says I should steam my genitalia and stick egg-shaped rocks up in there. I mean, surely GP knows exactly what she’s talking about and can be trusted despite her lack of formal medical education when it comes to all things vagina.

An innocent Easter egg hunt or nourishing breakfast may pop into your mind when you see eggs, but the company Goop saw a shape that a piece of jade could be molded into, and then decided women should insert them in their vaginas.

Wealthy, perfect-looking celebrities must certainly know what they’re talking about when it comes to health, fitness, and what to insert in one’s nether regions. Despite some of their products costing hundreds of dollars, not to mention being refuted by scientific data, gynecologists, and prestigious medical groups, we know we can trust them. After all, they are willing to share information that medical professionals refuse to tell us; they clearly have our best interest at heart.

6. Always be dieting.

This one’s easy. You’re a woman, so you’re obligated to a lifestyle of dieting. You can’t simply eat—you must watch what you eat. Even if what you’re doing is “working”—properly fueling your workouts and producing the body composition changes you desire —you should always scan magazines, books, and headlines for the latest tips, tricks, and secrets to help you diet more successfully. Scrutinize every bite of food by the criteria of whether it’ll help you lose body fat.

7. Don’t conclude a workout until you’re exhausted.

The closer you are to puking your guts out, the better. If you’re not fatigued, sweating profusely, or waddling to the designated barf bucket after every workout, then you wasted your damn time. Completing a workout feeling accomplished, strong, and even energized? That’s a devastating waste of effort. So what if you improved your performance, set a new personal record, or feel amazing? The only thing that matters is working yourself into a sweaty, depleted heap. That’s how you know you did enough.

Moving your body shouldn’t be enjoyable, serve a greater purpose beyond aesthetics, or be its own reward. It’s punishment for having fat on your body, and for eating food.

8. Each passing year, dread your increasing age.

It doesn’t matter that age is a normal chronology of every living creature, a byproduct of not dying. You’re a woman, and that means you should feel terrible about that increasing number. Lie about it, hide it, or jokingly say it’s your twenty-ninth birthday with each passing year. Heaven forbid you see your age as a number that reveals your experience, knowledge, and longevity.

9. Spend heaps of your hard-earned money on supplements.

You know a pill is mandatory for success if the trainer at the gym swears by its magical power. Isn’t it lucky for you that he just happens to sell them? The fact that he makes a hefty commission off those supplements can’t be influencing his recommendation in the slightest.

Who cares if the pricey supplements have zero proof to back up their hyperbolic claims? Surely someone who received a personal training certification online last weekend knows what he’s talking about. I mean, just look at his biceps!

Disregard the fact that the few supplements scientifically proven to be effective are quite cheap (e.g., creatine monohydrate). What reason could a health company have to lie to you? Or, for that matter, use Photoshopped before-and-after pictures to peddle an unregulated product? If anything, the fact that those magical fat burners are so expensive is proof that they will produce the incredible results they promise.

10. Embrace the magical power of detoxes and cleanses, because your liver and kidneys clearly aren’t doing their job fast enough.

Have no fear! You can eat and drink with reckless abandon all you want, because the next glassful of the magical detoxifying elixir will flush it all away. Down the hatch!

Why would you simply want to eat mostly real, minimally processed foods, get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated, and be physically active, when you can slurp down a cayenne pepper/apple cider vinegar/maple syrup/leprechaun fart cocktail that has zero research to back up its claims of flushing harmful toxins from your body while healing every imaginable disease…and melting stubborn body fat?

And for extra measure, let’s not forget the vagina-gourd cleanse! Someone on Facebook said you should stick one up there to “cleanse and refresh your yoni.” So what if your vagina cleanses itself? So what if a cucumber is covered in fungi that can damage your vaginal lining and put you at increased risk of disease? All your friends are chatting away on Facebook about how magical and life changing and rejuvenating these cleanses are; you don’t want to be left out, and anyway, Facebook is the best place to get advice about what to do with your vagina, and vegetables.

Salad? No, thank you. This is for my vagina. I saw a meme on Facebook, so, I know this is legit and trustworthy, even though dozens of doctors are speaking out against this.

11. Don’t concern yourself with silly goals like being a woman of integrity and action. Your value is definitely not about your personality or character. (See #2.)

