Top Green Tips

 
So you’ve dusted off your recycling bin and switched your light bulbs to compact fluorescents, maybe you even bring reusable bags to the grocery store and carpool to work -but what’s next? What are you putting into those reusable bags? How can you take your eco-friendly activities further without remodeling your home or breaking the bank? Not ready to go off-the-grid homesteading yet?

Frugal, eco-friendly living is not just a recessionary practice; it’s a way of life. Greening your lifestyle isn’t expensive and complicated, it’s actually quite easy and saves money. Living a more sustainable life not only helps your wallet, health, and quality of life; it also helps the planet.

The Environmental Protection Agency reports that as of 2007, residential housing is responsible for 54 percent of national energy use and 31 percent of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, the most common greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. It’s not just the power plants that are causing the problems. Every action, every person, can make a difference. It’s not so much “saving the earth,” just trying to use it up more slowly.

My top tips for frugal eco-friendly home life
- Be suspicious of single-use products, even if they tout “eco-friendliness”.

- Buy less. Period. Re-use and fix things instead of tossing them. When you do buy, buy used. Shop at thrift, friends or relatives hand-me-downs, craigslist, swap, barter, freecycle,

- If you don’t buy used, buy sustainable, quality products. Better to buy one good thing once instead of lots of poorly made things over and over. This strategy might cost a little more at first, but it will save you money and the planet’s resources in the long run.

- Re-wear clothes before washing.

- Ditch the extra TVs. I am a firm believer that one TV per home is plenty. Ditch cable/satellite service.

Kids
- Choose battery-free, toxin-free toys.

- Limit exposure to child-aimed marketing - that stuff is RUTHLESS!

- Breastfeeding.

- Cloth diapers.

Bathroom
- Use cloth toilet paper.

- Use bath towels more than once.

- Flush less often.

- Shower less. I shower every two to three days. This saves my skin's natural oils and money on soap and hot water.

- Plastic shower curtain alternatives = polyester.

- Use cloth feminine pads or a reusable "cup".

- Know your bad bath product ingredients.

- Use essential oils instead of perfume.

Kitchen
- Be wary of soy. And not just because of the phytoestrogens. Check out tofu's environmental footprint.

- Know what kind of produce to buy organic, and what is OK if it is conventionally farmed.

- Choose local grass-fed meats, no to hormones and antibiotics. Eat less meat.

- Valuable kitchen tools: food processor, blender, water purifier, Pyrex storage, stainless steel or cast iron pans (no to non-stick Teflon).

- I shop for basic pantry staples instead of for weekly menus.

- If you can’t pronounce an ingredient or don’t have time to read all the ingredients then don’t eat it.

- Bulk items=less packaging waste=generally cheaper.

- Use cloth instead of paper – towels, napkins, baby face-wipes, etc.

- Eat out less – esp. fast food for its multiple disposable containers.

- Keep your fridge on the lowest or “energy-saving” setting.

- I use my stainless steel water bottle at home. It helps me drink enough water every day and saves tons of glasses.

Can't Win For Losing

 (Photo by C. Ian Campbell, depicting the source of the most joy - and stress - in my life.)

Stress. It's that unhealthy thing we all have in our lives that we do have some nature of control over. I think I'm a closet sufferer. That is, I feel stressed quite often, but feel like as a mostly stay-at-home mom I shouldn't be stressed. The fact that I am not meeting this unrealistic expectation of stresslessness is no doubt adding to my stress. I feel like my stress comes from being very hard on myself on a daily basis. I think about all the fruits and vegetables I haven't eaten today, I think about all the writing I haven't gotten around to, I think about not being creatively playful enough with my son, I think about all the money I'm not making by being at home, I think about all the exercise I didn't do, about all the chores I haven't done around the house. I realize now that all this worrying and obsessing about being healthy, living well and being a good parent is only serving to make me unhealthier and unhappier. According to Prevention magazine, I'm not alone. It actually lists perfectionism as a cause of stress. Who knew?

Stress has been linked with a variety of physical ailments from headache to depression to symptoms that mimic a heart attack. The balance between stressors and your ability to cope with them, however, can determine your mental health. When the stressors in your life meet your coping abilities, you feel stimulated, engaged and appropriately challenged. Too many stressors in your life that overwhelm your attempts to cope, however, can result in depression or anxiety.

