Just had to share a video I spotted this weekend called Poopin 2.0. I have watched a lot of Underground Wellness videos but I never saw this one and he is talking about a HUGELY important subject. I used to be one of those people that was squeamish and embarrassed to talk about poop but getting colon cancer at age 28 kind of cures you of that. Watch the video and learn. It is kind of colorful and may make you uncomfortable but get over it!
I use an overturned bucket in my bathroom, kind of like how the video guy is using a box for proper toilet alignment. I have to whole heartedly agree with what he says about needing very little toilet paper too!
Eventually, I really would like to get a Squatty Potty. I think it would look better in the bathroom than a bucket. ;)
I just got home from a vigorous CrossFit workout. When I walked in the door my hubby was just about to take off for the golf course but he always asks how my workout was. Today I think he was a little taken aback by my enthusiastic “Awesome!” It was a really tough workout and we had four mini WODs today (WOD=workout of the day). I did squats, pushups, mountain climbers, rope climbing, medball presses, medball wall touches, 100 meter sprints, calf jumps, supermen, bicycles, rowing, sprinters, hip extensions, db floor press, and deadlifts. Most of it AMRAP or as many rounds as possible. Two months ago if I had done this workout I probably would have collapsed in exhaustion. Today though I just marveled at what I can do and how good I felt doing it. Building endurance and muscle has a lot to do with it but I think most of it is due to some other factors, which spurred me to make this top ten list.
Feel free to add your comments about daily health practices in the comments below. I would love to hear how you are staying healthy!
1. Eat Real Food – Everything you eat becomes part of your body because you are constantly rebuilding and replenishing your cells. Every single day your body is rebuilding itself and it is using the “tools” you give it. Those tools are the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients you eat. If you are not getting the proper nutrition then your house is being built by a framer who was never given nails, hammer, or wood that has not been infested. Scary thought. Ask yourself, am I made of PopTarts and pizza or healthy whole, real foods? For optimum health we need ample amounts of fresh fruits and veggies/greens, high quality protein, and lots of dietary fat. The ratio that works best for me is 50% fat, 30% protein, and 20% carbs and I get that from grass fed meats, coconut oil, nuts, dairy, fruits, greens, and veggies. I have simply never felt better in my life then I have after going paleo/primal.
2. Get the Bowels Moving – Many people overlook this important aspect of health but I think bowel and gut health is indicative of what your health is like throughout your whole body. If you have a leaky gut then you will likely have food allergies and immunity problems. If you have bowel issues then you also likely have nutrient absorption issues which means your body is not accessing the nutrition it needs for rebuilding effectively. Unhealthy bowels can also set you up for larger problems, like colon cancer. I can attest that you never, ever want to go through that so make sure your bowel health is a daily consideration even if you ARE 28 and think that colon cancer can’t touch you. You should be moving your bowels at least once per day but after each large meal is also a good thing to shoot for. A good book to read is What’s Your Poo Telling You?
3. Take High Quality Supplements – I am now a big believer that we cannot get everything we need from food, at least not in this modern day. Our soil conditions have fallen so far that it is impossible to expect that our food will have all the vitamins and minerals we need. Also many farms feed animals subpar foods like grains and soy, which means you eat meat from unhealthy animals. You are what you eat and you are what your food eats. We can do better by eating the best quality foods we can but we also need to supplement. I will not do without my magnesium, vitamin D3, fermented fish oils, High Vitamin Butter Oil, coconut oil, milk thistle capsules, chlorella tablets, and greens powders.
4. Break a Sweat – Exercise keeps you healthy, energetic, and happy. Weight training and other strength exercises help you build and maintain bone health as well as good balance to prevent injuries and falls. These same exercises also help you to retain your youthful flexibility. Exercise stimulates your lymph system and brings oxygenated blood to all your cells and it helps to regulate your weight.
5. Get Enough Sleep – Regeneration and healing occurs at night when you are sleeping. This time is very important and must never be shortchanged in favor of a busy lifestyle. Getting sufficient sleep (ala 8-10 hours a night) reduces stress, helps you maintain a healthy weight, improves brain function and clarity, improves physical performance, reduces depression, regulates hormones, reduces inflammation, and generally reduces your risk of disease and illness.
6. Spend Time in Nature – We need to get outside regularly and soak up Vitamin D. It is essential. We should also be spending time outside barefoot or Earthing so that we regulate the electric currents in our body and ground ourselves to the healing power of Mother Nature. Spending time outdoors makes us calmer, less stressed, happier, and it provides a cleaner source of air.
