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Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Link Loves and Must-Reads 3/10/17

In honor of whatever flu/stomach bug/bronchial infection is currently making rounds through school, I'm taking a sick day.  (In other words, I am ill.  Woohoo.)  But I've developed a new sort of love for tea.  If I could carry a tea kettle around with me at school and work, I seriously would do that.  Unfortunately, my backpack is already big enough to make me look ridiculous enough as it is.
Since I'm home, I have a little bit more time to do classwork and long-term projects, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to share some of the things I've had sitting here as links for the past two weeks.  Yay!

  • What I Ate Wednesday: It's Unhealthy to Eat Only Healthy Food by Alexis Joseph
    • This article from the Hummusapien is really refreshing given the current "all-or-nothing" attitude that the media is preaching when it comes to health and fitness and well-being.  It's awesome to make healthy choices so you can feel your best, but there's a big difference between taking caring of yourself and being obsessive.  Having a fixation on health can actually be really unhealthy.  This is something that's become more and more clear to me over the past few months.  That said, it can be difficult to identify what behaviors are healthy and which are obsessive because of al of the hardcore images of wellness that we're constantly being bombarded with.  Alexis's post is something I think everyone who struggles with balancing true health and happiness with obsession and anxiety needs to read because Alexis (an actual RD) has a very honest and un-obsessive attitude about taking care of herself.  Unlike the Photoshopped fitspo pics preaching two-hour workout sessions, green drink lunches, and dessert-less evenings, Alexis talks about how "[t]here is so much more to life than golden milk and smoothie bowls and toast covered with berries and almond milk yogurt." Thank you!!
  • A Story of Bats, Agaves, and People by Kristen Lear
    • I love Bat Conservation International and all it does to help take care of our little bat friends, and this story is awesome because it shows just how we can help people and animals at the same time.  YAY for environmental conservation efforts!  There's such a huge relationship between the health of the natural world and the health of the human one, and we often forget about this relationship when we're thinking about "progress" and "industrialization."  But true progress is about maintaining a balance with nature and respecting our ecosystems so that our world doesn't end in a sad spiral of global warming and pollution.  I mean, look at Bhutan....a carbon-negative country that measures progress based on GNH (Gross National Happiness). I think we have a lot to learn from Bhutan! (And from bats.)
  • If social media is toxic for you . . . do these 4 things by Cassey Ho
    • This sort of relates to the first article I linked to.  Looking around me, I realize just how many people (many of whom are very young) have fallen into the trap of comparison.  I'm definitely not immune to this myself. Even without a smart phone and all the apps that come with it (yup, I've got a little flip phone and LOVE IT), I'm definitely affected by comparison.  I'm so incredibly grateful every day for little things like hearing my hermit crabs playing in their houses or talking to my mum about work, but I also really love fashion magazines (guilty pleasure), and that usually leads to #comparisonproblems.  Social media is such a huge contributor to comparison because it inundates us with a Photoshopped version of reality.  Why, we wonder, is everyone so happy and glamorous and perfect all the time?  Well, here's the truth: they aren't!  Think of social media as a big filter.  People are only sharing what they WANT to share.  And for every Snapchat story of an epic vacation, there's something very sad going on in the world (i.e. deportation, famine, war, etc.).  Comparing ourselves to each other is such a waste of time. Should a blueberry compare itself to a banana?  NO.  Both fruits are totally awesome in totally different ways. 
<3 Frances

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