During stress, hormones including adrenaline and cortisol flood the body, resulting in:

• an increased need for oxygen
  
• increased heart rate and blood pressure
  
• tensed muscles
  
• increased blood sugar levels
  
• spilling of stored fat from cells into the bloodstream
  
• constriction of bowel and intestinal muscles
  

All this can strain your heart and artery linings. ... Stress can also cause what has been termed "toxic weight gain." Cortisol, a hormone released when you're under stress, is an appetite trigger. That's why so many women eat more - and less-than-healthy food - when under a lot of stress. Those extra calories are converted to fat deposits that gravitate to the waistline. These fat deposits, called visceral fat, are associated with life-threatening illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and cancer. Chronically high levels of cortisol may stimulate the fat cells inside the abdomen to fill with more fat. As you age, this expanding waistline can be life threatening.
Too much stress can also affect your immune system, weakening it and making you more susceptible to colds, coughs and infections.
 -Prevention on stress

I've been killing myself in the name of health. So with this in mind I now will strive to be more mindful - to be easier on myself. I can attempt to be a better person without that making me miserable. I can wake up with intentions for the day, but try my best not to beat myself up about whether I've achieved all I wanted at the end of that day. I can always try again tomorrow.

Detox Smeetox

 

                                     photo: C. Ian Campbell 

Addressing the myth of the detox/cleanse diet trend is something I've been wanting to do since I started this blog. They don't make any sense to me. How could a week of deprivation, will-power lemon-water and vitamins suddenly render your body "clean." Maybe if you eat a diet of highly processed food and drink and/or smoke I can see how that might compromise your body's natural cleansing systems.  Maybe detox diets are for these people whose bodies are most likely not working at their maximum performance. Even then, a cleanse would only be temporary surely, and long-term relief from toxin build-up could only occur by cessation of smoking, reduction in drinking and improvements in diet.  

Over at Choosing Raw this week Gena brings up this very topic on her extensive post about women's health. 

"There is no reason for a healthy, average woman to drastically lower her caloric consumption with 'cleanses'. In fact, there’s a good chance that whatever cleanse you’re interested in–juices, lemonade, all raw veggies, smoothies only, and the list goes on–will only leave you feeling deprived, strip you of water weight, and lower your metabolism."

 The Guardian's (British newspaper) glorious Ben Goldacre addressed the issue in this 2005 article The Detox Myth. 

"There's certainly no evidence I'm aware of that eating a slightly unusual diet for a few days and munching on some vitamins speeds up the degradation and expulsion of any of the things these products claim to help you get rid of. And it's not really possible to imagine what experiment you could do to measure whether they were having an effect on real people, although if you came up with one, I'd be happy to try to do it."

(For more of Goldacre's fabulous wit see his debunking blog Bad Science.)

Another Guardian article in January 2009 found here offers a similar story.

The bad news for the ever-expanding detox/cleanse industry continues on WebMD:

"But the science behind the detox theory is deeply flawed, says Peter Pressman, MD, an internal medicine specialist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The body already has multiple systems in place -- including the liver, kidneys, and gastrointestinal tract -- that do a perfectly good job of eliminating toxins from the body within hours of consumption. "There's no evidence at all that any of these approaches augment the body's own mechanisms," Pressman tells WebMD. 
Detox dieters may report a variety of benefits, Pressman notes, but none can be traced to the idea of detoxification. Fewer headaches can be traced to other lifestyle changes such as reduction in alcohol and caffeine intake. Clearer skin can result from improved hydration, and less bloating could be a result of eating less food.
Some detox dieters report a boost in energy and even a sense of euphoria. Pressman says the feeling -- also commonly reported by people who are fasting -- is actually a reaction to starvation. It likely evolved as a way to help a person evade threats and locate food, he says."

So why are so many alternative health enthusiasts so convinced by the junk science that is the detox? Maybe it's just that those of us who try to live healthily are just as susceptible to aggressive marketing campaigns as the rest of the population. Maybe the idea behind it just sounds so good. It's a quick fix, albeit a torturous one. It's easy to market because it's easier to sell than a "eat healthily all your life" product. That's just it. A healthy lifestyle isn't a product. There's no money to be made in the unpackaged produce aisles. (According to Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle small farms that produce a variety of crops earn much more per acre than large single-crop farms. But I'm sure we're not talking about profits as large as the multimillion dollar diet industry here.)  
I think if you're eating a well-balanced diet of minimally processed foods and getting enough water, exercise and sleep then there's no real need for a cleanse. Even so, if one of these areas is lacking a quick-fix cleanse is not a permanent solution or a free pass to go wild the rest of the year. A better approach is to work toward an attainable, sustainable balanced life.

Boobs, Boobs Good For the Heart

      
      The January issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology found yet more evidence for the protective, preventative effects of breastfeeding -- for the mother:

Mothers who do not breastfeed their infants seem to be at increased risk of vascular changes associated with future cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for U.S. women. As such, it is important to identify how behaviors, such as lactation, modify women’s risk of cardiovascular disease. Lactation increases a mother’s metabolic expenditure by an estimated 480 kcal/d.1 Mothers who do not breastfeed retain more weight in the postpartum period than women who do breastfeed. In addition, lactation improves insulin requirements, glucose tolerance, lipid metabolism, and C-reactive protein profiles in the postpartum period. Recently, a number of studies have indicated longer-term effects of lactation, including a reduced risk of midlife metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease.

