12 things that make your best friend, your BEST friend.

No matter who you are or where you come from everyone has a best friend. These come in many forms, whether it’s the same sex as you or the opposite sex, older, younger, family member, lifelong friend or a sibling. No matter who it is…almost everyone has one. There are however things that differentiate the normal “friend” and the best friend.

Being single isn't all that bad...

If there is one thing to be learned in life, it’s that break-ups and heartbreaks are inevitable. If you’re like me, you will go through many frogs before you find your prince charming. But be aware, whilst floating in single limbo potentially looking for “the one,” there’s plenty of time to have fun and “find yourself.”

I know that it’s nice to have a man (or woman) by your side, but while the other half is non-existent and your love life is DOA, its nice to find comfort in the many positives of living the single life.

1) Being single doesn’t make you lonely. Look around! -You’re probably surrounded by people who love you. No I don’t mean potential partners, I mean your friends! When all those guys have wronged you, who has been there with you to watch the notebook and eat obscene amounts of ice cream? You can bet your life that it’s your best mates.

2) Being single gives you the chance to accept that you can be independent. It can be challenging at times being on your own but you learn to live with it and love the company of yourself. I personally love my own space and love being on my own. Being single for so long, I’ve learned so much about myself that I don’t think I would have if I were in a relationship. I’ve learned that I don’t need a man to defend my corner and most definitely have grown a backbone.

3) You learn to appreciate the little things about being single. Never having to impress your other half, having days where you can slob around in your pyjamas eating stupid amounts of carbs and really not having a care in the world about it. Who’s going to tell you that you cant? If you don’t want to shave your legs, don’t shave them! You also don’t have someone checking up on you all the time and you sure as hell get to skip the arguments about the silly things, like where you are going to eat or what film to see in the cinema.

4) Flirting is permitted at all times. You are free to do your own thing. You can go out and flirt and not feel excruciatingly guilty or look obnoxious when a guy tries to chat you up. Whilst in a club you don’t have to shout over the deafening music to tell somebody that you’re taken and you can sure as hell drink as much as you want without being the embarrassing girlfriend that had too much to drink. 

5) You learn to invest in yourself. Instead of doing things for other people, you learn to do things just for you, to make you a better person. Being single is all about finding yourself and having fun while you are doing it. Every hour that you plan only has to be negotiated with yourself. There is nobody telling you that you cant go and have your nails done because you have planned a double date with your boyfriends best mate and his ever so boring girlfriend who has the personality of a spoon.

So, if you hate being single, remember, the right one is out there, but while you cant find them, you may as well find peace with it and have a little bit of fun along the way. Being single isn’t all that bad.

A x

me and my amazing friends x

proof that the single life isn't all that bad x

Tinder- so right but so wrong.

There’s something about spending hours swiping left and right, picking out the ones that are ‘worthy’ within a 10-mile radius that makes me excited. The pure joy that you feel when your phone pings only to tell you that you have a new match and it’s the hunk with the big biceps that took your fancy in superbull last Friday or the boy that sits in the back of all of your lectures that you’ve secretly been dying to talk to for the whole semester but you’re just not sure if he likes the look of you too. There’s something so right about tinder, but there is also something so WRONG!

If our generation will be remembered for anything, it will be creating a social networking platform that will live on for many years to come. It’s our main point of contact, communication and utter banter but tinder takes things to a new level. It’s a great way to meet new people that live in the surrounding area but there’s something that feels so wrong about judging people solely on their appearance alone. I am a strong believer that it’s what’s on the inside that counts but this doesn’t stop the smile on my face that stretches ear to ear when an absolute hottie wants to talk to me on Tinder and maybe even meet up for a drink, but why is this?

Is tinder the same as meeting someone on sites such as plenty of fish and match.com? In a way I suppose that it is. On both tinder and dating websites that person first draws you in by the way that they look. There is however a sinking feeling for every boy that you swipe left for on tinder. Maybe it’s the aspect that on dating websites you don’t have to say no to anybody, but on the tinder app you probably scroll past 50 boys before you finally swipe right for a match with the person that tickles your fancy.

We are however taught to never judge a book by its cover, but I think that dating websites and apps like tinder are the polar opposite of this- you literally are judging a book by its cover, its cover photo. It’s an addiction and normality that many youngsters have these days. I’m sure that tinder isn’t going out of business anytime soon. Tinder may be accepted by our generation, but this doesn’t necessarily make it right.

A x

tinder...theres no one new around you 

My experience with the Cambridge weight plan.

I’ve done every diet in the book in an attempt to drop the unwanted pounds that belong to my fluctuating body and add to my ever changing curvaceous figure but the Cambridge diet, although the most effective made me MISERABLE!

I knew a few people that had tried it out and were astounded with the results. They looked fabulous and I was feeling a little lost within myself. I had gained weight and wanted a short-term fix for my long-term battle with food. I had a supply of Cambridge shakes and snacks in my fridge that were going to go to waste and thought that I may as well give it a go.

The Cambridge diet can vary depending on what outcome you are looking for. I was extremely silly and decided to make my own decision about what meal plan was best for me and opted for the three shakes a day, one for breakfast, one for lunch and one for dinner. I’m not sure that any 18-year-old girl can be mentally prepared to only drink 3 shakes a day although I was so sure that I was.