7. Spend Some Time on You – We need to spend time doing things we enjoy. No, it’s not selfish to pursue those things that bring you happiness. In fact it is vital to good mental and physical health. Give yourself frequent time outs from stressful situations and make the time to do the things you love.
8. Get a Mental Workout – Just as we need to exert ourselves physically we also need to break a mental sweat daily. This can mean reading, writing, doing a puzzle or some other activity but you need exercises like this to keep you sharp and active mentally.
9. Take Care of Your Skin – Our cells rebuild us a new meat suit regularly and it is a reflection of our health. Dry brush daily to brush away dead skin cells and encourage new growth as well as get the lymphatic system moving along. Use nontoxic, organic skincare products that will nourish your skin and not poison it. Hydrating with water and green smoothies also bathes our skin cells and plumps them up. Eat foods that protect your skin from exposure and avoid sunburns.
10. Breathe Clean Air – I am a big believer in air purifiers because indoor air can be toxic. Think about all the products that may be off gassing in the home (in a concentrated area) and you will see why you should be cleaning your indoor air and/or opening windows and doors to allow fresh air to circulate inside. Clean, fresh air will also help you keep illness at bay.
A few months back now my family had its first ever bout with the big bad…head lice. I managed to go through my entire life without ever having had lice or even having it in my house. Luckily, I can still say I have never personally had lice but one of my kids did get a visit from these little guys and I was at a loss about what to do since I have zero experience with this issue. As the digital mom that I am, I sought advice from Facebook about natural – pesticide free – ways to get rid of these scary goobers. I say scary because they managed to reduce my child’s head to a bloody mass of scabs from biting and my child’s scratching. To make matters worse, we actually got the lice from a neighbor kid who had them, spent the night at our house (in my child’s bed), and never bothered to inform us. Ugh!
Anyway, from Facebook I was able to figure out that tea tree oil, peppermint oil, and vinegar would be my go-to resources for this adventure. The oils are hated by lice and they are also helpful in killing them. Vinegar would help dissolve the glue that the lice use to “stick” their nits on your hair shafts. I ended up making a list of all the stuff I found helpful…
Natural Ways to Remedy Head Lice
Peppermint Oil
Tea tree Oil
Oregano Oil
Salt
Vinegar
Coconut oil, another vegetable oil, or mayo – smothers lice – apply to hair and wrap with plastic wrap
Flat Iron – To melt the nits “glue”
A nit comb – or as I prefer, a metal flea comb from the pet store
We wanted to avoid conventional lice treatments for obvious reasons. They are pesticide based and if we work so hard to eat foods without pesticides and wear clothing grown from cotton without pesticides then it only goes to follow that putting it on our children’s heads will just not do. We also found that the tiny plastic combs sold as lice combs were nearly useless. The metal flea combs found online or at pet stores are more durable, the spaces between slats are smaller, and the one we chose actually has a double row of teeth. We compared it to the plastic lice comb from the drugstore and it was so much more effective with pulling lice and nits from the hair.
Once armed with our flea comb I made my own lice shampoo and guessed on the proportions.
All Natural Head Lice Shampoo Treatment
1 Quart size ball jar
1 Tablespoon (1 squirt) Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap
8-10 Drops tea tree oil (we use Trader Joe’s brand)
Fill jar to top with water, shake before each use.
Rinse with vinegar and let sit in hair for 5 minutes. Plastic wrap is optional (we didn’t use it)
Comb hair with flea comb or lice comb
We spent 1-2 hours each night doing this whole process and we did it every night for about 2 weeks. Getting that pesticide lice treatment would have been a whole lot easier, I will grant you that. It is not necessary though. Suzanne at Mommy Footprint shared on Facebook a theory that perhaps kids whose hair was washed less frequently and with non-conventional shampoos (no poo) were better safe guarded from lice. Smart Mama kind of confirmed by saying that lice cannot stick as well to hair that is “dirty” or containing the natural oils it is meant to be coated with. Very interesting! Perhaps my kiddo’s no poo hair may have helped us avoid lice until now but when the infestation is on your pillow (thanks to the aforementioned sleepover) I think the deck is stacked against you.
For bedding and stuffed toys we simply washed in hot water with a few drops of tea oil thrown in. We also dried everything on hot. We could have also dried them with a washcloth containing a few drops of tea tree oil or peppermint oil but I did not think of it at the time. If there is a next time though, we will be set!
** A reader also recommended Lice Shield Leave in Spray. It is supposedly made up of natural essential oils but I cannot find a full ingredients list so you may or may not want to check that out. If I see any, I will update.
Have you experienced head lice? Do you have any tips to share?
