Toxicity and Goals

What is Toxicity?

Dictionary.com defines toxicity as:

–noun, plural -ties.

the quality, relative degree, or specific degree of being toxic or poisonous

And toxic means acting as or having the effect of a poison (again, from Dictionary.com).

There are many things in our lives that are toxic. In the previous post, I was taking about parabens which are additives to different cosmetics or lotions. That is merely one kind of toxic thing I am talking about.

For instance, there are toxic relationships, toxic chemicals, toxic habits, and the list could go on and on. When I started thinking about blogging I really thought I would stick to talking about how I have started the journey of freeing myself and my family from the toxic burden on our bodies from chemicals. I continued to think about this after my first post, and realized it would be a very short blog. I wanted to do something a little more ambitious.

That brings me to today. I felt that I needed to set out some goals as to what I would write about besides the chemical toxicity in our lives. The goals I've come up with so far are very vague and more to help me sleep at night, as I tend to over think things over and over and over and just not sleep.

SO! Here's what I'm thinking: I would like to do a post a week about where I and my family are in ridding ourselves of physical toxicity, whether that be a new recipe that I'm trying or tips I follow, or whatever have you. Then, I would like to post once a week about spiritual toxicity and how to rely on God to continually purify us. And perhaps, every other week or so talk about some other thing that is poisonous in our lives and how to reduce our consumption of it.

I have no idea if I will be able to keep up with this or not as life tends to get in my way far too often, but I sure would like to try.

I hope that you are ready to come on this developing journey with me!

XO,

Bliss

The Tip of the Iceberg

It started as a slow trickle, really. All it took was for someone to mention the word “parabens” and I started to think.

I was at a Norwex party, and the saleswoman was talking about how there are chemicals that are unhealthy for us in our cleaning products or even our cosmetics. I was taken aback, but I didn't think much more about it.

About a year later, another lady was in my home trying to sell me something. This time it was Arbonne products. She talked more about parabens and what they actually could do to your body. I was a little more shocked, and reasoned that they had to be safe because they were in products like baby lotion.

It was after that night, I think my wariness about products we consume started. I did some research about parabens. Most of the articles I came across were anecdotal and not very helpful, but not a single one said anything good about them. I read what Wikipedia had to say, and again, nothing extremely bad, but nothing at all good.

The main thing about parabens, is that they act as xenoestrogens and that some estrogens drive the growing force behind tumours. Propylparaben, butylparaben, ethylparaben, isobutylparaben, as well as others have shown strong evidence that they disrupt the endocrine system as well as have a high human skin toxicant rating – this is according to the environmental working group's skin deep data base, which takes studies from around the word into consideration as they mark products from a 0-10 safety rating.

After researching more, my husband and I decided that we would try to avoid parabens as much as possible. As we were using up shampoos or soaps that we had previously bought, we replaced them with paraben free versions.

It has been over a year since then, and we are now realizing that parabens were just the tip of our toxic burden iceberg.