Listen With Your Heart

15 Facts About Smiling

1. Forcing yourself to smile can boost your mood: Psychologists have found that even if you’re in bad mood, you can instantly lift your spirits by forcing yourself to smile.
2. It boosts your immune system: Smiling really can improve your physical health, too. Your body is more relaxed when you smile, which contributes to good health and a stronger immune system. 
3. Smiles are contagious: It’s not just a saying: smiling really is contagious, scientists say. In a study conducted in Sweden, people had difficulty frowning when they looked at other subjects who were smiling, and their muscles twitched into smiles all on their own.
4. Smiles Relieve Stress: Your body immediately releases endorphins when you smile, even when you force it. This sudden change in mood will help you feel better and release stress.
5. It’s easier to smile than to frown: Scientists have discovered that your body has to work harder and use more muscles to frown than it does to smile.
6. It’s a universal sign of happiness: While hand shakes, hugs, and bows all have varying meanings across cultures, smiling is known around the world and in all cultures as a sign of happiness and acceptance.
7. We still smile at work: While we smile less at work than we do at home, 30% of subjects in a research study smiled five to 20 times a day, and 28% smiled over 20 times per day at the office.
8. Smiles use from 5 to 53 facial muscles: Just smiling can require your body to use up to 53 muscles, but some smiles only use 5 muscle movements.
9. Babies are born with the ability to smile: Babies learn a lot of behaviors and sounds from watching the people around them, but scientists believe that all babies are born with the ability, since even blind babies smile.
10. Smiling helps you get promoted: Smiles make a person seem more attractive, sociable and confident, and people who smile more are more likely to get a promotion.
11. Smiles are the most easily recognizable facial expression: People can recognize smiles from up to 300 feet away, making it the most easily recognizable facial expression.
12. Women smile more than men: Generally, women smile more than men, but when they participate in similar work or social roles, they smile the same amount. This finding leads scientists to believe that gender roles are quite flexible. Boy babies, though, dosmile less than girl babies, who also make more eye contact.
13. Smiles are more attractive than makeup: A research study conducted by Orbit Complete discovered that 69% of people find women more attractive when they smile than when they are wearing makeup.
14. There are 19 different types of smiles: UC-San Francisco researcher identified 19 types of smiles and put them into two categories: polite “social” smiles which engage fewer muscles, and sincere “felt” smiles that use more muscles on both sides of the face.
15. Babies start smiling as newborns: Most doctors believe that real smiles occur when babies are awake at the age of four-to-six weeks, but babies start smiling in their sleep as soon as they’re born.

A message from Sweetpea

i’m the biggest hypocrite in the world.

to the girls and boys who wake up in the morning, throw the covers off of their starving bodies, and run to the mirror to place their feet together and gaze between their thighs at the gap that may or may not have appeared already. to the boys and girls who think twice about eating the food on their plate, wonder if they really need it, or expertly dodge occasions where they may have to eat something that doesn’t fit into their scheduled intake. for the girls who cry themselves to sleep because they can’t feel their hip bones, and the boys who desire hip bones more than abs. for the women across the country who don’t feel beautiful when they go to bed at night, who feel like the mass of their thighs can be seen across the nation, who doubt themselves because they don’t fit into a size considerably smaller than their own and think that loosing “just a few pounds” will make them worthy of love/luck/affection/desire/that man/that job/that prize that “couldn’t possibly belong to me because i’m too fat.”

for the girls and boys who haven’t enjoyed the luscious taste of a warm chocolate chip cookie in the evening during their favorite movie without drowning in the guilt that follows in longer than they care to remember. for the girls and boys who remember the numbers from the flashing scale more vividly than the first snowfall of the year, their best friend’s birthday party (because there was cake there) and the color of the spring flowers they missed while speeding by to get to the gym before their meal finished digesting.

for the boys and girls who have spent longer calculating bmi’s and asking for diet plans than laughing with the people they love and spending a friday night out with friends. for those who think their self worth is defined by numbers on the scale and measurements, goal weights and ultimate goal weights, pounds lost and cravings won.

for the skeleton-worshipping girls who fear weight gain and the willowy folk who think thighs touching is a sign of weakness, ask yourself this. is it worth it? 

once upon a time, i would have told you that i would do anything to be thin. i wanted to be absolutely tiny, fragile, dainty, light like a feather and built like a stick. i don’t have the energy to make it through a day of work, and i don’t sleep anymore because my body physically can’t shut down. my nutrients are zero and when i close my eyes, i see numbers. this diet is an obsession. all diets are obsessions, because change is something that requires utter focus.

i’m ready for a different kind of change. a number doesn’t define me. my beauty ideals have transformed from a pin-thin nicole richie to a skeletal abbey lee kershaw to a tolerable, fit yet thin, victoria’s secret body. i want that. i want to be sexy, not hollow, and i want to glow when i smile because i have the energy to live. i want to go on dates and order something from the menu without thinking about the new food baby i have for the rest of the night, dreading the morning weigh-in, and feeling the regret throughout the rest of the night to the point where i don’t even enjoy myself.

tonight, the person i love the most in this world asked me, quite bluntly, about whether i think i have an eating disorder. i’ve never had a healthier conversation in my life, and i started to reflect upon what i want for others vs. what i want for myself. every night, i pray for the health of every single one of you. i want you all to be happy and healthy and to achieve your goals. 

but not if it’s going to kill you. i, sweetpea, am not going to be the girl who didn’t mean to die. 

and neither are you.

maybe it seems like, at this point, it would be hard to let go of this diet. maybe, at this point, you feel like you can’t continue living the way you are and you need something extreme to drop the pounds, quick. let me tell you something, it took you this long to be the way you are, it’s not going to happen overnight. what i want for you is gradual change, if that’s what you want for yourself, but more than that, happiness. i’ve lost eighty pounds and you know what? i’d give anything to have the energy to smile about that.

i’m going to change. initial weight gain is nothing compared to sudden loss of life. i could die and be thin, or live and be healthy and fit. i want a fit body. i want a lean, mean, calorie burning - muscle carrying - happy and energetic machine. i can look good in a bikini without looking like a corpse. i’d rather look like an angel than a dying girl. 

for what. ask yourself that. is it worth the ultimate price? the body is designed to run on more than nothing, yet we deny ourselves that simple pleasure because we’re purely selfish. it would be selfish of me to continue on this way. the people i love deserve my health. i deserve my health. i owe it to all of you, and myself, to finish this job and be a smiling, successful angel. 

i deserve to glow. you deserve to sparkle. you deserve to feel beautiful in your own skin because you can run three miles faster than you did three weeks ago, not because you’ve starved for ten consecutive days. compare the two. i’d rather brag about my fitness accomplishments than my starvation record.

i want to run. i want to run and make it through many rounds of yoga and pilates and sex. passionate sex. i want to give love and receive love in return because i deserve that.

this will be the smartest thing i have ever done. but i’m not doing it alone.

you. you’re going to join me. whether you’re two hundred pounds or eighty two pounds, you are beautiful because of your courage. those who have the courage to stand up and say, “no, i do not promote nor agree with self destruction. this can be done another way.” we don’t need to promote glamorous death. we need to support health. that’s what this was about in the beginning - ditching obesity for health. 

thin can be healthy. anything is possible if you choose it.

i choose health. i choose to live. i choose to turn this into the most powerful revolution you and i have ever been a part of. i dedicate myself to this. i’m spreading health to anyone regardless of numbers - i support you. i support me. 

i love you sweetpea. i love you and you deserve to be healthy and live. we can do this.