As a woman, the only goal you should strive toward is making sure your body is as close to perfect as possible. It’s about the superficial, not the substantive. Yeah, so what if we already covered this one? It bears repeating because how you look still matters more than who you are or what you do. Don’t expect this cultural mindset to change, and definitely don’t speak up against it. It will always be this way, so get used to it.

12. Actively label parts of your body as “flaws.”

You’re a woman, which means you’re not entitled to love your body. You have lots of flaws that you must loathe and try to fix (or, at the very least, conceal) despite the cost, time commitment, lack of effectiveness and potential side effects of gimmicky products designed to address them.

When not working to fix your flaws, you must bemoan them, publicly and privately. That cellulite on your thighs? Those stretch marks? Be ashamed of that. So what if it’s completely natural and something millions of other women have? We should all be deeply ashamed of our flaws and search for ways to fix them. Lucky for us, there are plenty of marketers willing to share their secret vanishing creams, invasive procedures, and special diets to help us improve.

And if by some chance you do love your body, like only a raging narcissist would, then you better find some part of it to enhance or improve. How dare you think it’s possible to be satisfied with your body?

13. Ask for permission to enjoy your favorite foods.

If you’re on a date, order a skimpy salad, lest you look as though you enjoy eating. Appearances are important, and it should look like your preferred foods resemble the eating habits of a rabbit. Instead, give every indication that you subsist on tepid water and salad. If you must, you can eat a real meal once you’re safely home alone, where no one can see you.

14. For goodness’ sake, when you break the previous rule—because you will—and eat something substantial, make sure you’ve earned the right to do so.

You better have performed a grueling, fat-torching workout earlier in the day. If you didn’t earn that food, then by golly you’d better work it off as soon as possible. You can’t just have a cookie because you want a cookie. You must earn that cookie ahead of time, and then burn it off later, chanting the “you ate it, now negate it” motto as you climb onto the stair-master.

15. Constantly compare your body to other women.

Fitness professionals. Celebrities. Award-winning athletes. Instagram models who take fifty-seven different photos before they get the perfect one to post for all the world to see. These should absolutely be your measuring stick for success. And definitely listen to women who spout motivational phrases like, “I have twelve kids, two full-time jobs, and a perfectly sculpted six-pack. What’s your excuse?”

We can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves what’s important to us, so we must always compare ourselves to every woman we admire. Feeling super shitty about yourself is the surest way to get motivated.

16. Always follow the pack, even if it makes you miserable.

What you enjoy doesn’t matter. If everyone you know is suddenly competing in powerlifting, you need to work out that way too. Yes, even if you hate it. If everyone is doing metabolic workouts that leave you dry-heaving into your gym bag on the car ride home, but you’d prefer to just pull some heavy deadlifts, tough tater-tots. If everyone is chanting about how boring cardio is, but running a few miles is your favorite way to wind down after work, you’d be advised not to do it. (Don’t let anyone catch you doing it, anyway.)

There’s nothing more rewarding than casting your desires to the side and blindly following others without any consideration of whether you even like that activity.

17. Make sure to complicate your approach to health and fitness as much as possible.

If you don’t rely on hardware, spreadsheets, and fancy apps to keep your health and fitness habits on track, you can be sure you’re doing it wrong.

Eating real food most of the time, getting plenty of protein, making sleep a priority, and managing stress? Right—as though something as complex as health and fitness could be minimized to those simple basics.

18. Turn the way you eat and work out into a cult-like identity.

You don’t “just” eat and work out a certain way—those activities define you. They’re not part of your life; they are your life. Make sure everyone knows that you define yourself by your diet and workout style.

Disregard the poor souls who use eating well and working out as a tool to enhance their life, instead of revolving their life around the one-true way that you’ve discovered. It’s a given that the food you put in your mouth and the workouts you perform increase your moral superiority over all others who don’t follow the same approach. If someone doesn’t adopt your exact health and fitness philosophy, they must be shunned.

19. Always strive to obtain the latest “it” body part.

Back dimples. A thigh gap. Ab cracks. Voluptuous curves. Whatever pops up next as the most desirable trait to flaunt, you’d better do your best to attain it. After all, if there’s one thing we know about beauty, it’s that beauty is defined by a single physical trait. Doesn’t matter that women come in various shapes and sizes and have different preferences. Do your best to cram your body into the one-size-fits-all mold.

