Healthy Living Blogs: Friend or Foe

As much as I want to drone on about my fabulous trip away with the hubs, I came across something while blog stalking reading yesterday that I really want to touch on before I go back to explaining how happy this makes me:

It's stupid, how cute and ridiculous I think he is.

I have a tendency to look at what other people have said in the "comment" section on blogs that I read and sometimes I'll venture over to another blog because of something witty someone said, or because another blog linked up with them, etc. I'm sure all you bloggers out there know what I'm talking about.

While reading someones blog that I had never read before, I came across a paragraph in her post where she talked about how she had abandoned reading "healthy living" blogs because she had eaten ice cream one night and then wanted to throw up after reading blogs (or something like that, I'm paraphrasing and honestly don't even remember whose blog it was considering happened upon this blog).

It really made me sad and I've been thinking about it ever since. I don't think that any of us that do "healthy living" blogging ever intended for our blogs to act as something negative to make others feel bad when they made a "poor" choice, or had a bad day and slipped up on their diets or skipped a work out.

I can say full-heartedly that is not my intent at all.

And I will be the first to tell you that I still make a lot of mistakes when it comes to being healthy. I am nowhere near perfect. There are days I don't want to work out, there are days when I straight up skip working out, there are days when I get caught up at the bar with my friends and I drink too much or I make poor food decisions, there are days when I exist on a purely liquid carb diet because I'm having fun and I'm 24 and I'm not perfect. And there are certainly days when I want to give up.

But I don't. Why? Because one slip up is not a big deal. It happens. You are human. You will never be perfect, and you're supposed to indulge every now and then.

Am I influenced by other people's blogs? You bet. I definitely have laid in bed hitting the snooze button and then something has made me think about the girls whose lives I follow and think about if they would skip a work out or get up and get it done, and it has given me the push I needed to get out of bed and go to spin class or go on that run. But I've never allowed reading someone else's blog to negatively influence me. That's not the point! We're all in this together, really. We all have our struggles and our off days - whether we blog about it or not.

For me, "healthy living" blogs are a support system. They're a reminder to stay on track and to learn from others - but not to make you or me feel bad.

What are your thoughts on this?

Have you ever felt bad about yourself from reading someone else's blog?