Entries from June 2007 ↓

I feel really lucky to have a few close friends in my professional and personal life who are very health conscious, probably even more health conscious than me! One of the great things about these friendships is it gives me someone to talk to about being healthy, someone to shop with at the markets or health food stores, and even someone to be a little bit competitive with. Last night I made myself a really healthy dinner of organic steamed veges and brown rice. When I was cooking I was thinking, ‘ha, I bet I’m the healthiest one tonight!’.

My point is, get yourself a health buddy. Someone who can give you encouragement, someone you can share tips with and maybe even someone you can compete with to be the healthiest. If I was the only healthy person I know, I would feel a little bit like a crazy health freak. But at least I have a few people in my life who I know are just as crazy as me.

A few reasons why you need a health buddy

• Whatever your motivation is to being healthy, whether you’re just starting out or maybe you’ve always been healthy, having support from another healthy person is great. The support can be things like sharing tips on how to deal with junk food cravings, help with what exercise to do or maybe sharing tips on what natural body products you’ve tried.
• I’m not very motivated when it comes to exercising on my own, unless it’s a very solo sport like swimming. I love combining social and sport together so I skate with an inline skating group a couple of times a week, go to the same yoga as a couple of friends and walk or cycle with a girlfriend when we’ve got time. The best part of social sport is stopping into a cafe after and sharing a meal (super healthy food or not, you just did some exercise!).
• My work health buddy has been really handy too, especially during my sugar free diets. At times when I’ve been eyeing off that cake for somebody’s birthday, she’s looked at my sternly and said ‘no Fran’. Not that I have to listen to her, but geez it helps keep me focused.
• I’m a little bit of a competitive person so I find the competition to keep up with my healthy friends a great motivator. When I get a bit lazy with my diet or can’t be bothered to start that regular yoga and meditation I keep meaning to do, I think of my healthy friends and how their great diets or daily yoga has paid off and I want to be just like them! Note, I’m still working on this one.

So, thanks health buddies - you know who you are. Thanks for the chats on spirituality, thanks for the motivation to switch to organic foods, thanks for showing me that I’m not a freak for almost completely giving up alcohol (yeah, it’s the new black, didn’t you know?) and thanks for all the support when I’ve needed it :-).

Frances Kerr

A book I absolutely cannot live without is ‘The Chemical Maze’ by Bill Statham. This handy little pocket sized reference book is an extensive guide to food additives and cosmetic ingredients. It’s embarrassing to admit this …but …I have even taken this book with me when I’ve gone food shopping. Yes, I’m one of those crazy people that stand in the grocery store reading every single ingredient on a packet or jar, and looking those ingredients up in a tiny little book. It’s worth it though. If you were to choose between two similar products, say two cans of butter beans, and they were both around the same price, which would you choose – the one with the chemicals in it that cause rashes and brain cancer in rats or the one with all natural ingredients?

You can look chemicals up in the book by name or number which is really handy. If you don’t understand what I mean by number, go into your kitchen and take a look at anything you’ve bought that’s in a packet, jar or tin. Now look at the ingredients list and look for any 3-digit numbers. These numbers refer to food additives. Some are perfectly safe, some are okay, but some are really not a good idea to put into your body.

The same goes for cosmetics. Anything you put onto your skin absorbs into your body. So why put chemicals onto it when you don’t have to? There’s not a lot of difference between not wanting to eat chemicals and not wanting to bathe in them.

Need an example?

I may be half a hippy but that doesn’t make me vegetarian by default. I really love bacon (although it’s best to eat free range because the poor pigs are not kept very well in those tiny little cages). A friend of mine told me about these little bacon bits you can buy which are basically dried bacon. Great for salads! she said. I was horrified when I read the ingredients, and even more horrified considering the fact she ate a lot of these little things when she was pregnant. This product contains a preservative that was tested on rats (poor rats). These rats grew brain tumors. There was no chance, no way, I was putting one of those little bits of bacon into my mouth. Why risk it?

I only have the second edition of the book. Bill Statham’s done such a thorough job putting this book together that I’m going to upgrade next time I see the latest edition out. Definitely a good little reference book to keep close by. I’ve also just discovered there’s two new versions of the book. The shopping companion and bookshelf companion. One for home and one for the handbag (or manbag/murse)!

