“For me, this lifestyle is all about self love.  Giving my body the absolute best I can for long term health and happiness”. 

I was asked recently why I decided to pursue a toxin free lifestyle.  So, before I open my beauty bag and cleaning cupboard to you over a series of new posts, sharing recommended toxin-free products, I thought I’d give you an introduction as to the why, what and how.

As a cancer survivor, I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’re hearing about someone else’s decision to live toxin free.  I’m also sure you were bombarded with crazy articles and conspiracy theories from friends, which scared you using anything and everything in your home.  Everything from loo paper to toothpaste is going to kill you according to the internet.  If you look hard enough, you will find an article from someone ‘credible’ linking everything to cancer.  It’s even scarier reading this stuff when you’re in the middle of the cancer fight.

There is some truth behind some of these stories.  There are chemicals out there in the everyday products found in our homes, that are classified as carcinogenic which are linked to cancer, endocrine disruption, reproductive toxicity, immunotoxicity, neurotoxicity and allergies.

If you want to read more about carcinogenics: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/generalinformationaboutcarcinogens/known-and-probable-human-carcinogens

The good news is, if you want to start eliminating toxins from your life, you can.  It’s daunting, frustrating, and it takes a while, but we’re lucky enough to live in a day and age to have alternatives.

My journey……

One of my favourite childhood memories was watching with intrigue and amazement as my dear dad washed his hair with weird and wonderful kitchen-found products.  There were lemons, olive oil, beer and eggs…not all together, obviously.  And the only way I was ever allowed to use face masks as a teenager was to learn recipes to make them myself….queue, an increase of avocados on mum’s shopping list, not an easy all-year-round find back in the early 90’s.

We grew up in a family that mixed natural methods alongside regular products found in the supermarket.  It’s the same story with household cleaning products, our grannies taught us the powerful benefits on lemons, vinegar and bicarb and we used them alongside Persil, Flash and Mr.Muscle.

That being said, over the years, the preference for convenience, big promises and pretty packaging won over the traditional non-chemical approach learned in my youth, and my adult cupboards became full of toxins and chemicals.

Fast-forward 20 odd years later.

Within days of being diagnosed with the Big C, I had a treatment plan.  I needed an aggressive cocktail of different chemo drugs to shrink the tumour by 15-20% for surgeons to operate.  We have to remember treatment is a choice, and having already seen Steve Jobs waste precious time with natural alternatives on his NET pancreatic tumour, I chose to proceed with pumping my body full of nasty toxic chemicals, knowing I had a small window of opportunity to attack the tumour.  I believe in modern medicine and science as much as I believe in natural remedies – there’s a time and a place for both.  I don’t believe they are mutual exclusive choices either; they can work just as successfully, if not better, hand in hand along the way, through treatment and recovery.

Having chosen the chemotherapy road, I decided to make some lifestyle changes along side it and give it all I had. One of those changes was cleaning up my act and reducing the number of toxins I was putting in my body aside from drugs.  Limiting the carcinogenics going into my body, so it could work at its optimum strength to fight the cancer already there.  That was my approach, and not something that was medically backed by the doctors.  Considering how we were raised, turning to toxin-free products and home-made potions felt like the completely natural thing to do.

I remember my sister Georgie kicking things off, calling me in that first week to say she was coming over to pick me up – we were going ‘toxin-free shopping’ at Planet Organic. Whoop! I loved shopping back then.  Whilst waiting for her to come over, I got out a black bag and binned all the washing powders, liquids, sprays and detergents from under the sink.  That was fun and easy peasy.  Then I got to the bathroom cupboard; that bit wasn’t so.  I looked lovingly at all that pretty packaging I mentioned earlier, doing a mental tally of how much those trips to Space NK totaled, sat on the bathroom floor and wept.  How was I going to replace all these gorgeous lotions and potions?  I loved the idea of going clean but I’d spent a lifetime finding the right curling crème for my ringlets, the right moisturising shampoo for bleached damage hair, and the moisturisers and perfumes that made me smell of wild jasmine nights.  How? How was all this stuff going to be replaced?  It was bad enough having chemo, but now I was giving up all the magic products that made me look and feel like me.

I huffed and puffed (and perhaps stomped a little) for the 10-minute drive to Planet Organic. Poor Georgie. She ever so patiently tried to convince me the shelves were stacked with shiny new high performing clean products.  All I could do was remember the smelly, ugly bottled beauty products that lined the shelves in the 90’s health stores.