Naturally healthy teeth and gums have been on my radar of late. One of the “issues” I wanted to help fix when I decided to go paleo several months back was my own dental health. I think I have been relatively lucky for most of my life in this area. I don’t think I even got a cavity until I was pregnant with my third child and if you recall I had cancer while pregnant with him so my body was in serious crisis mode at the time. When I went vegetarian a few years back though my gums and teeth started to decline and at the time I didn’t think it was related. After I started reading up on grains though I started to think that may be the culprit. Even though I tried to avoid becoming a “grainarian” the simple fact is that I ate more grains and junk carbs as a vegetarian than I ever did as am omnivore. This is why I think I started to have issues with bleeding gums, plaque buildup on my teeth, and dental caries (cavities).
The book Cure Tooth Decay (which is completely awesome) discusses how it isn’t specific foods so much that cause decay but instead it is the fact that these foods replace the foods you should be eating for strong healthy teeth. Things like grains, sugar, and other processed foods lack the nutrients and minerals we need and tooth decay occurs because we are malnourished. Healthy teeth will not decay or break down and healthy teeth are created and maintained with a healthy diet.
This book highlights a lot of the work done by Weston A. Price with photos of his findings. If you are not familiar with Weston A. Price he traveled the world looking at primitive cultures and looking at how healthy they were and how healthy their teeth were compared to their counterparts who adopted more modern and westernized diets. The results are shocking. The Aborigines of Australia are one such group studied. Their primitive hunter-gatherer diet of roots, stems, leaves, berries, seeds, bugs, eggs, birds, aquatic animals, and native peas eaten with animal flesh such as kangaroo resulted in zero instances of dental cavities. When the same people started to eat modern, westernized diets… 70% of them had serous dental decay problems.
There are several other cultures featured in the book but they all have some things in common that show us what we need to eat for good dental health. All the groups with little to no dental decay had diets rich in fat soluble vitamins (A,D,E,K) and minerals like calcium and phosphorus. 30-70% of their calories were derived from fat and they ate things like things like grassfed diary, organs and head meat from fish and shellfish, and/or organs of land animals. Grains are generally not recommended because they lack many of these nutrients and they also have anti-nutrients inside them that prevent us from assimilating what nutrients they DO have. Also the modern versions of foods such as eggs are no longer going to cut it. The eggs you can buy at most stores for instance, are sourced from chickens that are fed grains and thus they are the byproduct of malnourished chickens. To get the best eggs we have to buy those sourced from chickens who are allowed to roam on pastures and eat grass and bugs. This is why we will also want grassfed/pastured meat and organs or wild seafood instead of farmed.
The book highlights each nutrient we need and shares the best sources for all of them. I copied the lists on my scanner so I can reference them often. I highly doubt I will ever buy or consume pig’s blood but I will make a special trip to get duck eggs which have about seven times the Vitamin D of chicken eggs. I can also see quickly that turkey liver has lots more Vitamin A than chicken liver. High up on just about all these lists is Blue Ice fermented cod liver oil so that is a must have for me.
The book Reversing Gum Disease is another gem that shows how we should be able to keep all our teeth for our entire lives. Gum disease though often stems from vitamin deficiency that causes bone loss in the sockets around the teeth and also unhealthy gums. When our gums get unhealthy they loosen and develop pockets that allow food to go down under the gum line and cause further bone loss. It recommends supplementing with vitamins and getting plenty of magnesium and zinc. The magnesium part is important because without magnesium we cannot utilize the calcium we need for stronger teeth. It also recommends eating more bone broth and using herbal rinses and toothpastes instead of the harsh chemical ones from stores.
You can also buy supplements specific to dental health like The Dental Essentials. They claim that taken daily, “The Dental Essentials” can help reduce the incidence of cavities by up to 95% in as little as 3 months and this is done with a blend of vitamins and minerals. They also claim that can you arrest decay and remineralize damaged areas without the need for drilling and filling, which I too believe is totally possible. The company sent me some of the pills and the drops to try so from the packaging I can see that they are essentially calcium, phosphorus, Vitamin D3, Vitamin K2, Magnesium, and Zinc. The drops are flavorless and odorless so they are perfect for kids because you can add them to their drinking water, milk, or smoothies.
I really like the idea of their products but I have to assume that the vitamins are synthetic and I would much prefer those sourced from real food. That is my only criticism though. I am taking them along with some other supplements while I try to find some good recipes for incorporating more organ meats.
