Health

Are you still using shampoo?

soda

I haven’t bought any shampoo or conditioner since the end of May. Don’t worry, I’m still washing my hair. but now I use baking soda and apple cider vinegar. Maybe you’ve heard of this “no-poo” thing already? It seems like everyone’s talking about it these days.

Perhaps you’re still a tad skeptical? Trust me, so was I.

I used to love shampoo and conditioner. I usually had four or five different brands lined up on the edge of my bathtub. I knew that many cosmetics contain ingredients that are supposedly not so great. So I shopped for mine at the health food store and scrutinized the labels for parabens and pthalates, sodium laurel sulfate and sulfer. The few products that did not contain those suspect ingredients made my hair look, well, sort of flat and tired. And they cost a lot – $7.00 or more for a 12 ounce bottle. If I went more than a day or so without shampooing, my hair got greasy. So I ended up buying and using a lot. For so many years, I thought all of this was just normal.

Well, here’s my new normal. I use this method every other day or every third day. It is remarkably easy, inexpensive, and effective.

1. Mix a tablespoon or two of baking soda with just enough water to make it into a paste.
2. Wet hair.
3. Massage paste into scalp for a few minutes. (It feels great!)
4. Rinse hair well.
5. Pour a couple of tablespoons of apple cider vinegar into a quart jar and fill up the rest with warm water.
6. Pour the vinegar water mixture on ends of hair and let it sit on hair for a few minutes.
7. Rinse well.

It took my hair about three weeks to adjust to the new method. During the transition time, it was at times amazingly soft and manageable and at other times very greasy. I almost quit on several occasions. I’m so glad I stuck with it. Now my hair looks great every time. It doesn’t get greasy even after three days between washings. And it does not smell like vinegar. Plus, I’m saving money and cutting down on the plastic containers I purchase. Amazing!

Want to read more? Go here , here, here, or here.

(This post is for Steady Mom’s 30 Minute Blog Challenge. Post time, start to finish: 28 minutes.)

Have you tried ditching your shampoo and conditioner yet? I’d love to hear the results.

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7 Ways to Ditch the Gym and Get Fit

By Abby Quillen

I used to run a few miles every morning. On the rare days I didn’t run, I swam laps, played tennis, hiked in the woods, or went on a bike ride. And I owned a library of yoga and pilates DVDs.

These days I hardly even think about exercise, and the tennis rackets and workout DVDs are in the closet gathering dust. But the weird thing is – I feel fitter now. So I was fascinated to find that some research supports what I’ve been noticing.

Daily Physical Activity Trumps Exercise

I spend most of my days carrying or chasing my active 16-month old baby, and my house, yard, and gardens require nearly constant labor. My family walks or rides bikes most everywhere we go – to the grocery store, library, park, and to friends’ houses. And I rarely stop moving during the day, except when I’m writing. Sure, sometimes I miss those long solo runs and challenging yoga workouts, but I just don’t have much energy to spare at the end of my days.

Mayo Clinic physician Dr. James Levine’s research makes me think it might not just be my imagination. I may actually be in better shape now than back when my idea of relaxation was a power yoga session. The results of Levine’s study on obesity indicate that if you want to achieve a healthy body weight, it’s more effective to put more of what Levine calls NEAT — “Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis” — into your life than to seek out organized exercise. NEAT includes the activities of daily life that are not planned physical activity, like standing, walking, talking, cleaning, fidgeting, or diving to rescue a 16-month old before he pulls the Oxford English Dictionary onto his head.

Moreover another large study suggests that the frequent moderate activity of daily life helps prevent cancer better than more infrequent, but intense recreational activity. In the nine-country European breast cancer study of more than 200,000 women, of all the household and recreational exercise women did, household activity – including housework, home repair, gardening, and stair climbing – was the only activity that significantly reduced breast cancer risk.

Increasing your daily activity, or NEAT, is easy, and the best part is, you not only get a healthy body, you get to mark things off your to-do list. Plus, increasing your NEAT usually means turning off power tools and ramping up human power. And that contributes to a cleaner, healthier planet for all of us.

Here are 7 great ways to increase your NEAT as the weather gets colder.

Leave the car at home.

How can you increase your physical activity, be healthier, feel better, make the world a cleaner, more beautiful place while you get where you need to go? Reduce your car use. Whether you bike, walk, or take public transportation, you’re certain to add more activity to your day when you ditch the automobile. And as a perk, alternative transportation is usually more fun than sitting in traffic and searching for parking spots.

