Truth or lies?

I've been reading my way through the great blog from Charlie - aka "The Runner Beans" and came across her post about false impressions given on social media about the way people live their lives, specifically relating to fitness and diet. Let's face it, I bet there is hardly a blogger or instagrammer out there not occasionally guilty of putting their life into "soft focus" and only showing the good bits? It's natural to want to show the best of ourselves, rather than confessing that yesterday, we ate a breakfast that contained more calories than we burned off in the entire very rainy day. (Yes, this actually WAS me yesterday!)

Charlie posted this list which came from a study carried out by KP Nuts, apparently, so I thought it would be fun to take a look and see how I stacked up with some truths...

20 TOP HEALTH AND FITNESS FIBS: 

1. I drink more than 1 litre of water a day During the week, yes I do, and it's often more than 2. At weekends though I can be shockingly bad at forgetting about hydration.
2. I don’t watch much telly I watch a lot less than MrEH but still probably more than I'd like. I do have a few shows I will make a point of recording (By a Tuesday night when he's at rugby training I'm always itching to catch up on casualty, for example!).
3. I only drink at weekends It's a rare week when this one isn't true - although my weekends do start on a Thursday night, it should be remembered! If I do drink during the week though it's because we're out somewhere and it will be beer rather than wine or spirits.
4. I visit the gym regularly Generally once a week.
5. My kids aren’t allowed sweets No kids, and the chances of me stopping MrEH from eating sweets is next to zero! I don't eat much in the way of sweets myself although I do enjoy a bit of good dark chocolate on occasion. 
6. I have a normal BMI It's getting there - finally - last time I got on my scales they told me 24.8 so *just* in the healthy zone finally. 
7. I never eat takeaways This is definitely not me! At home we have a takeaway about once a month - with occasionally a second one creeping in there. If we're away at weekends then there will often be one somewhere along the lines there too - the weekend just gone this was the most fantastic fish & chips!
8. I don’t really like chocolate I have far more of a savoury taste than sweet, but I do enjoy chocolate from time to time. If you gave me a straight choice between a bar of Dairy Milk or a packet of Cheese & Onion though the crisps would win every single time!
9. I don’t like the taste of alcohol Really? People say this? I definitely DO like the taste of alcohol - especially in beer or gin form! And of course in moderation drinking can be a great way to get out and socialise with friends, too.
10. I’m not a fan of fried food This is too general, surely? I frequently use my frying pan at home, usually with just a teaspoon or two of rapeseed oil, but we don't eat deep fried food at home particularly. 
11. My kids love vegetables Again - no kids. MrEH probably eats more veggies than he would if he was single though if that counts? 
12. I never eat fast food See no. 7 above...although in terms of the "usual suspect" fast food chains - McDonalds is a "never" - this is on grounds of principle following some rather dubious activities that they supported years ago. BK & KFC are a "very occasional" - and I tend not to enjoy them particularly when I do these days. 
13. I lift really heavy weights The only weights I own at home are dinky 1.5kg ones. I don't do any free weights stuff at the gym at all at the moment - and the leg-press machine is the only one I set above 25kg, currently! 
14. I only shop at organic supermarkets I pretty much never buy organic. I'll be honest, I'm unsure whether the benefits of doing so are great enough to justify the much higher price tags. Instead we try to focus on buying British as far as possible, and in the case of meat, always British free range/higher welfare.
15. I don’t eat any saturated fat Crisps contain saturated fat. Therefore I DO eat saturated fat. ;-) 
16. I won’t have processed food in the house Cheese is made via a process and is therefore, surely, processed? Seriously though, generally speaking we avoid ready meals and similar and usually cook from scratch from bare ingredients. It's just the way we prefer to eat. 
17. I have never tried a kebab My answer here is much the same as Charlie's - shish kebabs....mmmm! 
18. I don’t eat carbs at all Pfft. I have days when I eat precious little but carbs! 
19. I’ve run a marathon Nope. And that is highly unlikely to change, too. Absolutely get why people go out there and do it, but have zero wish to run one myself, thanks! 
20. My children never eat fast food As above, no children to think about. If we had, I'd hate for them to be the "strange ones" at school for never eating fast food - but I would make sure that rather as when I was a child, it was a treat rather than a regular occurrence. 

