Three Easy Tips for a Natural Lifestyle

Most people nowadays want to live a more natural and lower waste lifestyle, but it can feel daunting trying to get started! There’s a lot of conflicting information available, and conflicting opinions. Is it necessary to “go big or go home?” Or will small changes make enough of a difference to be worth it? Why are some of these “small changes” so intimidating? Making a bazillion small changes can be scary, difficult, or even impossible. But it can feel awful to continuously wonder if you could be doing more. Over the next few months, I want to help share some simple tips and tricks for slowly introducing a more natural way of life and helping you reduce your waste. This post will have three tips to start out, and then each post in the series will have a few more easy changes. After you utilize the tips for a month, it will be easy to carry out the next few!

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Natural Stress Reduction Challenge

steel-cable-1646051_1920Everyone is stressed nowadays. In fact, as a society, we’ve started glamorizing stress. Think that’s weird? Well, if someone was telling you that they had to somehow figure out how to run to 5 different stores, get their kids to three different sports (all on different ends of town), go to their own high-intensity spin class, and still work full time – what would you think? Odds are, most people think “Wow, they really have their life together! I am so not measuring up.” But, if you really stop and think about how that must feel, they probably feel like a frayed rope trying to hold up an elephant.

These levels of stress are severely unhealthy, and we’re doing them to ourselves. Society has put such a premium on “busier is better” that we don’t take time to relax or unwind.

High levels of stress have been scientifically proven to shorten our telomeres. Telomeres are essentially caps on the ends of our chromosomes that are responsible for protecting our DNA. While they naturally shrink as we age, long-term stress accelerates this shortening process. When the telomeres are no longer there, our chromosomes begin to get damaged, which causes aging and decreased cellular health. Yikes!

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(In summary: Being excessively stressed ages you prematurely and causes cell damage.)

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Head-to-Head Science: OnGuard Cleaner Concentrate vs Lysol Toilet Bowl Cleaner

I love science experiments, and have always been fond of Petri dish experiments! There’s something satisfying in getting a definite visual result in the Petri dish.

Dan and I decided to try a Petri dish experiment of our own. The toilets in our house needed cleaning, and we wanted to see if there was a difference between the usual cleaner we’ve been using, Lysol Toilet Bowl Cleaner, and the On Guard Cleaner Concentrate. I can’t actually use the Lysol Toilet Bowl Cleaner – it messes with my asthma and gives me migraines. When we clean the toilets with the Lysol, the vent fans have to be on full and we have to open the powder room window. The On Guard Cleaner Concentrate doesn’t mess with my asthma and doesn’t give me migraines, so I was hopeful that it would clean well so that I could actually help with this household chore.

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