Creative Ways to Improve Your Health

Intro

There is no doubt that diet has the most significant influence on my body in my effort to stay off of medication as a Type 1 Diabetic (officially just passed 2.5 years no meds!).  However, I personally believe one has to watch other lifestyle and environmental factors as well in order to optimize their health and limit toxins.

I will be the first to admit that chemical intake is not my area of expertise, but I know enough to be dangerous. My wife is actually the one who is much more up-to-speed on the daily toxins that enter our body through something as simple as shampoo or cleaners.

I thought a good blog topic would be to describe several other ways that my family improves the quality of our lives by minimizing our toxin intake. Although diet is much easier to gauge its effect on my blood sugars, I know that minimizing other toxins entering my body can only help my cause to remain medication free and keep my blood sugars low.

Many people probably think we are weird for doing things like this, however, the one nice thing about having a chronic disease is that you get a free pass on being weird when it comes to raw vegan diets and holistic approaches to things!

Toxin Fighting Products

Tower Garden

As I’ve mentioned before, this diet is not cheap as it involves purchasing a significant amount of organic produce. To try and save on costs long-term, we invested in the Tower Garden.

Using aeroponics, the Tower Garden grows plants with only water and nutrients rather than dirt. Research has found aeroponic systems grow plants three times faster and produce 30% greater yields on average.

This thing is pretty sweet. It’s super easy to use and provides you probably the safest way to eat your produce because you are growing it yourself. My wife or I don’t have the time to manage a garden, and the Tower Garden allows you to grow everything in the basement!

The upfront cost is about $1,000 +/-, but the Tower Garden grows so fast and in abundance that it provides nearly all of the base for my salads in a given week (I eat ~7 salads/week). So, my guess is the amount we save on buying store organic spinach, kale, etc. is probably $500 to $1,000 per year, so the payback is quick.

Here is a picture of our Tower Garden in the basement…

Essential Oils

I used to use your typical grocery store bought products for things like face lotion, shampoo and body wash. They work great, but the ingredients look like a science experiment on the packages.

My wife buys Essential Oils which allow you to make your own home products. We don’t use these for everything, but my shampoo, face lotion, shaving cream and body wash are all based on the Essential Oils. 

When buying essential oils, you want to make sure they are 100% therapeutic grade. We mostly use DoTerra, but Young Living is also another good brand. These brands are so pure, that you can actually cook with them or take them in a capsule. Many of the cheaper versions of essential oils have additives and chemicals, so you have to be careful. 

Wellness Mama and Sophie Uliano have some great DIY recipes and also DoTerra has quite a few on their web site.

Berkey Water Filter

The water you drink is very important to understand. Obviously most people understand tap water is bad and use some sort of water filter. However, even filtered tap water contains a significant amount of chemicals that your body doesn’t necessarily need.

The Berkey Water Filter is the stud of all water filters. It removes viruses to purification standards, pathogenic bacteria, cysts and parasites to non detectable levels, and harmful or unwanted chemicals to below detectable levels. We have the fluoride filter add-on too for additional chemical removal.  I just fill up a large thermos before I leave for work and that’s the water I drink all day.

The Berkey is a low cost system that requires to be refilled. More expensive options are reverse osmosis water filtration systems that can be installed into your home and don’t require refilling. However, we’ve enjoyed using the Berkey since we purchased it earlier this year.

La Croix and a SodaStream

Since I’m not able to indulge on many drinks besides water and almond milk, my life can get a little boring in that regard. Enter La Croix! I am definitely hooked on these. To the average person, these are pretty boring. But to a type 1 diabetic trying to stay off of medication, these things are amazing! They provide consumers with a non-artificially sweetened sparkling water that tastes pretty good.

The only problem is that they are packed in aluminum cans with water from god knows where. So, we purchased a SodaStream on Amazon which allows us to create our own homemade La Croix that we can use our Berkey filtered water. Talk about amazing (sorry, I know this is not really that exciting)!

I’ve actually started to see a lot of other people drinking La Croix over the past year. I think people are wising up and realizing that a majority of drinks at the grocery store contain all sorts of harmful chemicals and added sugar, and people are relieved that there is a flavored sparkling water with no artificial sweeteners.

In the News

VAXXED (website)

This gets off subject slightly, but it still has relevance as it involves the truth hiding pharmaceutical companies that I have learned to distrust since I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes back in 2014.

I’ve been mildly obsessed with this film ever since it came out in March 2016, and I personally think it’s one of the biggest stories we will see in our lifetimes. The producer, Del Bigtree, even goes as far to say this could be the largest cover-up in the history of mankind.

It’s a documentary about a Center for Disease Control (“CDC”) whistleblower who confessed that the CDC had omitted crucial data in their final 2004 report that revealed a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Without getting into the weeds too much, the whistleblower was the lead scientist on the study, and he was recorded admitting that the CDC covered up, manipulated and destroyed data to hide a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

My guess is that most of my blog readers probably have heard nothing about this, which is the most mind-blowing part. Somehow, mainstream media has blacked this story out to the general public.

The most unsettling part is that the whistleblower provided an affidavit to Congressman Bill Posey (click here to view his speech to Congress) asking to be subpoenaed in 2014 to testify in front of Congress regarding the corruption on this report, but nothing has happened yet. Yes, that is 2 years of nothing…absurd.

What’s even MORE interesting, is that California just implemented a new law, SB 277, that requires all children to follow the one-size-fits-all CDC vaccine schedule or the child will not be allowed to enroll in any public or private schooling. 

And any child currently in school that is not fully vaccinated would be required to get all the vaccines before starting school this fall. Prior to this law, California parents could claim a personal belief exemption to avoid vaccinating their child, but that is now removed.

Pretty interesting that a state just passed this law with the CDC whistleblower situation just coming out, right? Check out this speech by Del Bigtree (Be Brave) talking about the situation. Should be interesting to see how this shakes out.

I’m not trying to get into a pro / anti-vaccine dialogue because it’s outside of the scope of this blog. My desire to work this into my blog is to try and make the public aware about what’s going on inside the pharmaceutical industry and certain government health organizations. It’s pretty shady stuff. Actually, it’s outright fraud and illegal.

Whether you are pro or anti-vaccine, or somewhere in between, I think all people can unite and realize there is something really wrong with this situation.

Why Alternative Health is Booming

This is a great article talking about how the general public is starting to engage more holistic health care professionals instead of conventional medical care. It even talks about how standard medical doctors are often referring patients to holistic health professionals to help patients with chronic pain.

It drills down the point that the medical community treats disease with more treatments, and they don’t really focus on the root cause of the disease. Much like how the fact that a raw-plant based diet can potentially keep a type 1 diabetic off medication is just not in the conversations with standard health care professionals.