Prepare the yard for winter

In most climates, fall is a great time to plant bulbs, harvest and dry or freeze herbs, save seeds, clear away dead foliage, and plant cover crops. And yards offer opportunities for healthy activity for any season.

Rake leaves

Several years ago, I lived next to a dental office with the most manicured lawn I’ve ever seen. Teams of landscapers descended on it every day with gas-powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and shrub trimmers. The noise was deafening. Since then, I’ve become a huge fan of the humble (and quiet) rake.

Hang laundry

Take advantage of sunny days to hang laundry on the line. Drying diapers or whites in the sun helps bleach and disinfect them. Line-drying also saves money, conserves energy, and helps clothes last longer. During the winter, you can dry clothes on a rack inside in most climates, which also helps to humidify dry indoor air.

Split and stack firewood

Burning wood is arguably not the greenest way to heat a house, but it can be remarkably economical (and cozy). Plus, preparing the winter wood supply an excellent workout for a crisp autumn day.

Handwash dishes

The jury’s still out on whether it’s greener to hand wash or machine wash dishes. It depends on how you’re hand-washing and rinsing and on how energy-efficient your dishwasher is. (See an analysis of the carbon footprint of each method here.) In our household, handwashing conserves both money and energy. On the downside, it hogs a lot of precious counter space. However, I tend to enjoy hand washing. It’s a pleasant, meditative task, and it’s just the sort of frequent, moderate exercise those studies suggest is so good for us.

Play

If you have little ones in your life, you already know how much energy you can burn jumping into piles of leaves, building forts, playing Red Rover, or just carrying or chasing after the little speed-racers. If you don’t have kids, I’m sure a neighbor, friend, or family member would be happy to share the fun for a few hours (so he or she can take a nap).[clickToTweet tweet=”You don’t need to go to the gym to get fit. Try these 7 ways to increase your activity. #fitness” quote=”You don’t need to go to the gym to get fit. Try these 7 ways to increase your activity.” theme=”style1″]

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What are your favorite ways to stay active and fit?

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Embracing Labor

By Abby Quillen

pregnant

When I was pregnant and preparing for a home birth, I inhaled every book about childbirth in my local library. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth month of my pregnancy, when I was getting too round to squeeze into jeans with zippers and the January rains were flooding down each night, I came across A Midwife’s Story by Penny Armstrong. I didn’t know it at the time, but Armstrong’s memoir, which recounts her years as a midwife to the Amish, would be one of those pivotal books in my life. It would change the way I thought about labor and childbirth – and life.

By the time I needed to shop for maternity clothes or invest in acupressure bracelets to stave off morning sickness, I’d heard at least several hundred horror stories about labor and childbirth – the crippling contractions, the “ring of fire”, the stitches and suturing and bleeding. I’d seen dozens of movies and television shows that depicted labor as a dangerous event that usually started with sudden, searing pain and often ending with a woman being wheeled madly through hospital halls on a gurney attended by a team of strangers in scrubs and masks. And I knew the statistics. In the United States, 32 percent of laboring women end up under a surgeon’s knife.

I’d half-way dreaded labor and childbirth since I was old enough to understand that I might experience them someday. And here I was, armed with some stacks of books on my nightstand, only a few months to prepare and nowhere to go but forward. By the time I picked up A Midwife’s Story, I wouldn’t say I was racked with anxiety. But I was weary.

Penny Armstrong set up her midwifery practice in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania over 20 years ago. The Amish women she encountered there surprised her. She’d arrive at a laboring woman’s house to find the woman outside painting a rocking chair or toiling in the fields – right up to eight or nine centimeters of cervical dilation. More remarkably, these Amish women, who’d have to be called in from their chores to birth babies, didn’t seem to have as hard of a time with birth as the women Armstrong had attended during her training in a Glasgow hospital.

Armstrong wondered if the Amish women had easier births, not just because they kept in good shape, walking and working right up until their births, which undoubtedly prepared them for labor, but also because of the way they thought of hard physical work. Work was not something these women seemed to avoid or fear. It was part of life. It was necessary and good. Work is what brought them the riches of life – be they bountiful harvests or dewy-skinned newborns – and they seemed to embrace it.

After reading Armstrong’s Amish birth stories, I didn’t know if I would end up having my baby at home or in a hospital. And I didn’t begin to predict whether mine would be one of those 32 percent of labors that ends with surgery. But I knew that I could face this thing. I didn’t need to plan for drugs or hypnosis or fancy breathing techniques, or anything else designed to try to avoid the hard work that I needed to do. I just needed to show up and experience this thing called labor and birth – whatever it turned out to be.