20. Remember, the only goal you can have is fat loss.

You’re a woman, and that means the only health and fitness goal you can have is losing fat, dropping a few pant sizes, or whittling away parts of your body. Sure, choosing to focus on making the weight on the barbell go up instead of the number on the scale go down is fun and empowering, but fat loss is all that matters. Every action in the kitchen and gym must be made with this critical fact in mind.

21. Embrace dichotomous food labels.

“Good” and “bad” foods are a strong way to start. “Clean” and “dirty” are acceptable, too. But hell, don’t stop there! Select some “forbidden” foods to avoid at all costs, so that when you do slip up and eat them, you can be riddled with guilt and shame!

Food isn’t just food. It’s a value system for measuring our self-worth. Never lose sight of the fact that what we eat has the power to make us superior, or inferior.

22. When you overindulge or miss a workout, self-flagellation is the only appropriate response.

Remember what we addressed earlier regarding perfection? Well, when you fall short of perfection, you must beat yourself up. (Self-compassion is overrated.) When you make less-than-ideal food choices or miss a workout, make sure you tell yourself repeatedly how much you suck, how hard you failed, and how you’ll never be able to stick with a program. Really go the extra step to reinforce the belief that you’ll never be good enough—this negative self-talk has always worked for you and everyone else who has done it.

Nothing and no one is perfect, but despite that fact, we must still demand absolute perfection from ourselves at all costs and respond harshly when we fail.

23. Never be sarcastic in the way you talk about health and fitness.

It’s a lazy way of expressing your opinions and experiences. Not to mention appalling, unhelpful, and very unladylike.

Okay, then—that’s enough sarcasm for one article.

It’s Time for a Change

Undoubtedly when you read the title of this article, you wondered, “Why would anyone want to hate their body?” No one starts eating well and working out with the goal of disliking their body, or themselves.

So here’s the better question:

Why does much of the health and fitness world cause us to dislike our bodies?

Perhaps more importantly, why do we put up with it?

We shouldn’t. And if you have been, you can choose to stop. You can choose to take a different health and fitness path. Instead of a path defined by obsessive eating and exercise habits that dominates your life and makes you feel terrible about yourself, you can choose an empowering, enjoyable, sustainable approach that makes you feel great from the first day you start. You can choose a path that truly makes you happy as well as healthy.

If you’ve had it up to HERE with the nonsense that permeates the health and fitness world, and want a plan that’s sustainable, enjoyable, and empowering, then grab a copy of my new book Lift Like a Girl. Packed with practical advice on everything from boosting nutrition to combating negative mindset, the book offers step-by-step instructions for starting and building a transformative strength-training practice.

I’m so excited to get Lift Like a Girl in your hands right now, that I’m offering it for just $0.99. (That’s $9 off the shelf price.)

Click here to get your copy now.

The post 23 Tips to Hate Your Way to Fitness appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Tips By Crystal http://www.niashanks.com/23-tips-hate-way-fitness/

[sushildhiman]

The 10 Secrets You Must Know To Choose A Good Wedding Photographer

Selecting your wedding photographer is not a difficult task. By learning my 10 secrets you will eliminate many of the pitfalls it is so easy to fall into. It is very important that you make your selection of photographer early on in your wedding plans. The best and most popular photographers get booked early, often a year or two in advance. So once you have set your date and arranged the wedding venue, the next thing on your list should be your photographer.

If you were getting married a generation ago in the 1930's or 40's, your choice would have been rather limited. In those days photography was still something of a 'dark art'. Literally the photographer or his assistant would spend hours in the dark room developing films and making photographic prints by hand. Your options for the wedding day would have been limited. The photographer would usually turn up at the end of your wedding service and meet you at the church door. He would then take a handful of pictures on his large camera. Usually a full length picture of the couple at the church door, a close-up if you were lucky and then perhaps a family group or two. Colour pictures were a definite luxury in the 30's as colour film was still in its infancy. A talented photographer might offer you hand tinted or coloured pictures which he would make from black and white originals, but these would be an expensive option.

It was not uncommon to take a trip to the photographers studio either on your wedding day or shortly afterwards. The whole business became quite an occasion. Posing in front of hot studio lights was something you only did on special occasions. It was the only way to get photographs of a reasonable quality. Simple cameras were becoming more available to the public, but they were very basic with few control. In those days the professional photographer still had a mysterious quality; part artist, part chemist and part magician. He could produce photographs you just could not achieve yourself with your 'Box Brownie' camera.