Frances Kerr

Boys, you might want to put on a brave face when reading this post or just skip it all together. I’m delving into a ‘female area’ that may be a little bit too graphic for you …but, this was brought to my attention today and it’s just too important not to share.

The garlic experiment

The topic of thrush came up in the lunchroom at work today. It’s surprising how many women have had similar experiences to me with the contraceptive pill and thrush. We were discussing treatments and of course natural treatments like yoghurt (which I’ve used with not much success before), and garlic which is a new one to me. Apparently a clove of garlic chopped up and inserted into the vagina is a cure, in a home remedy kind of way, for vaginal thrush.

What completely threw me was listening to a girls experience with trying this particular cure. The garlic spread throughout her entire body. She could smell it all over her skin and even taste it in her mouth! We’re talking about one tiny little garlic clove here that’s sitting up the twat not taken by mouth. So this means anything we put up there is going to leak into our entire system. Consider feminine hygiene products. How many chemicals are tampons soaked in? All these chemicals are leaking into our bodies, through our blood and our skin. This is quite a frightening thought to me.

The importance of organic tampons

I never really put too much thought into what brand of tampons I’ve used in the past. I’ve always bought 100% cotton because I assumed that was the healthiest option. Now I’m buying completely organic only. The price is a little more and they’re not as neat but this whole chemicals leaking into the body thing is enough motivation for me to spend the extra money. I urge all women to consider their options with the information I’ve provided here and think twice about what product you use in the future.

Frances Kerr

I found a really interesting article in the UK Daily Mail about how often you need to wash your hair. The article claimed that you don’t need to wash your hair with shampoo at all. Ever. The theory is we screw up our hair’s natural oil balance by washing it with shampoo way too often.

This is the article I read:

Could you survive without shampoo?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=
394226&in_page_id=1879

The no shampoo challenge

My hair is long, fine and oily and usually needs washing every two days. I’ve thought about taking the no shampoo challenge but by day three I always chicken out. I have red hair that gets even redder when it’s oily, and people really start noticing. I’ve even had work colleagues ask if I’d coloured my hair because it was looking a lot ‘brighter’ or ‘redder’. Eww.

I showed the article to two girlfriends of mine who were brave enough to take the challenge. Ideally you want to try for a whole six weeks but both girls only lasted a week (still more than I could handle).

My theory is the no shampoo thing only works with dry hair. I think my hair is so oily that it needs a little assistance. I encourage anyone with dry hair to take the challenge to see if it works. I love the idea of no longer having to buy shampoo!

Frances Kerr

A friend of mine, who’s a very successful beauty therapist, once told me that using antiperspirant deodorants are really bad for you. She explained how our bodies release a lot of toxins through the pores under our arms and how you don’t really want to be messing around with that.

From that day on I stopped using antiperspirant deodorants and haven’t again since. Instead I’ve been using a deodorant made out of crystal and spring water which actually works incredibly well.

Where the nasty smell comes from and how to stop it

What you can smell when you sweat under your arms is actually bacteria. When moisture (sweat) comes in contact with the bacteria on your skin it creates a bad smell.

The crystal deodorant works so well because it’s a natural anti-bacterial. The deodorant leaves a layer of mineral salts on the skin which prevent the bacteria from forming under the arm. The crystal deodorant is not antiperspirant so you still sweat but the sweat doesn’t smell, well it doesn’t in my case anyway. Sweating is your bodies natural process and a way of cooling down so it’s something you don’t really want to be preventing anyway.

Now and again when it’s hot or I play sport and I sweat a lot it does get a little bit embarrassing. But I’d rather be slightly embarrassed and let my body do its natural thing than clog up my pores and prevent my body sweating like its supposed to.

My theory on why boys smell more

Obviously when you have hair under your arms it’s a lot harder to create an even layer with the mineral salts. When you spray the deodorant under your arms or use a roll on the hair just gets in the way. The bacteria then clings onto the hairs and when a boy sweats, the moisture gets in contact with this bacteria and the smell is produced. Most girls remove the hair under their arms so they don’t have this problem. My ex boyfriend would actually clip the hair under his arms quite short (I guess shaving or waxing was too girly) and found this made the deodorant work a lot better.

To me it makes a lot of sense to keep our bodies doing as much of its natural thing as possible. I’ve found using the crystal deoderant is a great way of preventing the smell without preventing my body from doing what it’s supposed to.

Frances Kerr