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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.