We believe that living a healthy lifestyle should be enjoyable and fun and not stressful! Sometimes it's easy to take things a bit too literally. So this article written by our lovely friends at Pollen and Grace really struck a chord with us and we wanted to share it too.
Why it's Ok Not to Care
We've always stuck to one rule at pollen HQ: we don't do diets, nor do we encourage them. We won't associate food with guilt, we won't create low calorie/low fat products and we'll never market our products on the sole basis of being a way to shift a few pounds. Yet we find ourselves being constantly bombarded by messages from elsewhere telling us how we should eat, exercise and look. Take the internet for example: have you ever noticed how many of your emails are telling you the latest foods to avoid, or the best exercise for 'ripped six-pack abs'. We log into social media and are bombarded by 'fitspiration' and endless messages designed to make us feel guilty if we didn't workout that day. It's something that's hard to escape, and at times entirely absorbing.
Yet surely spending hours looking at endless photos of girls in bikinis, being told about the macro-content of someone's dinner or being made to feel bad if we haven't workout out every day that week cannot be healthy, nor beneficial for your self-confidence, particularly when we're all so good at being hard on ourselves already.
So today our message is loud and clear, and something we really feel isn't said enough? You're doing well, in fact you're doing great. Being happy with where you're at, what you're doing and how you choose to live your life is much greater than pushing yourself purely because it's apparently 'what you should do'. Looking after your body is great, eating well and exercising is great too, being told you have to do it, not so much. It really doesn't matter what anyone else is doing or saying: just do you.
Which brings us back to the title: it's okay not to care. It's okay not to care that you had a day off from the gym, not to care that you haven't been drinking 'detox tea' every night, and not to care that you don't have those apparently easy to get 'ripped six-pack abs'. Health is about looking after yourself, eating wholesome food and listening to your body. It should be about giving rather than restricting: giving your body the vitamins and minerals it needs to function best and exercising because your mind and body want to, not because you feel pressure to do so. So embrace not caring, and instead enjoy the freedom to do just what makes you happy.