The first day was one of the hardest, most unsettling days that I had experienced in relation to my dieting journeys. I was a bag of emotion and I was absolutely starving. Some of you may recognise the term HANGRY. (A feeling of such hunger that you become an absolute raging lunatic and could very easily inhale every item of food in your cupboard, cooked or not.) But the second day was a day that nobody could have prepared me for. I was like a vampire waiting for my next hit of blood and I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had drunk every sip of my shake and destroyed the carton. I was two days in and this diet was already driving me insane!!! One day i even found myself crying into a carton because i had finished it. I had hit a new low. 

However difficult, I continued on and the weight fell off! I dropped a stone in a week and a half and felt fantastic for a week or two until the weight just piled back on when I returned to my reasonably balanced diet.

Don’t get me wrong; the Cambridge diet was a gruelling experience for me because I don’t think that my body was mentally or physically prepared to consume no real solid food. I hadn’t spoken to a Cambridge consultant and literally pulled my meal plan out of thin air and its safe to say that I made a bad decision.

Like all diets, they work for some people and not for others. I was a reasonably healthy weight and didn’t need to drop a stone in a week and a half, which is why my body felt such a strain. I wouldn’t say the Cambridge diet is terrible and nobody should go on it because that would be wrong but I will say, be careful and talk to a consultant. Don’t do what I did and put yourself through mental and physical pain. I’ve seen this diet do fantastic things for people. You just have to go about it the right way.

A x

Embrace your insecurities.

This is a very personal subject for me but if I can help just one person from this post then I’ll feel like I have achieved something.

I spent years of my life beating myself up about my weight. I still do now. I constantly criticised the way that I looked. I found myself looking in the mirror pinching parts of my body wondering what it would be like if that bit of fat wasn’t there. I thought if my hips were smaller and my thighs didn’t touch maybe people would look at me differently. I was 15 when I endured my first diet after crying hysterically to my mum as the scales told me I weighed 8 and a half stone.  119lbs. 15 years old and my biggest problem was that I was 9lbs over the average weight for my height and age.

I was a teenage girl and I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders (quite literally.) I found myself googling ways to dramatically lose weight fast. In my mind I wondered how quickly I could lose a stone. Thinking back now I question how bad it would have been if my mind set had continued on this way into my early adulthood.

I then endured my first heartbreak, which I thought was the end of the world, as I knew it. For anyone that has been through their first heartbreak then you’ll know it’s the hardest of them all. Food became unsightly and my body had gone into starvation mode. This means at first, it stores up all the food that you digest and then after a while your body basically eats itself. At that time I was unaware of how it could cause health issues and even eating disorders.

I was lucky enough to have an amazing family and great group of friends. I never got to the point where I became ill because of my eating but if I had continued to act the way that I was, I could have ended up seriously ill or even dead.

Don’t get me wrong. I still have periods where I take on wacky and unhealthy diets but I make sure that this is all in moderation with a reasonably healthy routine. I will talk about my experiences with these in later posts.

I ask for everyone reading this to take a moment to think, people have feelings that are so easily hurt by words. I’d never wish for anybody to have the mind set that I had about my body and that I still have from time to time. Not a day goes by when I don’t look in the mirror and wish there was something I wanted to change but don’t we all have moments like that. If you are someone reading this that is insecure about your body or the way you look, embrace it, but do so without putting yourself through physical or emotional distress and remember, everyone is different, but isn’t that what makes you, you.

A x

15 year old me 

Boys: makeup is for our benefit, not yours.

I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse that I have perfected the art of contouring to push my cheekbones up to my eyes, dramatically increasing the size of my lips and making my eyebrows look like they do not only consist of a few transparent looking hairs. But let me take a moment to say that I didn’t spend 3 years of my life watching YouTube tutorial videos so that I could be aesthetically pleasing to the opposite sex. I wear make up because it makes me feel a little less tatty around the edges.

-Placing the eyeliner pencil and swooping it across my upper eyelid to create a perfect line and wing.

-Smiling so the apples of my cheeks are visible to place my blusher just in the right place.

-Allowing my lip liner to be placed just outside the real lines of my lips to create a more voluptuous look.

To me, these give me the best feeling in the world, especially if I’m feeling a bit down. When I see myself with no makeup on I feel somewhat Cinderella pre fairy godmother transformation. No I don’t mean I think I’m a Disney princess or even worthy of royal status, I mean without makeup I feel I may as well be cleaning floors but with it on “I shall go to the ball.” 

It’s not even just the wearing make-up part that I love. One of my biggest loves in life is when I achieve perfectly blending my urban decay eye shadow onto my lids. I treat my face like a canvas and therefore my make-up is like my artwork. No man will ever understand the true skill it takes a girl to achieve the perfect wing on their eyeliner or drawing in the perfect peak of the eyebrow.  (Unless you are a man that wears make-up)

So lads, stop ripping us for trying to look pretty and feel good about ourselves. Lets be honest, the real reason you think that the transformation from plain Jane to Jessica Rabbit is for you is because the most part when you see us we’re wearing makeup and quite frankly, you’re probably jealous you don’t have something similar to enhance your handsomeness, or lack of.

Here’s a final word for the men reading this. My sister always says when I’m getting ready for a night out and I’ve got all my make-up done I look at myself in the mirror and make a whole array of pouty faces, but I do it because I love me a little more that I did before. Not because I want you to love me.

A x

me and my bestie with our faces on x