Reducing your toxic load is so important for your health. “Toxic load” refers to the number of toxins in the environment in which you are living that are absorbed by your body.
Toxins are everywhere- cigarette smoke, exhaust, flame retardants, chemicals in skincare, pesticides…you get the picture! We can’t avoid them completely, but there are many things we can do to reduce our toxic load.
Our bodies naturally work to eliminate and detox toxins on their own but in today’s world, it is all too easy for our bodies to become burdened and for us to hit toxin overload. This is when we begin to see health problems. They say “genes load the gun, but it’s your diet, lifestyle, and exposure that pull the trigger”.
A good way for us to support our body’s natural detoxification process is to reduce our toxic load. We can do this by focusing on what we can control because there is a lot we can’t!
Here are the top 5 things I recommend doing to reduce your toxic load:
Buy Organic Food
This is a very important one. Conventional produce is grown using pesticides and herbicides that are bad for our health. Limit processed food, buy grass-fed high-quality meat, avoid refined sugar, and eat more whole food. Food is medicine. Food is meant to nourish our body not add our toxic load.
Make The Switch To Cleaner Beauty Products
There are over 80,000 chemicals used in beauty products today. There hasn’t been a new regulatory law for our personal care products since 1938! Currently, there are only 30 chemicals that are banned from our personal care products in the US. Our skin is our largest organ. It absorbs anything that is put on it. Many of the conventional products out there have endocrine disrupters that have no place on our skin. Using cleaner, safer products on your body is just as important as what you put in your body. Here are the products I recommend.
Improve Indoor Air Quality
Indoor air quality can be so toxic! It can contain VOC’s, dirt, dust, pet dander, and mold. Some of the things you can do to improve your indoor air quality are to buy an air filter, get rid of toxic candles and air fresheners, open windows for at least 10 minutes a day, run bathroom fans, get some air-purifying plants, and dust & vacuum regularly.
Pure Enrichment Purezone Air Purifier This one is more cost-effective.
Get a Water Filter
Tap water can contain chlorine, pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, heavy metals, and other contaminants. Filtering these contaminants out of your water is SO important.
Berkey Water Filter One of the best water filters but the two cons are a) it doesn’t filter out arsenic, and b) it takes up counter space.
Apec Reverse Osmosis Under Sink Filtration System This is the system I use. It filters EVERYTHING out of the water. The con to going this route is you must add trace minerals back into your water. I use these Trace Minerals.
You can check your local water here.
Clean up Your Cleaning Products
Don’t be fooled by “all-natural”, “free and clear”, and “fragrance-free”. Those phrases don’t necessarily mean anything. To truly know if they are clean, you must do your homework. The cleaning products we use in our homes are on surfaces we touch, in the air, and even end up on our skin. The products I use are:
Branch Basics for laundry and cleaning showers.
Force of Nature for disinfecting.
Thrive Market Glass Cleaner for windows & mirrors.
Bon Ami for sparking clean sinks, toilets, and bathtubs.
Ecover Dishwasher Tablets for the dishwasher.
When looking for new, cleaner, safer products, I recommend using the EWG Skin Deep Database to help determine the toxicity level of the products you are interested in.
Making the switch to a cleaner lifestyle and reducing your toxic load can be overwhelming. Baby steps! Every little swap will make a difference. Maybe next time you run out of your laundry detergent or dish soap, reach for a cleaner option instead of the one you have been using for years.
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