So there you go - I reckon I'm pretty much the same as most people when it comes to food and eating - there are things I could do better for sure, but equally some of my choices are probably better than a lot of people's. I'm pretty active, and tend to watch what I eat during the week and relax a lot at weekends. Ultimately I really enjoy nice food, and taking my weekdays as mostly in calorie deficit and exercising a fair bit means I can get away with splurging a bit more at weekends. It works for me. 

Robyn

"Date night" doesn't have to be a thing...!

Once you were married, or settled down with your chosen significant other, dating used to be one of the things that a large number of people said "phew - thank goodness I'm out of that loop" about. But in the last few years "Date Nights" have become a "thing" for a lot of people, it seems. Well I say "a lot of people" but actually I suspect that should read "A lot of people with a heavy reliance on social media" -  as that seems to be where it's originated. Now, if it just stopped as people taking the view that it's something they choose to do, that would be fine, but like so many hashtag-worthy subjects, a lot of people seem to see the fact that they do "Date Nights" as a route to feel smug, or worse, to outright try to shame others who're choosing to travel a different path.

As she so often does, Kendra makes a great case for the opposition on her Lazy Genius Collective Blog - alarmingly there are those out there trying to suggest that if you're not regularly "doing date night" it probably means that your marriage is in trouble. Seriously? Now last time I looked, there were all sorts of signs that a relationship might be in trouble, but failing to pop out for a mid-week pizza and beer isn't generally recognised as one of them. If you aren't spending time together at all then clearly that might suggest that something is a wee bit amiss, and perhaps it's time to think about focusing back on one another, but for the majority of us non date-nighters that's not the case. It's not that we're not spending time with that most-important-person-in-the-world-to-us - it's that we're not feeling the need to label that time publicly to others.

I was curious about the "Hashtag datenight" phenomenon so I googled it - astonishingly there is a company out there who, for £40 a month, will send you a ready made date in the post every month - thus removing even the need to sit down together and discuss what you might want to do. There was also a pretty universally panned film dating from 2010, but once you get past those, the majority of what you'll find is Social Media related. Instagram leads the way unsurprisingly with a mix of selfies, "meaningful" quotes and food pics, mostly with other "aspirational" hashtags attached all designed to show the world - or at least a couple of hundred followers - how "perfect" that person's life is. An occasional post clearly made with a good dollop of irony thrown in stands out a mile - and are almost exclusively British (no surprise there!). It's when you stray onto Urban Dictionary definitions that things get REALLY interesting though - and indeed "Date night is the negotiated exchange of a night out for the lady resulting in an*l sex for the man" nearly made me spit my tea out - I'll certainly always view that hashtag rather differently in the future! The OED clarifies that it's mainly intended for couples with children - and I definitely see more logic in this - when you reach the point that far more planning is needed to get a night out with "just the two of you". The majority of those instagram posts don't appear to relate to this model - but I wonder whether this is as simple as again, people not feeling the need to apply a label to it, plus feeling the importance of actually focusing more on and enjoying the time with each other and no other demands than telling their "friends list" what a fantastic time they're having...? 

It's pretty rare for MrEH and I to go out on a weeknight. There are several reasons why it tends not to suit us, but the most notable of those is that by the time we've both finished work and got home, it's usually after 7, and neither of us want to be out late on a night when the alarm is going to go off shortly after 6am the following morning to summon us for another day of daily grind. To be honest, much as we might enjoy going out, generally speaking, what we enjoy more on a weeknight is a chat about our day while curled up on the sofa, and a bit of time to be just "us" after a hectic day. All of the above though doesn't mean we don't spend time together - we always have right since we were first together, and perhaps that's part of it. We have ALWAYS made time to spend time together because we WANT to be with the other, we just take for granted that this is part of our lives together - it doesn't need drawing attention to, and I suspect an awful lot of others treat things in exactly the same way. We just do stuff, rather than advertising to the world that we're doing it and labelling it as something extraordinary. If you're doing the same, then really, I promise you, there is NOTHING wrong with that!

