doin’ a little good

it suddenly occurred to me today that, over the last year, i’ve made quite a number of changes in my life to avoid things which bring toxins and other dubious substances into my life.
i used to take Brita-filtered water to work in one-litre pop bottles. i’d re-use the bottles until they were, quite literally, cracked and ready to give up the ghost. i can’t even begin to bring myself to imagine the amount of icky plastic particles which i voluntarily drank as a result. some time last year, i recycled the last plastic bottle and bought a Laken aluminum bottle to take to work instead. it’s blue with a whole buncha cute sheep acting out around the outside.
shortly before ditching the plastic bottles, i found this website which documented a woman’s experiments with rats and Aspartame which really scared me. basically, she dosed her rats with relatively moderate levels of NutraSweet to see if she could get some clear results as to the safety of the artificial sweetener. if i recall correctly, all the rats died. most developed tumours or lost eyes or their offspring had birth defects. it was a frightening thing to read and look at (there are lots of photos documenting it all). after that, i swore off my non-sugar sweetener of choice: Splenda. while i know that white sugar isn’t the best for me, it’s got to be better than some franken-sweetener made in a lab. recently, i even purchased some Agave nectar to try to get away from sugar, too.
for Christmas, i received a gift card to London Drugs. with it, since it was free money, i bought myself something i’d been wanting but wouldn’t have ever brought myself to purchase: tempered glass lunch containers. so, instead of nuking my lunch every day in plastic containers, i now heat it up in tempered glass. no more icky plastic bits are being exited and finding their way into my leftover chicken fried rice. i pretty much refuse to microwave anything in plastic now. sometimes, i’m too lazy and do it, but i always feel guilty afterwards.
next in my quest for less bad things in my life, i’ve been trying to buy fewer processed food items. no HFCS, no excessive corn or soy by-products, less sugars and salts. generally, i’ve been moving towards eating closer to the source. maybe it was reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food” (i heart Michael Pollan), but it just makes so much sense to try to eat real food instead of all the packaged crap which marketers call food. gah! it makes me a little queasy to look at all those boxes of shelf-stable food-like substances on the grocery store shelves. oh, i’m FAR from perfect in this regard, but to think back a few years… i shudder to remember what i was putting in my body.
i didn’t really MEAN to have made so many changes in my life in 2008. maybe that’s the key to continuing them? one small thing, followed by another small thing, until, suddenly, you realize you’ve actually made a whole bunch of pretty big improvements in how you treat your body!
p.s. do you want to join Kimli, Nelson and I this Saturday when we go to give blood and save lives? aw, c’mon… you can have all the cookies you want!