       So all you selfish mamas out there considering using formula, think again. Breastfeeding can be self-serving too! Other benefits of nursing for moms is reduced risk of osteoporosis, breast cancer, postpartum depression, endometrial cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. Ovarian and uterine cancers have also been found to be more common in women who did not breastfeed. With breastfeeding and its benefits, there is a dose-related effect for moms and babies. Meaning that the longer you nurse the more disease prevention you are likely to gain.

       Lactation duration and breast cancer risk are inversely related. The longer a woman breastfeeds the less likely she is to get pre- or postmenopausal breast cancer, even with a family history of the disease. Re-examination of data from 47 international studies found that for every year a woman breastfeeds, she reduces her risk of breast cancer by an average of 4.3 percent. The risk is reduced a further 7 percent by simply having a baby. One study found that women who've nursed for six years or more reduced their risk of breast cancer by as much as a 63 percent.

       A study published in The Archives of Internal Medicine in 2009 found that for women with an immediate relative who had breast cancer, those who breast-fed had a 59 percent lower risk of premenopausal breast cancer. Making their risk about the same as women who had no breast cancer in the family.

       For each year of breastfeeding, a woman decreases her chances of getting type 2 diabetes by 15 percent, reported a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005. So if a woman breastfeeds three children for two years each, she's earned a 90 percent reduction in her risk of developing diabetes.
       My 2-year-old is still an avid nursing enthusiast, occasionally to my chagrin. It can be taxing and annoying at times, but mostly its a calming, bonding please-fall-asleep-now experience. I hope to wean him by age 3. My siblings and I were all breastfed for three years. Find more info on extended breastfeeding at Kellymom.

Healthy Body Image

 

Photo credit Kalshassan.

(Me a few years back in my dancing prime)

      In teaching a 100-level class on mass media last fall, I was hit by the inevitable end-of-semester barrage of final papers on the topic of "the media's portrayal of body image." They could have come up with any topic they wanted, but lo, so many of them did not realize how mundane and overdone that topic has become. I was sick of hearing about my classmates writing about it when I was in school, so I'm definitely bored of it now.
      One thing it did make me think of though, was how we as Americans are fighting a war against epidemic-proportion obesity in adults and children, while at the same time demanding that plus-size women be as equally represented and glorified in the fashion and media industries as their size 0 counterparts.
      This January Washington Post article on the subject caught my eye: Robin Givhan zeroes in on debate over plus-size women in fashion. Post staff fashion writer Givhan says: 

"after a volley of exhausting complaining, defending, finger-pointing and declaring one's right to creative license, a new conundrum has presented itself: It's hard to even know what an acceptable-size model is supposed to look like anymore. How big is big enough? And when does plus size, in a profoundly overweight population, become just as distressingly unhealthy an image as emaciation?"

      She has come to the conclusion that "Somewhere between emaciation and obesity lies good health. And somewhere between those extremes there is also a definition of beauty that is inclusive, sound and honest." And this is about where I'm at. Shouldn't women and fashion/media critics be calling for a healthy body image to be represented instead of championing the size 16-and-up set?
      Waif-like models are most likely unhealthy, otherwise they would have some nature of muscle tone from regular exercise. While I do think bodies can come healthily in all shapes and sizes, someone wearing a size 18 is most likely not hitting the gym every day either. Metabolism and genes can play as much of a role in a woman's size as diet and exercise, and I do know people that just look like they were meant to be a certain size, be it size 2 or 12. To me, it's about people that look healthy, like the shape their body was created to make.
      So which is more of a problem, eating disorders or obesity? It doesn't really matter I guess since they are both problems that are in a large part shaped and influenced by fashion and media. "Be super-skinny like practically every famous actress, anchorwoman and model." *cut to commercial* "Drink lots of Coke to be happy and eat at McDonald's 'cause they're made of good stuff now." Those mixed messages alone are enough to create a case of bulimia.
      In the end I hope that girls are getting the bulk of their self-esteem and body image ideas from healthier sources, like family, sports or clubs. Could the problem be more in the breakdown of family values than the fault of the media? It's possible, but plenty of studies have shown connections between what we see in the media and our subsequent behavior. I'm not going to end this post by saying celebrate your size - you are woman - because that's not how I feel. Celebrate your beauty, yes, celebrate your family and friends. Work toward health. Attain a healthier body image by striving to exercise and eat well, not by staring at the scale or idolizing any size model.