Several months later, on a rainy day in June, my son was born in a tub of water in my dining room after five hours of active labor. Even a few days later, I couldn’t remember the pain, although I know it was painful. What I remember is feeling calm and unafraid and just letting things unfold. I probably owe a great deal of my composure to the cocktail of endorphins and hormones that overwhelm a woman during labor. But some if it, I owe to Penny Armstrong. So much of what I’d heard about birth had the underlying message that labor is hard. It is painful. It is something to fear and to avoid with pharmaceuticals or hypnosis or breathing. It was liberating to read that yes, labor and childbirth would be hard work. But what’s wrong with hard work?

The lessons from A Midwife’s Story have stayed with me. I’ve noticed that so many of us are arming ourselves with arsenals of power tools – leaf blowers, wood splitters, vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, dishwashers, and on and on, to avoid hard work. But why are we taking such pains to avoid physical work? Work is what makes us healthy and strong. It is what brings us the real riches of life – bountiful gardens, comfortable houses, healthy dinners. It is what makes leisure a treat. Moreover, so many of us spend our days avoiding hard work only to drive to the gym to run in place on a treadmill.

Moreover, Dr. James Levine, a Mayo Clinic physician, researches Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) – a fancy term for the calories burned during daily living, and his research suggests that people who stay active during the day – standing, walking and bicycling to work or on errands, gardening, and even fidgeting – stay fitter than those who “work out” or hit the gym.

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The Slow Food Revolution

By Abby Quillen

(The fourth in a series highlighting U.S. Movements to celebrate, support, and spread the word about.)

Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist and political activist, founded Slow Food International in 1989, in response to a McDonalds opening in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. Instead of focusing on his beefs with fast food – its highly-processed ingredients, the homogenizing effect it has on people’s diets, the social isolation it encourages, etc. – Petrini gathered 62 like-minded activists and created an organization to champion what fast food is not – the simple pleasure of cooking and eating fresh, high-quality food with others.

Today Slow Food International has 1,000 local chapters worldwide. They have an International Council, a President’s Committee, an Executive Committee, and an International Congress. They also founded:

Slow Food Editore, a publishing house that boasts a 70 title-catalog of books and magazines about food and wine production, artisan food specialties, crop varieties, animal breeds and food culture.
The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, which defends agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions, especially in the third world. Their Ark of Taste is a list of foods or food traditions in danger of going extinct because of “industrial standardization, hygiene laws, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage.”
Tierra Madre, a network of “food producers, distributors, cooks, academics and all those who work for responsible and sustainable food production.”
The University of Gastronomic Science in Italy, which offers a “multidisciplinary academic program in the science and culture of food.”

At first glance, one might be inclined to discount the 100,000 members of Slow Food International as an elitist cadre of epicures. Their manifesto doesn’t demand an end to agribusiness, factory farms, feed lots, or genetically modified crops, but defends “quiet material pleasure” and calls for a rediscovery of “the flavors and savors of regional cooking.” Petrini talks about a “fundamental right to pleasure.” And Slow Food enthusiasts devote resources to “taste education” of all things, holding sensory workshops for children and taste workshops for adults.

Unemployment is nearing double digits, our prisons are overflowing, our health care system is bloated and broken, and our public schools are scrambling for resources to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, let alone hold sensory workshops. Surely we have more cogent issues to tackle than how our food tastes?

Well, maybe not.

Petrini might just be onto something. Getting Americans to change our over-consuming, gas-guzzling ways by decrying our ills simply isn’t working all that well. But convincing Americans to seek out pleasure in cooking, eating, and sharing food is undoubtedly a more salient message. And that message alone could transform the world.

I’m not thinking about what could happen if mass numbers jumped on board to save the Amish Pie squash, the bay scallop, Blenheim apricots, or other endangered plant and animal species from extinction or fought to preserve traditional ways of making gumbo or New England clam chowder. I’m not even thinking about how the Slow Food Movement’s insistence on “good, clean, and fair” could transform our food systems if it went mainstream.

I’m thinking about what could happen if more Americans simply rediscovered their kitchens, cooked real food, and took pleasure in sharing more family meals. How might those simple acts change the world?

Well, consider the following:

According to The Dogwood Alliance, fast food packaging waste makes up 20% of all litter and food packaging takes up 15% of our landfills.

