You know the one I’m talking about. That crazy Aunt we all have.

The one that’s into tarot cards, and mood rings. Detoxes and vegetarian meals.

As I went to my local liquor store the other day to purchase a bottle of wine, I said to the young guy behind the counter “you must think I’m an alcoholic”.

“Nah. I don’t think that at all.”

That’s what I think of myself actually.

I don’t drink that much. Just a glass here and there, however weighing in at barely 50 kilos, means the single glass has quite an effect.

I have found after 18 months of insomnia, I have sought the help of alcohol in order to assist in sedating me.

Insomnia is a funny thing. You think with a lack of sleep, you would eventually become tired. Not at all. You actually become increasingly anxious. Full of nervous energy that needs to be spent. What I’d give for a proper nights sleep. Probably the reason behind Tyler Durden starting Fight Club. To get rid of that extra energy. More on that later.

In my true contradictory fashion I had stopped in to purchase my bottle of plonk on the way home. On the way home from a 90 minute gym session.

Upon arriving home, I sat out in the garden in my gym clothes, poured myself a glass of wine, and lit up a cigarette.

If that’s not the definition of counter-productivity, I don’t know what is.

Oh, and after chain smoking 4 cigarettes with my glass of vino, I went back inside, showered, and made myself a chick pea salad.

I am both the picture of health, in addition to being a toxic wasteland.

And I had a thought. Well, I always have thoughts. But this one was a little more profound than the usual pondering of life’s mysteries. Like the random thoughts that occasionally pop into my mind. The ones that we keep to ourselves. “Do those Mexican girls that do the donkey shows like their job?”, “I wonder if vampires are really real?”. You know. Those ones.

So, I had a thought. Am I “that woman”? Am I “crazy Aunt Amy”?

Not that I have any nieces or nephews. Thank God for that. These non-existent children have truly been spared.

But have I morphed into that woman I swore I would never become?

The eccentric writer who occasionally resembles a bag lady. The one with no set routine. The one who won’t buy any appliances or sign any contracts during mercury retrograde.

Am I her?

I am two women. I am the free spirit, and I am the one who craves stability. I am the non-conformist, and the one who would like to know what normal looks like. I am the hobo and the glamour girl. I am aloof, yet very sensible. Cautious even. I exude confidence and charisma, coupled with self-doubt and awkwardness.

Don’t we all look like this on the inside? Tormented by our very selves?

Which brings me back to Tyler Durden and Fight Club.

What an appropriately named title for the film. Fight Club. The inner battle between consciousness and ego.

Eckart Tolle teaches in “The Power of Now”, that the ego relies on labels to identify with.

Have I inadvertently labeled myself?

My new neighbour invited me over for drinks one afternoon. Drinks. I can handle that.

My mind immediately began with its unstoppable thoughts.

“Will they like me? I’m so different compared to them. What am I going to talk about? They are the nuclear family I often wonder about. They are the 2.3 children, 4WD people.”
I reigned myself in. Centred myself.

“You are a nice person. You are kind, and honest, and interesting.”

That’s all that matters at the end. My heart is in the right place.

So am I “that woman”? No. I am me. No labels. Just me.

The first step in eliminating labeling yourself is acceptance. So accept yourself for the person you are.

While I am terrible at taking my own advice, I excel at dishing out pearls of wisdom.

Create balance in your life, get enough sleep, don’t over-think, never allow your ego to override your consciousness, and never buy any appliances during mercury retrograde.

So don’t label yourself. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into a stereotype. Lose the label. Free yourself.

Because like Tyler Durden says in Fight Club “It’s only after we’ve lost everything, that we’re free to do anything”.

The post Labels appeared first on Something Clever.

And I’ll tell you why.

First of all, there’s a certain stigma attached to the phrase. When I first started healthy eating, I said it all the time. It wasn’t so bothersome during my gap year after school, but in my first year of University, I had to say it all the time, turning down drinks, Maccas runs, community dinners, and so on. And people would just look at me strangely.

When you say the phrase “I’m on a diet,” people immediately assume you’re following the “flavour of the month” diet. A fad. Like the lemon detox diet, or the CSIRO diet. It implies that you’re doing something short-term for a quick fix, and people know that doing a fad diet is a stupid move because you’re just going to pack weight back on afterwards.