I silently walked around Planet O (I go quiet when I’m really mad), Georgie excitedly showing me the new health store of the naughtiest, whilst I dragged my feet thinking of my empty bathroom cupboard.  As we turned the corner into the beauty aisle, my heart skipped a beat. What was this?  This wasn’t the health store beauty aisle I remembered. This was a beauty aisle I recognised!  Brands and products I already knew and loved, not realising they were clean and green. This was high-end pretty packaging-ville.  Oh hurrah!  There were no compromises or second rate products here.

We forked out a fair bit to get the staples.  To ease the financial and emotional pressure, we decided to start with the basics and find alternatives for all the other products over time.  We started with; shampoo, conditioner, body soap, hand soap, face moisturiser, body moisturiser, deodorant and toothpaste.

With only the exception on bleach, all the other cleaning products were replaced in the house.  I kept the bleach at the back of the cupboard for emergencies, but that’s since gone too.

Replacing kitchen sprays is straightforward, we’re not as attached to them as we are our shampoo.  However, when it came to personal grooming products, I didn’t fall in love with everything I first tried – but hey, you gotta start somewhere.  There were times I got frustrated, and stressed at not finding ‘clean’ replacements that were high performing or to my taste.  With stress itself being a toxin, I decided to relax, and revert to my old products until I found a good clean alternative to take over.  Once I took the pressure off to do everything in one go, it became a nice adventure amidst the hospital appointments, and over time I’ve slowly found the products that best suit my needs and home.

I’ve seen such evolvement in this area, with regular brands cutting out naughty chemicals, as well as the cleaner alternatives becoming easily available and cost comparative.  You’ll be surprised how much easier it is to find cleaner and natural brands.

My cupboards are pretty much toxin free now and I love it, I wouldn’t go back to the beauty cupboard I cried over years ago.  However, I’ve stayed relaxed about the whole thing, and still happily turn to high performance products every now and then, when a bit of extra help is needed.  Especially in the early days of recovery, when let’s face it, we need a lot of help to get our outsides back to where we want them to be.

Examples of this; I may have a carcinogenic free toothpaste for long term use, but used a few months worth of whitening strips after being bed bound for the best part of a year, and needed to get my pearly whites back to smiling standard.  And don’t get me started on deodorants, there weren’t any natural ones out that could deal with the hormone flushes, so I stayed with Mitchum until they stopped and could comfortably switch to something more natural.

Going clean all in one go is a costly and exhausting exercise, treatment and recovery is hard enough.  My advice is to take it slow, enjoy the ride, and don’t put too much pressure on yourself.  Let the people around you know what you’re doing, so they can help with gifts and recommendations.  Talk to shop assistants and the girls at the beauty counters, they’ll give you great free advice and often samples.  Watch this space and Instagram for recommendations, and soon I’ll be launching an exciting project to help bring you the best products out there straight to your homes.

Although I’m now cancer free, and treatment is well and truly finished, I continue to pursue a toxin free lifestyle.  Why?  Well, I want to stay healthy and keep the cancer at bay for as long as possible, and my part in that starts with how I treat my body. For me, this lifestyle is all about self love.  Giving my body the absolute best I can for long-term health and happiness.  And on a separate note, but a really important one to raise. Toxins and chemicals feed (CRF) fatigue, a side-effect of cancer therapy, and something I’ve been struggling with.

My body is getting stronger, my gastric system healthier and fatigue better under control.  I attribute that to the lifestyle I’ve been building and a big part of that is living toxin free.  

Toxins to our bodies are not only constrained to products found in bottles, the wrong food and stress can of course be just as toxic.  You’ll find once you start going down this path, you’ll become keen to live cleaner in those areas too.  It’s a snowball affect, it feels so good and healthy, that it’s hard not to want to continue making changes everywhere.  It doesn’t have to be drastic, you don’t have to give up work, turn into a raw food eating vegan and live on a farm.  Again, there are ways to start reducing toxins in all areas of your life, as you continue living exactly where you are.

Living a clean lifestyle for me has been, and still is a slow burn.  Changing over 30 years worth of habits and tastes in one go would have been an impossible task.  But as you start adding the good stuff, the bad stuff starts falling away from your life quite naturally. 

There are loads of ‘detox your body’ / ‘detox your life’ programmes out there, apparently you can do it all in 30 days, 10 days etc.. etc.  Maybe some people can, but I’ve yet to see anyone in the real world do this and keep to it successfully.  As soon as you get back to your real life, or come up against real life challenges, it is scientifically proven that we revert back to old and familiar habits.  The idea is to be clever and create a new normal, one habit at a time, reprogramming your neurological patterns.  I refuse to believe you can change a whole lifetime of eating, shopping, living and working habits in one go or 30 days.  It takes time, work and dedication. But with a relaxed attitude and an appetite for the new, it’s a fun road to take and the benefits make it worthwhile.

I encourage you all, survivor or not, to make the decision to change.

Happy health,

Lulu x