Officials at Central Alternative High School in Appleton, Wisconsin switched from serving the standard fare highly-processed school lunches to fresh, locally grown, low-fat, low-sugar meals, and the results were dramatic. Discipline problems plummeted, attendance increased, and students reported an increased ability to concentrate, less moodiness, and fewer health complaints.

A National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse study found that kids who ate most often with their parents were 40% more likely to report getting mostly A’s and B’s in school than kids who had two or fewer family dinners a week.

Integrated-medicine champion Dr. Andrew Weil was interviewed on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show recently about how Americans can achieve health care reform, and more importantly how we can attain actual health. His advice? Stop eating processed and fast food. “It’s that simple,” he said. “In the 1940s and 50s, my family … ate at least two meals together everyday and food was cooked from scratch.”

So, this movement championing pleasure might be more revolutionary than it sounds. It’s hard to think of a societal problem that couldn’t be improved if more of us enjoyed the simple pleasure of cooking and eating good, clean, and fair food together – including the state of employment, prisons, schools, landfills, waterways, or our health care system.

To learn more about Slow Food USA and find a local chapter, click here.

Are you a fan or member of a movement fighting for social, cultural, or environmental change? Leave a comment! Your movement could be highlighted in a future article.

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Slowing Down in the Kitchen

By Abby Quillen

I started to enjoy cooking when I dumped the convenience items that are supposed to make it easier.

My husband had been the main cook in our family for years, but after I had a baby, I found myself at home more. So I dusted off my old cookbooks and rediscovered the kitchen. I decided to cook the way I’d always wanted to – using fresh whole foods ingredients. And I stopped worrying about how long things took. Time was on my side, after all. The meals I put together were delicious, remarkably affordable, and cooking them was fun. (I should mention that I also discovered my now-favorite cookbook around then – Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair, and her amazing recipes contributed greatly to my success.)

So I wondered, could I also bake organic, 100% whole wheat bread once a week and save the $4.00 a loaf we were shelling out for it at the health food store? I poured over The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book. At times it felt like I was deciphering a foreign text. Instead of, “knead for ten minutes,” it said things like, knead the dough until you can “pull it into a paper-thin sheet, smooth and bright. When you hold it to the light, you can see the webbing of the gluten strands….” What? Maybe $4.00 wasn’t really so much for a loaf of bread.

Then I cut into my first home-baked loaf, and I was hooked.

Something happened when I started to cook from scratch more. I found myself reading cookbooks, not just a recipe or two, but every page. I devoured books about bread-baking, jotting down different methods, rising times, and ideal resting temperatures. And I scoured the library shelves for encyclopedias of whole foods.

I was shocked by how ignorant I was about real food. After all, I’d been eating “organic” food and reading about health and wellness for the better part of a decade. I knew that avocados and blueberries were good and hydrogenated oils were bad. I’d read my Michael Pollan. But cooking exclusively with whole ingredients introduced me to food in a different way – less as something to eat and more as whole, once living things. I wanted to know what these plants looked like sprouting from the earth , where they grew, and who grew them.

I was astounded by the complex processes I was learning that had been perfected over centuries and handed down from one generation to the next – like turning flour, yeast, and water into bread. They were art forms. And most of them had been honed by a group of people I’d never thought much about – housewives. But the art these women created seem no less worthy of admiration than a piano concerto or fresco.

These days I spend more time in the kitchen than ever. Cooking is more labor-intensive, more time-consuming, and more general effort. But I love it. It’s creative work, making meals from raw ingredients and spices. The house smells of fresh-baked bread; or of garlic, oregano, or basil; or of stew slowly simmered all day. It feels more like, well, home. Dinner is now a discovery of new tastes, not a rehash of processed sauces or canned soups, as it once was on my cooking nights. And 1:00 on bread day, when the steaming loaves come out of the oven, is as close to perfection as this life offers.

I’ve discovered that slow food, for all its inconvenience, is the best food on earth. And I’m not alone. A whole movement of slow food enthusiasts are out there spreading the word that when we entirely abandon our kitchens, we’re at risk of deserting our health and taste buds too. America’s emphasis on quantity and speed over quality also puts us in danger of losing heirloom fruits and vegetables, heritage livestock breeds, and rich food traditions.
Stay tuned for an article about the Slow Food movement next week.

Have you discovered or rediscovered your kitchen lately? What do you like to cook?

The Art of Walking

By Abby Quillen

My baby pulls himself up now, teeters on a knee and one foot, and then plunks down. He’ll take his first steps soon, sway and totter across the living room floor, and join me in one of my favorite activities – walking.

