Happy Thanksgiving
Posted by leah on Nov 26, 2008
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which marks the beginning of at least a month of holiday parties and junk food. I love food, and I know I won’t be able to skip all the unhealthy, high calorie treats, so my plan is to exercise more often over the next few weeks.
What are you doing to avoid gaining weight during the holidays?
My new strength training routine
Posted by leah on Oct 26, 2008
When I started this blog, I was motivated because I wanted to lose the weight I gained during my pregnancy. I’ve done that (although I’d love to lose a bit more weight that I’d gained before getting pregnant) and I decided I needed a new goal.
So - now I’m working on upper body strength, which has the added benefits of making me look thinner and more toned, and because it involves weight-bearing moves, it should help keep my bones strong.
My strength training routine is simple.
I do 15 “easy” push ups (with knees down) then rest for a minute and do 15 more with my hands in a wider position, and rest for another minute. Then I try to do full push ups with perfect form, which gets my muscles fatigued really quickly. When I can’t do another full push up, I do a few more of the “easy” kind. I do this every other day, and I can already do more than when I started less than two weeks ago. Total time for this is less than five minutes a day - can’t beat that.
On the days I don’t do push ups, I do yoga sun salutations. These are great for building stregth and flexibility, not just in the arms but the whole body. Once I’ve done enough repetitions for my muscles to be tired, I’m also completely warmed up, and I do some more stretching. This usually takes about 15 minutes, so I can do it during my son’s nap or before he gets up if I wake up early, and I feel amazing afterward. I’m convinced this helps prevent muscle soreness and gives me more energy, but I can’t prove that. I do know it’s a workout I enjoy, and like my push up workout, it doesn’t require a lot of time, so it isn’t too hard to fit into my schedule.
That’s it - five minutes one day, fifteen the next - but it’s working really well for me so far.
Found - Paraben and Phthalate-free Conditioner
Posted by leah on Sep 26, 2008
I found a paraben and phthalate-free hair conditioner that actually works for my somewhat difficult hair type. It’s made by Avalon Organics, and it isn’t cheap - but it actually works so well on my hair that I can use a bit less than I normally would, so hopefully that will help offset the price a bit. Anyway, the product is called Avalon Organics Lavender Nourishing Conditioner
Avalon Organics is committed to making products free of parabens and phthalates, which means that I can try *any* of their hair and skin products and know that I’m not exposing myself or my breastmilk to chemicals that may harm me or my son. Granted, their other products might not work for me, but at least I found a hair conditioner that works!
If you didn’t see my previous post about toxins in beauty products, here’s a quick recap of why I’m looking for non toxic products:
- I’ve been hearing about harmful chemicals in cosmetics and other beauty products
- I started reading about the research behind the headlines
- I decided that even though the jury is out on many of these chemicals, avoiding them wouldn’t be a bad idea until there is a consensus among scientists on whether or not they are safe
- As with most other health concerns, pregnant and nursing women should be careful because everything is passed to fetus or breastfeeding infant - I happen to be a nursing mom
Here are the ingredients I found that are commonly used in beauty products that may be toxic:
- parabens - easily identifiable because if you read the ingredients, you’ll see paraben
- phthalates - not so easily identifiable, because they are often used in fragrance, which may be listed as simply “fragrance”
I wanted to switch all my beauty products to safer, less toxic formulas, but I was having trouble finding hair conditioner that actually worked for me. My hair is fine-textured but there is a lot of it, and I wear it long despite the fact that it tangles easily and I tend to get dry, split ends. So even without eliminating common ingredients, a lot of products don’t work for me.
Before learning what to look for in the ingredient list, I bought some “greenwashed” products, which I later found out did contain parabens and/or phthalates, and not only that - they didn’t work for me either.
Researching toxins in beauty products
Posted by leah on Sep 19, 2008
I decided to start my research on toxins in beauty products by heading to the local library. The “new nonfiction” section had two books, both published earlier this year, that caught my eye. Green Babies, Sage Moms: The Ultimate Guide to Raising Your Organic Baby
Green Babies, Sage Moms has several chapters that deal with beauty products - specifically, what to avoid using during pregnancy, and what not to use on your baby. Now, I don’t know how much research went into writing this book, so I can’t guarantee that the information I got from it is completely accurate, but I did find out about two groups of chemicals that the author recommends avoiding in cosmetics, hair and skin care, and other products. One group is parabens, and the other is pthalates. Parabens are easy enough to identify in an ingredient list because the word “paraben” will be in the ingredient if it is one. Phthalates are harder to identify because some of them have names that don’t say phthalate in them, and they are frequently included in fragrance, which is listed as simply “fragrance” on the label.
When I was pregnant, I started using more natural brands of beauty products, because I’d heard about chemicals potentially causing fetal damage, but I didn’t know which chemicals I should be avoiding. After reading this book, I was curious to see if the products I bought were free of pthalates and parabens or not. Since beauty products aren’t regulated very much, it’s easy for a brand to claim to be all natural, but it’s harder to know if that claim means anything.