After 5 months of ancestral eating and nutrients supplementation I have seen some amazing progress in my own dental health. Before I made the switch I was diagnosed with Periodontitis and had pockets of 3, 4, and 5mm. That is pretty severe for those not familiar and I had to have a deep cleaning. This week I went back and the pockets were all 1s and 2s with a couple 3s on my back teeth. My formerly bleeding gums are now pink and healthy looking. The dental caries that my dentist wanted to fill previously are now just being watched. My dentist and I are pleased as punch. My husband has also seen progress. Before going paleo he had a toothache every other month and was told he needed some root canals. He only held off because he hates to spend that kind of money. After going paleo though and eating more pastured meats and eggs and also taking the supplements I give him, he has not had one single toothache. I can only hope that this means they are healing.
Have you had any experience with curing dental decay and gum disease naturally? I would love to hear!
To understand what the slow movement is and what it could mean in our lives, we first need to take a look at what life is currently like for most of us today. We have schedules that are generally jam-packed full of things to do ranging from work, to errands, to chauffeuring kids to after school activities. Often times our schedules are so full during the week that it is often hard for some of us to plan meals and cook a decent dinner… which of course can mean purchasing take-out foods several times a week. Proper nutrition and the connection we have with family at meal times should be one of our biggest priorities and yet we are so busy that they get sidelined for faster and easier.
The slow movement is a completely opposite lifestyle. Instead of cramming as much as can be crammed into the schedule, slow movement advocates are purposely slowing things down so they can pause and enjoy life. The slow movement is a cultural shift that touches on a number of areas in life, including:
• Food – As mentioned above, a lot of folks are eating fast-food several times throughout the week. I used to be one of them. The slow movement though emphasizes mindful eating, which is not compatible with the fast-food culture prevalent today. Advocates of slow food believe in eating the right foods, carefully picked, at a slower rate so they are thoroughly able to enjoy their food and relish in the nutrients that are bringing health and wellness to their bodies. This is why many slow food fans enjoy artisan fare, local markets, and foods celebrating various cultures and heritages.
• Travel – Even our vacations seem rushed and not relaxing enough. We try to pack in as much adventure as we can and end up feeling anything but refreshed and relaxed by the end of our “vacation”. Slow travel advocates focus on slowing down when they travel. Instead of rushing from location to location while on vacation, slow travelers often choose destinations where they are able to mingle with the local residents and connect with the community there in a meaningful way.
• City Life – Believe it or not, entire cities are considered “slow.” The concept of “slow cities” originated in Italy. These communities generally have no more than 50,000 people who all agree on meeting certain principles and “slow criteria.” Often, these cities have a slower feel to them as they have less noise and traffic. I actually love to read about living in countries that value this slower lifestyle so I can see how to incorporate some of that into my day to day life. Good books that come to mind are Go Slow Italy, Under the Tuscan Sun, and The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Olive Oil in the South of France. I have an entire shelf in my bedroom of books like these.
• Education – Advocates of slow schooling place more emphasis on teaching children how to connect with the world than the information found in text books and test scores. Slow educational practices focus more on discovering how individual children learn best, finding out what they love, and combining these with real life experiences and adventures to enhance learning.
• Investing – Advocates of the slow movement believe in shopping local and investing their money in the communities where they live, work, and play. They believe that by investing in small enterprises and businesses within the local community, they will be able to better stimulate the local economy, which helps everyone. It also makes them more mindful of where their money goes and what it goes to support.
• Reading – Yes, believe it or not, the slow movement even touches literacy. Today, there are a number of reading aids available to people… tablets, e-books, e-readers, blogs, etc., which is making the traditional book rare. The world is becoming so wrapped up in the “do-it-now, do-it-fast” mentality that we are losing the simple pleasures in life… such as reading physical books. There is nothing wrong with reading e-books on your tablet or e-reader, but it is helpful to unplug and pick up a real book on a regular basis. Reading helps reduce stress, improve motivation, and start inspiration.
Even though I am always taking steps to go slower I frequently have moments where I know I could be doing more. This past weekend I went to see a new release movie and I ended up taking my seat 35 minutes before the start time. I brought a book but it was too dark to read so I played on my smart phone until it went dead. The realization that I was uncomfortable to just sit and do nothing for 15 minutes without something to occupy me and entertain me, really bothered me. I made a conscious decision to embrace that time and be content with having nothing better to do than people watch and be with my own thoughts. It was refreshing. Why is it so hard to be mindful of this all the time?
Now it’s your turn. What steps have you taken to “go slow”? Do you struggle with it?
Hi there! I am a green, paleo, crossfit mom of three. I am concerned about health, wellness, and sustainability issues. This is my life. This what I am passionate about. Come get to know me and feel free to connect. Enjoy!
Hi there! I am a green, paleo, crossfit mom of three. I am concerned about health, wellness, and sustainability issues. This is my life. This what I am passionate about. Come get to know me and feel free to 
