Ditching the Toxins

One of the things that I have been working towards for the last year or so is ditching the things that I know cause harm to my family. I have spent countless hours educating myself on the things we use daily that are causing harm to not only the air we breath in our home but our bodies and environment too. I am the gatekeeper of our home meaning that I am the one who does all the shopping and makes the decisions on the products we use and the ways we cook and eat. It would be foolish of me to not take small steps to keep my family.

This process has been slow but I have been making the steps to switch over in the areas that are easiest or most important first. Knowledge is power and once you know better you can take the steps to do better too. We can’t live in a bubble and protect ourselves from everything (even though my mama heart sure wishes we could) but we can make conscious choices to do the best we can in the areas that we CAN control.

Here are the ways that I have started to DO better

1. Ditching all the annoying plastic containers and replacing them with glass. This was easy for me because glass doesn’t stain, warp and is just prettier to look at. When you heat up your food in plastic containers so many chemicals seep into your heated food. yikes.
2.  Bye Bye microwave. This one was also easy for me but not so much for Jordan. We did this last spring when we gave our kitchen a little facelift. Heating things up in the microwave zaps out a lot of the nutrition in certain foods plus we really didn’t have a great spot to put another.
3. Ditching the Candles. This one was by far the hardest habiet for me to break. I LOVE my candles but I switched to a oil diffuser for smell and I use battery operated candles for the hygge.
4. Using essential oils. This is a whole blog post in itself and i will be sharing our oil journey soon but I started making roller bottles instead of grabbing the tylenol first and have been working on switching all our cleaning supplies to homemade oil based too.
5. The foods we eat. coconut sugar replacing refined sugar. Nut flours to replace white flour. Purchasing organic products or produce when I can. I try and keep these changes within our grocery budget.
6. PLANTS. This is probably my favorite thing we have done. Two or so years ago I started adding houseplants to our home. I actually didn’t know it at the time but houseplants are such an amazing way to purify the air in your home and plus they are super fun and add life to any space. This is also a whole blog post in itself too and I will be sharing this soon as well.
7. 99% of the Time we use cloths in place of paper napkins or paper towels.
8. I switched to a plant based laundry soap/ dishwasher soap and toilet cleaner. instead of my typical Tide and it cleans just as great!
9. Recycling. A majority of cities or towns have free recycling centers or you can pay to have a trash truck pick it up curbside.

The things we need to improve on.

1. Ditching plastic bags and replacing them with reusable ones.
2. Cloth diapers. I actually cloth diapered both of my boys but when Grayson was born I really wanted to protect my mental health and not add any extra pressure or duties to myself just in case PPD started to rare its ugly head. I’m good and should be doing this!!
3. Ditch my snuggle. I LOVE this fabric softer but I know its not the best to use so switching to dryer balls + oils which I do already have is best.
4. Continue to replace our cleaning products with plant based
5. Do more research on the products I’m using on my face + soaps/shampoos etc..

There is an app called “Think Dirty” that you can download and check the labels of certain things that you use and it will rate them from 0-10. This is such an easy way to have all that research and hard work done for you. There are so many things that have labels of “all natural” or “natural” and they are still full of so many chemicals that are known and proven to cause cancer. yikes. Knowledge is power!

Also, my main focus has been doing the things that are easiest and leave the most impact first and working from there. It’s in the small changes that we make daily/weekly/monthly/yearly that will ultimately get us to our goals.

I hope this inspires you to keep making the best decisions for you and your family even if it is one small thing or one small step at a time.

Ali

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