Today things are very different. Photography has been turned on its head. Gone are the famous companies like Agfa and Kodak. Film based photography has been replaced almost entirely by digital technology, the quality of which improves dramatically year by year. Most people now have a camera of some type and are happy with the pictures they take. Rapid advances in digital imaging have ensured that the 'auto' function on your camera will give you an acceptable image. Today you don't have to worry about shutter speed and 'f' stops to get a reasonable picture. Point and shoot is the easy option. However, technical progress does not mean that everyone knows what they are doing.

Look in any Yellow Pages or any other directory, Google 'wedding photographer' for any town or city and you will find an ever increasing number of entries under the listing. Why is this? It is simply because technology has improved to such an extent that even the most modest and affordable camera is capable of producing great images.

Sadly you will discover that not every so called photographer is a professional photographer. Some work at it on a part time basis and might be a cleaner, taxi driver or office worker from Monday to Friday and a wedding photographer at the weekend. It has become a part time occupation for many keen amateurs looking to make some extra cash at the weekend.

The questions you must ask yourself are; would I go to a dentist if I wasn't confident they had the training, experience and qualifications to take care of my teeth safely and hygienically? Would I trust a plumber to install a gas fire if he were not qualified and registered? No, it could be a matter of life and death.

Would I trust my wedding pictures to a photographer who might be working part time at weekends, shoots everything with his camera set to 'auto', promises me hundreds of pictures on a disc for a few hundred pounds? Sadly many people do!

The reasons for doing this are intriguing. Apart from the technology issue I have already mentioned, the other current influence is fashion. The current fashion in wedding photography can be described by the terms 'documentary', 'reportage', and 'life-style'. In a nut shell, today it is cool and fashionable to have wedding photographs that look like snap-shots! Pictures that look spontaneous, which is not staged and capture the emotion of the day without being intrusive or formal in any way.

What does all this mean in reality? Firstly, it is assumed that to achieve this 'documentary' or 'reportage' look, all you need to do is to take an inordinate number of pictures and chances are that you will get some suitable ones in the mix. So snap away is the mentality of many inexperienced photographers. After all, after you have bought your camera and memory cards, the images are free. There are no processing costs as with film, if the image is no good just delete it, it costs nothing!

In reality, to take good 'documentary' images you also need other skills. You need to anticipate the action, be in the right place at the right time, know when to press the shutter to get that decisive moment, know how to cope with a variety of lighting conditions that will fool your camera, compose your picture correctly, and finally be able to control the guests in such a way that things you want to photograph happen naturally.

How do you avoid the pitfalls? It can be difficult, but here are 10 secrets that will help you when choosing your wedding photographer!

1. Looking in a directory will only give you contact details. Looking at a web site is a good start; at least you get to see some pictures. Today a good and well produced web site is within the budget of most people who want to set up in business. So you cannot assume that someone with a fancy web site is the best choice. He may have another occupation to pay the mortgage. Does the web site have a bio page? How much information does it give about the photographer, their experience and their professional qualifications? How long have they been in business?

2. Do they belong to a recognised professional photographic association, or just a camera club? Are they subject to a professional Code of Conduct? Will you have anywhere to appeal to if things go wrong? Sadly a man can go to town and buy a fancy camera with his redundancy money on Friday and call himself a professional photographer on Saturday. In the U.K. there is no regulation of photographers at the moment. Anyone can legally set themselves up in business as a photographer and they do not have to register with anyone. The public is not protected by any legislation. Over the years the major professional photographic associations in the U.K. have lobbied successive governments regarding this matter, but without success.

3. Is a postal address listed on the web site, or just a mobile number and email address? How will you find them if there is a problem? Not every photographer has a high street studio, much work from home quite legitimately. A reputable photographer will always publish an address.

4. If the photographer works from home he/she is unlikely to have a large studio unless it has been purpose built or adapted from a garage or other room. They are unlikely to be taking many portraits during the week. Can you arrange to visit them to view a recent selection of wedding pictures, or do they insist on coming to see you at your home? When it comes to looking at samples, albums containing a variety of weddings can look fine. Photographers always like to show off their best pictures. Always ask to see complete weddings from start to finish. That will give you a better indication of the photographers' skill level, rather than admiring pretty pictures.