Which brings me to my most important point: Saying you’re on a diet implies it is temporary. A “temporary” diet is absolutely the wrong approach, because it means you have not learned anything. It means you think that putting on weight was a silly fluke, and that you can return to old habits and not exercise, and won’t suffer any consequences. It sounds silly when you word it like that, but people subconsciously believe it without realising.

When you lose weight, you should not be following a temporary “diet;” you should be rethinking and overhauling your entire lifestyle. Losing weight is not as easy as a quick fix – it’s changing everything.

Five years ago, I was eating toast or cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and treats (biscuits, yogurt, cake, etc) for lunch, and a cooked meal for dinner, which almost always included pasta or rice.

Today, I usually skip breakfast, eat a rump steak with cooked veges for lunch, and eat a salad with chicken breast fillet for dinner. I’ve sustained that lifestyle for over four years now, and do not plan to return to my old eating habits. Even if I do proverbially “cheat,” my days remain structured, eating cooked meals that involve meat and vegetables amid the bad food. And the next day, I’m back to my healthy eating all the way.

To the outsider, my former eating regimen sounds perfect, because it’s the government-approved, status quo image we have in our heads of a day of meals. But what we should be eating is lean meats and vegetables. In fact, when I do eat breakfast, people scoff when they see I’ve cooked a stir-fry or a salad. “How can you eat that for breakfast?,” they ask, “Isn’t that really heavy?” Well, no, because I’m giving my body what it actually needs. Cereal or toast will load your body with sugar and dense carbohydrates, which makes you feel shit for the rest for the day of the day.

(NB: I know I said I skip breakfast whenever I can, and this makes me seem like I’m saying breakfast sets the pace for the day; what I’m saying is this breakfast affects your wellbeing during the day. Skipping breakfast and fasting is my choice, because it’s specific to my goal of leaning out. It is not recommended for everyone, but it works for me.)

This discussion brings me to my next point, which is one of the things I want to stress more than anything in this article.

When I tell people about the progress I’ve made (at my lightest, I lost more than 40kg), they ask about what I did. And when I tell them the stuff to avoid (gluten, sugar, grains, potatoes, carb-rich foods), they ask the golden question: “What am I meant to eat?”

That’s when my heart drops, because I realise what I am about to tell them is, in their minds, complete madness. I am accustomed to my way of life, and I am comfortable with it. But when I heard the madness for the first time after 18 years of life, believing that my eating was just peachy, I felt like someone just told me that they raped a child. No bread? No pasta? No rice? No potato? What the hell?!

The people I talk to… They are not prepared to hear it. They want me to tell them to cut out just one or two foods, because they don’t want to give up the foods they find so yummy. They want to believe that bread, pasta, rice, potato, oats, grains, etc, are good for you, because they taste good and trigger a hormonal response that provokes pure pleasure.

Of course, some people take the information well, and actively start taking steps to change their lives. That’s maybe 25% of the people I talk to. There’s a 50% margin of people who are simply reluctant, but, with persuasion, might give it a go. But then there’s the 25% of people, who hear me, but are not willing or prepared to step outside of their comfort zone. They don’t want to budge from their routine, because they’re brainwashed to believe their diet is already perfect, and they do not have the willpower or motivation to change.

I have no patience for the latter 25%, because they’re so defensive and vicious, that they often take offense. They just don’t want to hear it. And they are the ones who asked for the fucking advice in the first place.

Decide which camp you are in.

If I was to tell you the specifics of how to eat properly, this article would wind up being as long as a book. So you’re better off reading a book from someone a lot more qualified than me. Try the writings of Robb Wolf, Loren Cordain, Mark Sisson, Chris Kresser, or Greg Everett. Or all of the above. I’m just saying that people need to fix their attitude towards healthy eating, because I’ve dealt with a lot of losers and it makes me lose faith in humanity.

The post Healthy Eating: What You Need To Know appeared first on Something Clever.

CrossFit had humble beginnings. Founded in the year 2000, it started out as a small-time organisation, eventually picking up affiliates in the years to follow. In 2005, there were 13 affiliated gyms, but CrossFit, Inc. eventually boomed, and as of 2013 there are more than 6,000 CrossFit gyms around the globe. It has become a tremendous international success, and it keeps growing and growing.

