There, I said it.

I had a burger and fries from Hopdoddy for dinner. I'm also a 5'4 female and I by no means can eat anything I want without paying the price for it. However, I feel like there's such a negative connotation associated with girls eating a hamburger. Or ice cream. Or fried chicken. Honestly, anything that isn't salmon, salad, or low calorie. I cannot tell you how many times I've heard comments made to girls such as, "Oh, you're going to eat that?"

We're supposed to be fit, healthy, fun, beautiful, and attractive because that's what society tells us is desirable. If girls are being completely honest, I guarantee you a motivating factor behind why we eat healthily, watch our calorie intake, and work out for an hour every day is that we want to be perceived and deemed attractive by other people. People want other people to like them and admire how they look. It's how we're wired. We want acceptance, validation, and praise.

But is that the end all, be all?

Is that really the epitome of reaching our full potential? By working out and watching what we eat as if our life (or quite literally, our identity) depended on it?

There was this girl in my workout class yesterday. Don't get me wrong, she was beautiful, but she wasn't the smallest girl in the seemingly endless line of Orange Theory treadmills.

But quite frankly, she was the one lighting up the freakin room. She was joyful, talkative, and encouraging, while the other girls hardly said a word and didn't even smile. By societal standards, the other girls were very pretty and exactly what society is looking for.

But this one girl, who wasn't societies cookie cutter mold, was by far the most enjoyable and happy girl in the room. Her smile was contagious and she made me want to be a more joyful human being just by the brief five minutes I spent talking to her. I thought more and more about societal standards and quite frankly, society has it all wrong.

Don't get me wrong, taking care of yourself is a GOOD THING. Working out, eating healthy, and enjoying donuts sometimes is a good thing! But it can be so incredibly easy to let that become something that defines you instead of just something you do to take care of yourself and enjoy life.

I've watched countless friends slip into a downward spiral of insecurity and eating disorders. I've watched girls lose their joy as a result of striving to live up to a certain image. But what is it worth? If you're the prettiest girl in the room, but don't treat others with kindness and respect, what's it worth? Is it really that attractive?

Think about it, how many girls do you know that is absolutely beautiful and could probably be a VS model if they wanted to, but are quite honestly really mean to other people? It automatically makes that person so much less attractive if they don't love others well and have a heart for something bigger than themselves.

Someone told me recently, "no one has the power to take away what they do not have the power to give." If you think about it long enough, it starts to apply to literally everything.

Society does NOT have the power to give you joy, so don't let it take yours away. Society does not have the power to give you fulfillment and peace, so it cannot take away your peace.

Eat the burger. Run. Love Jesus and other people more than you love yourself. Don't lose your light striving for something that doesn't even have the power to give joy to you.