Robyn

Social Mediocracy...

I've posted before on the subject of Social Media, and it's good and bad sides. I'm still in two minds - I love the fact that it's so easy to share photos with an ever-wider audience on the likes of Twitter & Flickr, for example. That Facebook lets me stay in contact with people who otherwise, I'd have no likelihood of staying in touch with, and whilst I may not have much to do with them, I wouldn't want to totally lose touch. Facebook is also great for keeping in touch with people who fall into certain "compartments" in my life - airshow people in the winter, Great British Beer Festival friends who live at the other end of the country from one August to the next. Instagram is ace for being able to just see little snippets of people's lives - some I know personally, others I don't, but I choose to keep my "follows" on there to a small group as mostly this means that I can keep up with my feed and don't miss too much. In part as a result of that I've been surprised how fast my number of followers has built up to be honest - but it's truly lovely that so many people like what I post on there.

One thing I really don't like about social media generally is the fact that it does seem to give a certain "type of person" an outlet to be snipey, bitchy or just plain cruel. The older I get, the more time moves on, the more I find online one-upmanship or spiteful behaviour to be completely unacceptable. If you're someone who regularly gets a kick out of making nasty little jibes at people, or patronising them, then get over yourself please - you are absolutely NO better than anyone else and the only person you will make look small, ultimately, will be yourself.  As someone who has been using assorted online forums for a good many years, it's a sad fact that there have always been "keyboard warriors" - the sort of folk who like nothing better than sitting hunched over their computer firing nasty little jibes at those who they think are a) the most likely to be affected and b) are least likely to retaliate. Just like any other playground bully out there, they won't generally attack anyone who they think is likely to challenge their behaviour, and if in an environment where others are likely to see their comments, they generally take care to ensure that, if challenged by someone else, they can claim not to have meant what is being suggested, that they are being taken out of context...

Generally speaking whether online or in real life I do have an issue with people being two-faced. I'm always doubtful about trusting, for example, someone who is sweet as pie to someone's face, yet will happily slag them off to me, behind their back. Not nice, and it doesn't take much thinking to realise that person would almost certainly be doing the same in reverse! Happy to maintain an aquaintance of sorts with someone like that, but they are definitely never going to be someone who I will trust with my innermost secrets! Again, it sort of feels as though Social Media does facilitate this sort of behaviour too. A friend on FB has regularly had problem with someone on their friends list who is clearly acting as a go-between - passing information about him back to somebody who has been responsible for some fairly nasty online bullying of my friend in the past - and this too is having a huge impact on him as he simply doesn't know who to trust anymore. Considering that my friend has a history (which he freely and publicly acknowledges) of severe depression - that's a pretty low way to behave, and watching him crumble when yet another incident of this behaviour rears it's head is so sad. He's got the person who was the original problem blocked on every possible level, as has his partner, yet still the information leaks back, and he's simply run out of ideas to stop it.

I regularly see cute little pictures being posted on Twitter, or lines in people's online biographies spouting legends about "being nice" - yet oddly enough so often, the sort of people who use that sort of thing are just the people who, when you watch their behaviour for a while, are about as far from "nice" as can be imagined! I often wonder if they replicate their online behaviour in real life - perhaps they are the people who will happily drive right down a closed motorway lane until they are practically on top of the incident it is closed for before confidently barging into a gap in the traffic that never really existed. Can they be found on trains sitting in someone else's reserved seat? Or maybe picking up every apple in the box in Tesco before selecting one perfect enough for them - carelessly throwing those they discard back into the heap to bruise them for everyone else? Are they those with a huge sense of entitlement and superiority complex who stalk around sneering at those they see as unworthy of or too lowly for their attention, and being rude to shop assistants just for fun? the one thing I am sure that all these people have in common is that actually, I suspect their lives aren't anywhere close to as happy as they try to pretend - nobody who is genuinely comfortable in their own skin, happy with their life and secure in their friendships has a need to act like this, do they, so perhaps these unpleasant characters we've all had the misfortune to run across, we should actually be feeling sorry for? I'll let you make your own mind up on that one, but you'll find me making every effort to avoid them, as I have been, thank you!