In theory, it’s a solid program, mixing Olympic lifts with conditioning workouts to improve one’s strength and fitness. But it’s no stranger to controversy, and there is a very vocal community who take the piss out of CrossFitters and use every opportunity to criticise the corporation as a whole.

We’ll get the smaller controversy out of the way first. As explained by fitness gurus Robb Wolf and Greg Everett, CrossFit was intended to be a sport for everybody of every fitness level, catering for fit young gym nuts, morbidly obese, unfit people, and senior citizens wanting to keep themselves in shape. But the introduction of the CrossFit Games in 2007 changed this perspective, turning the “sport for everyone” into what’s essentially a dick-measuring contest. It’s created an image in the public conscious that CrossFit is only for the elite athletes, and people are reluctant to join CrossFit gyms in fear of feeling insecure and inadequate.

It’s one of the criticisms of CrossFit that I agree with. Though any sort of competition is interesting, the Games are indeed intimidating, and it alienates those of us who train to stay in shape and look good, not to be the most physically superior badass on the planet.

However, the Games is not a reflection of CrossFit programming as a whole or of individual gyms. It’s just a constituent of the CrossFit Corporation, and people can easily choose to ignore it. I’ve been a CrossFitter for 18 months, and I’ve passed up the chance to enter the CrossFit Open twice now. I train to keep myself looking and feeling good; I’m not out to take the title. The Games do not affect me or my training; it’s optional.

It is a problem, though, that the uninitiated seem to think that CrossFit isn’t for everyone directly because of the Games. The folks at CrossFit, Inc. could try to help this, but they don’t want to. They’re successful enough.

And this brings us to the next big thing: the key players of CrossFit, Inc. are dicks.

You see, the biggest criticism that CrossFit cops is that it doesn’t focus on technique; that people work out with poor form, leading to injuries. Apparently the mantra is “lift as heavy as possible, don’t worry about shit form.”

It’s a valid criticism, but why is it, then, that my CrossFit gym are so focused on technique and form? In fact, 5-10 minutes of each 60-minute class is used to go through and practice proper form. If you cannot perform the exercise with good form, you scale back the weight until your form is acceptable. My deadlifting was less than perfect this week, so I scaled back to a demoralising 60kg, to allow me to concentrate on keeping a straight back and doing the lift properly. For the conditioning workout, there is an option at my gym to use a light stick as opposed to a barbell with weight, allowing newcomers to ensure they do the movement properly.

I’ve been to a number of CrossFit gyms, and every single one of them have emphasised technique over heavy weight.

So why is it, then, that CrossFit still gets this criticism?

Well, it’s simple: as I said before, the dudes running CrossFit are a bunch of dicks.

While some CrossFit gyms are determined to uphold form, some gyms do not. Some gyms do adhere to the idiotic “lift heavy with shit form” mantra, giving CrossFit a bad name.

You see, all it takes to become certified as a CrossFit coach, is one weekend workshop. That’s all. Two days of tests, after which you are free to open your own CrossFit gym and be a head coach. A number of CrossFit certified trainers, therefore, are terrible coaches, leading to injuries because of teaching improper form or not focusing on form at all. But they can do that, because nobody is there to stop them. Indeed, CrossFit, Inc. is a corporation and they’re all about the money. They do not feel the need to quality-control the gyms, because they’re money-hungry dicks. They’re happy with their growth and don’t want to shut any gyms down, because the gyms are paying them a flat rate every year in order to be a CrossFit affiliate. For that, they deserve every bit of scorn that they get.

All it would take to fix this little issue would be fully-qualified inspectors checking out every CrossFit gym around the world at least once a year, and if they are giving CrossFit a bad name, either give them a warning or shut them down.

So in the end, CrossFit as a whole is flawed, but it all depends on the individual CrossFit gym. I know of several excellent CrossFit gyms that I recommend to people, but obviously there are some gyms out there that need to be stopped. By bashing CrossFit as a whole for “teaching bad form,” you look like a pathetically ignorant dick, and you’re just as bad as any inept coach.