I’ve loved to walk for as long as I can remember. My parents walked me and my sister to and from school each day until we were old enough to walk alone. We hiked in the Rocky Mountains most summer weekends. We strolled around our neighborhood after dinner. We did errands on foot, stopping at the bank, the hardware store, and the grocery store. My dad even wrote notes to get us out of school on crisp fall afternoons so we could amble along as a family, talk, and gaze at the streaks of red and orange aspen trees on the hillsides. Perhaps this is why walking feels like eating and breathing to me, like I’m not really living unless I’m doing it often.

Walking has factored into many of my big life decisions, like where I’ve lived and worked. I’ve been able to get to work or school on foot most days for my entire life. My commute has ranged from a few blocks to a few miles. I walked four miles a day throughout my pregnancy, right up until the day before my son’s birth. I even walked a couple of miles when I was in labor. I’ve walked up mountains, across beaches, through cities, and up and down a hallway countless times with a sleepy baby in my arms.

I love to walk without purpose, to set my own pace, to have nowhere to go, no time frame, nobody to meet, no one to talk to, and nothing in particular to think about. I love to walk to sort through something I’m writing; or reflect on a bad day; or listen to a podcast; or just meditate on my surroundings. I love to walk with my husband, a good friend, my mom, or my sister and let our conversations drift from topic to topic. I love to lull my baby to sleep on my back as I weave through neighborhoods, across parks, up hills, and down bike paths.

I hate that the word pedestrian also means dull, uninspired, unexciting, or humdrum. I’m convinced the world would be a better place if everyone who was able walked, strode, clomped, jaunted, sauntered, tramped, meandered, shuffled, plodded, and wandered a lot more. We used to. In On Foot: A History of Walking, Joseph A. Amato points out that it’s only very recently that humans have sat and ridden “first on horses and in carriages, then on trains and bicycles, and finally in cars, trucks, buses, and airplanes.” He argues this revolution in the way we live has changed not only our bodies but our minds. It’s altered, “conceptions of space, distance, motion, movement, and the amount of energy necessary to invest in travel.” Amato’s book, as well as Rebecca Solnit’s magnificent Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” exemplify that walking is anything but pedestrian. It inspires passion, magic, creativity – art.

In honor of one of my favorite activities: here are six reasons to lace on some comfortable shoes and hit the pavement, path, or trail today (and every other day too!):

1. Your health

Moderate daily exercise is essential for good health, and walking is a great exercise. The Honolulu Heart Study followed retired non-smoking men over the age of sixty for twelve years and found that men who walked just two miles a day cut their risk of premature death nearly in half. Of course most people know exercise is great for the heart. It may surprise you that the walkers were also two-and-a-half times less likely to die of cancer than their sedentary peers. (New England Journal of Medicine, Jan 9, 1998)

2. The Environment

I’ve written about how much I love bikes . And walking is even easier on the earth than cycling. No one has to mine molybdenum, titanium, aluminum, or smelt steel for you to hit the pavement. All you need is a comfortable pair of shoes (which you probably own anyway). The more trips we make on foot, the cleaner our air, water, and planet will be.

To make walking an even greener option, check out this Runner’s World article on the environmental “footprint” of running shoes, and consider supporting companies striving to make greener shoes. You can also drop off your used running shoes at a recycling center. Find one near you here.

3. Fresh Air

Richard Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder” in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods referring to the trend of children spending less time outdoors. Louv believes a lack of outdoors time leads to all sorts of behavioral problems in kids. Spending time in nature is undoubtedly good for children and adults alike. A daily walk allows you to note the gradual shifts in the seasons, watch the sun rise or set, keep track of the moon’s cycles, breathe in fresh air, explore the vast variety of plants and animals, and just be part of the natural world.

4. Problem solving

As Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, “the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking.” It’s probably not a coincidence that so many of our great thinkers and writers were also great fans of walking – Thoreau, William Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, John Adams, Soren Keirkegaard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, and more.

5. Family and Neighborhood Connections

A daily after-dinner stroll is not only good for digestion. It’s also a great time to catch up with your spouse or kids and get to know your neighbors. Check out your neighborhood’s “walk score” here.

6. It’s easy

My favorite thing about walking is how easy it is to incorporate into daily life. Just lace on some shoes, set a comfortable pace, and enjoy the scenery. That’s all it takes.

If you liked this post, you may enjoy these popular posts:

What’s your favorite thing about walking? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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