5. Are they qualified? I'm not talking of a degree in photography. To my knowledge there are no degree courses in wedding photography at any college in the U.K. There are degree courses in Documentary photography, but weddings or social photography are not covered in any depth. There are wedding qualifications awarded by the main photographic bodies in the U.K., such as the MPA, BIPP, SWPP. These are awarded by the submission of actual work that has been undertaken. So look for professional qualifications. There are three levels: the basic level being Licentiate (LMPA or LBIPP). This level indicates the photographer can produce work of a competent and professional standard. They will also have good business skills if they have achieved a Diploma in Professional Photographic Practice (DipPP). The second level of qualification is the Associate (AMPA or ABIPP). This indicates considerable experience and a talent to produce artistic and creative photography. The second level is difficult to attain, therefore there are fewer Associates than Licentiates. The top level of qualification and ultimate aim of all aspiring professionals is to be a Fellow (FMPA or FBIPP). To be a Fellow is a rare achievement. It indicates the highest level of competence, experience and artistry and indicates the photographer has a unique style. These are the top professionals who have been recognised as leaders in their field.

6. Who will be taking your wedding photographs? Get to meet the person him/herself. Many photographers rather than turn a wedding commission away, will sub-contract the work to an assistant, keen amateur, or camera operator. Always find out who your photographer will be and get to see their portfolio of work. The boss might take good pictures, but what about his assistant?

7. Ask what insurance they hold. Your 'cowboy' will not have Professional Indemnity cover if his equipment fails. He will not have Public Liability cover should a guest trip over his camera bag. If he says his camera is insured that's not the same thing. That only covers him if his camera is stolen.

8. Don't be fooled by statements like 'award winning'. Always ask "what awards"! Are they recognised professional awards or something picked up at a Camera Club?

9. If you ask a technical question this will put everyone on the back foot. Ask if they shoot jpegs. If the answer is yes then beware! The vast majority of professional photographers worldwide will shoot RAW files in their camera, for maximum image quality. They will then spend time to editing these RAW files on a computer to produce jpegs. If your photographer argues that he doesn't need to shoot RAW files because his jpegs are spot on... beware! Jpeg files produced directly by the camera are never as good as those prepared by editing RAW files manually, because the internal camera software always makes general assumptions on the subject and lighting conditions. The photographer who edits RAW files manually can make specific and individual fine adjustments to the exposure, white balance, tone & sharpness of each image, together with an array of other specific controls which will produce the highest quality images.

10. Ask what happens if they become ill the day before your wedding? What happens if they break a leg or are involved in an accident? What back-up is in place? A reputable photographer will have a network of qualified colleagues he can call upon either locally or via their professional association.

So now you have the 10 secrets to finding your wedding photographer. Always meet them face to face and discuss your plans in detail. He will probably know your wedding venue already and will be able to put your mind at ease should it rain on your big day. If you are interested in having some group photographs of your family and friends, make a list with names so that no one is left out or hides away. 'Brides family' is not very specific, list the people you want in the picture. If your dress detail is important or Aunty Betty made the cake, or you have a frail Granny who can't stand up for long, you must tell your photographer so he can make allowances.

Your photographer will need time to take pictures for you, so it is important that you plan for and consider timings. If you really want a big picture with all the guests as soon as you get to the reception, it won't work. Guests always arrive in dribs and drabs and someone will be missing. Rather plan for that picture to be taken just before you all go into your wedding breakfast. There will be more chance everyone will be present.

Once you have selected your photographer you will need to confirm your booking. Don't leave it until the last moment assuming your kind photographer is holding the day for you. He/she has a business to run so expect to pay a deposit or booking fee to secure the day. When you book expect to sign a contract which simply states what will be provided and the fee expected. This is usual practice. Generally all outstanding fees are payable prior to the wedding. Finally, just to avoid surprises, ask about hidden fees. Is VAT included or are you going to get a nasty 20% addition at the end of the day.

At some stage you might ask the question "Who owns the copyright on my wedding pictures?" In the U.K. by law the copyright is owned by the photographer on the understanding that they will supply you with any images you require. If you are in China, Asia, India and many other countries in the world, copyright and intellectual property is another ball game and mine field!

Sushil Dhiman is an award-winning professional photographer and considered one of the best Wedding Photographer in Chandigarh. Visit our site to know more about Candid Wedding Photographer in Chandigarh.