I was happy to find out that my Burts Bees lotions, both for me and baby, are pthalate and paraben free. My Trader Joe’s shampoo is pthalate free, but not paraben free. It’s also free of laurel sulfate, so I assume that’s another chemical to avoid, but it hasn’t come up in my reading yet - obviously I have more research to do. My non-natural hair conditioner, not surprisingly, contains all kinds of chemicals I’ve never heard of, including some pthalates and parabens. (As I said in my first post on this topic, I’ve yet to find an even slightly natural conditioner that works well with my hair type, but I’m on a mission to find one.) My sugar scrubs - one for my face made by daisywares, and a Trader Joe’s brand scrub for body - seem to have the safest ingredients of anything in my bathroom: sugar, edible plant-derived oils, and natural fragrances.
Brita water pitchers and BPA
Posted by leah on Sep 17, 2008
As I started purging potentially BPA-laden products from my home, I had a moment of panic when I realized that the Brita water pitcher
This is reassuring - since reading The Body Toxic I’ve seen headlines about new study results confirming that BPA exposure can be harmful to fetuses and infants - and as a mother of a 6-month-old, protecting my son from potential harm is always on my mind. I bought him a BPA-free sippy cup, and I’ll be buying baby food in jars rather than the convenient plastic containers. (Better yet, I’m going to cook some organic veggies from my mom’s garden & run them through a food mill - healthy organic food for my son that’s practically free.)
The Body Toxic
Posted by leah on Sep 1, 2008
I just read a book that is truly frightening, called The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-being
Written by an investigative journalist, it discusses the toxicology of chemicals that are present in all humans: pesticides, phthalates, BPA, fire-retardants, and more. Scientific studies are referred to, public policy is discussed, as well as the potential health hazards of each chemical covered.
A week or so I wrote about wanting to find less toxic beauty products, after hearing a lot in the media about certain ingredients in beauty products being unhealthy. Well, now there are a whole bunch of things besides beauty products that I’m going to be more skeptical of, and I’ve taken an interest in dusting because I don’t want my baby ingesting the flame retardant chemicals in household dust….
The author seems to side with the scientists on the environmental/public health side of the issue, not the industry side of the issue, with regards to all of the chemicals discussed. Without actually conducting research studies myself, (which I’m not qualified to do - my BA in linguistics hardly qualifies me for toxicology studies) I can’t be sure who to believe - but I do know that I am going to be more careful about the products I use in my day to day life because of reading this book.
If anyone reading this blog knows of resources or information related to the toxicology of the chemicals I listed above, please leave a comment.
Toxic Shampoo?
Posted by leah on Aug 25, 2008
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how there are potentially toxic ingredients in beauty products, such as shampoo, moisturizer, and lipgloss. I’m not sure how much to believe, and how much is hype, but if it is true that some common ingredients could cause cancer, I’d definitely prefer to use products that don’t contain those ingredients.
The problem: what am I supposed to be avoiding, and do products without those ingredients actually work?
I already use natural cleaning products around the house, and for some beauty products, I’ve found options I can make at home (or buy from someone who makes them at home) that contain food ingredients, which I’m reasonably sure are non-toxic, since I use the same ingredients when I cook meals for myself.
Here’s my problem: I don’t know enough about the non-food things that are added to beauty products to know which ones are potentially unsafe (or perhaps just believed to be unsafe by some people, because really, I don’t know if they actually are unsafe or not) but I’d really like to find a hair conditioner and detangler that I know isn’t bad for me and that works well.
My hair is long, and there’s a ton of it, but it’s fine-textured, so it gets tangled really easily. I’ve tried two all-natural conditioners so far, and neither worked well for my hair (but they were fine for my husband, whose shorter hair doesn’t have the same tangling problem as mine). So I’m on a mission to find out more about which non-natural ingredients are believed to be toxic, so that I can go to the store able to read the ingredient lists and know which ones are okay to try. And then I’m going to test a bunch of non-toxic conditioning products and see if ANY of them actually work for me.
Know of a great product, or reliable information online about which ingredients are toxic? Leave me a comment, I’d love to hear opinions/advice about this.
Site Re-vamp
Posted by leah on Aug 18, 2008
I have some new ideas for this site, and as I work them out, posting may be sporadic. I was getting bored with my weekly posts & not posting the kind of content that I really *want* to write, so….stay tuned!
Look in the mirror
Posted by leah on Aug 12, 2008
This week’s tip: Watch yourself in the mirror while you work out. This will help you to see if you are using correct form. If you aren’t sure what the move is supposed to look like, pick up a fitness magazine and compare your form to the models demonstrating the moves.
You don’t have to look like the fitness models (although you might want to) - just make sure your body positions are the same. If the model has his/her knees above her heels, that’s where your knees should be. If the model’s shoulders are down and back, yours should be do.
Bow
Posted by leah on Aug 6, 2008
This week’s yoga pose is bow. Bow is a great backbend that also gives your shoulders a really good stretch. A detailed explanation of the pose, with pictures, is at trainyoga.com.