Mention must also be made of the bodybuilding community, who consider CrossFit a laughing stock. They criticise poor form, but really, regular everyday weightlifters don’t have a coach with them, and could easily be performing with terrible technique. Lifting with unqualified friends who don’t know proper form is very dangerous, even more so than a bad CrossFit coach. And what of the people who’ve never lifted before, who walk into a gym and start to lift for the first time? They don’t know proper form, and will probably hurt themselves.

With the proper coaches, CrossFit is a godsend. When I started CrossFit, I performed every exercise with poor form, and could not squat. 18 months later, I’m performing most lifts with spot-on form after having learned the proper technique, and the coaches have given me stretches and exercises to improve my squatting. I’ve also learned more about good nutrition than I ever have before. More than that, my CrossFit gym is full of friends. It’s a brilliant community of like-minded people from every walk of life. There’s no elitism in my gym, everyone is an equal. There’s no way I’m ever going to want to return to a regular weightlifting regimen, performed by myself in a gym full of elitist snobs and groups of people I don’t know.

Anyone reading this can try CrossFit. It’s just a matter of picking the right gym.

The post CrossFit: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly appeared first on Something Clever.

As a chubby twelve year old I ached and wished for a prince. I used to think that all of my problems would dissolve if I could just find a man to love me. I even developed a crush on Prince Harry at one stage, thinking that maybe I could be royalty all on my own. Hey every little Aussie girl wants their Princess Mary fairytale right?

As I got a little older, I realised that my “happily ever after” would not just fall into my lap.

Those that know me may roll their eyes. I may be one of the “lucky ones”. I met my Prince Charming at nineteen years old.

My (now husband) even proposed in an incredibly romantic way, getting down on one knee, after an afternoon of strolling through the autumn New York City streets, and ice-skating at Rockefeller Centre. We had a dream wedding and purchased our first home together last year

I am incredibly and phenomenally loved by this exceptionally beautiful man. He made me a more understanding, fair, calm and rational person and taught me to always share what I am feeling. In my few years of dating, I had my fair share of toxic relationships with men, who made me a much lesser version of myself. The best thing about him is that he makes me the absolute best version of myself.

Since being with him, I have not fallen into the trap that some people do, getting comfortable and taking less care of myself. He would love me no matter how I looked, but I think it’s incredibly important to keep fit, happy and healthy for my own well-being. He is incredibly encouraging of me, and having a healthy and happy relationship means that your partner encourages you to do what makes you content and to be the best you can be.

I still have my fair share of self-esteem issues from a childhood of bullying, taunting at the hands of some not so nice people. And truly believe that finding your “happily ever after”, is really about finding yourself, whether inside, or outside of a relationship, and loving yourself.

Your self-esteem and happiness should in no way be tied to whether or not you have a partner. Can your “happily ever after” mean having a life full of self-discovery, personal growth and happiness without a partner? Abso-freaking-lutely.

Can a life dedicated to health, fitness, travel, learning, dedicating yourself to a cause, a passion, a hobby (or whatever your pleasure and self-satisfaction may entail) be YOUR happily ever after?

The deep-rooted, societal belief that to live out your days happily, requires you to be married to your soul mate and grow old together is lovely, but may be outdated and not necessarily for everyone. Some are lucky to find a life partner, someone who will love them unconditionally, but many are lucky to draw this unwavering support from family and friends too. It is important to realise that people that we perceive to have a perfect life are likely to have their own battles and challenges with health, finances or other suffering and loss.

Open your heart and mind to whatever life brings you and have realistic expectations. By my definition, a “happily ever after” is living positively and efficaciously as you define achievement and success and ultimately to love yourself and be content with what you have and who you are.

Tips for getting YOUR happily ever after;

• Do something new, that may scare you at first, but that you have always wanted to do.

• Do things that make YOU happy, and be the best version of you, not to impress other people, but so you feel good about yourself.

• Write a list of the things that make you happy, and refer to this if you find that you are going off course.

• Have realistic goals about what you want to achieve and for your future.

• Be healthy.

• Put your time and feeling into the relationships (friends, family, partner) that make you feel good and less into those that don’t.

• In a similar vein, let go of the things that no longer make you happy, or bring you down.

• Let go of the stereotypical, fairytale notion of “happily ever after”, and have faith that things will fall into place.

A big thankyou to the few girls on twitter who also helped with my research.

The post How to get your “Happily Ever After” appeared first on Something Clever.