living simply – SidebySide Photography

7/33

oh my gosh, i can’t believe i just discovered this!!

after cleaning up our eating habits, we started looking into lots of other things in our life that could be toxifying our life. we just went through all the cupboards and just got rid of a ton of lotions, shampoos, cleansers, etc… because they are full of terrible chemicals. some of the chemicals are known carcinogens, there is food coloring, formaldehyde, and chemicals that change your hormones! these ingredients are in so many items, ones that are even advertised as ‘natural’. but why am i surprised, all the food is falsely advertised…

so i was googling to find what are good ingredients in soap and i came across this website, goodguide. you can search any product, and if you have the app, you can even scan products, and they rate them based on health, environment, and social and you can see how it measures up! i ended up looking up everything we owned, threw 95% of it out, and searched for products that rated 10 for health. we were able to find a lot of products at target and amazon, some i’m still on the hunt for but i’m so happy to say that my cupboards are cleaned out and simplified.

i feel safer with less toxins for our bodies and less risk if kids ever get their hands on cleaning products. as with everything healthy, the ones we went with are a bit more expensive, but it’s worth it…it’s worth it…it’s worth it!!! ask me and i will tell you how clean eating and clean living is worth it!!

project simplify

3/33

a few months ago a friend was encouraging other people to join in their spring cleaning event of getting rid of 40 bags in 40 days.

the first thing i said was, i don’t have 40 bags of stuff to get rid of but…

they give you a .pdf with 40 spaces to write down areas in your house that you can go through. then you print a blank one and write down what you actually went through that day and how many bags you actually got rid of. you know because you might have written down an area you just don’t feel like getting to yet and need to go out of order 🙂

it was certainly a challenge but i did it! it really made me question everything i have an ask myself if i really need it. it is so easy to get bombarded with STUFF and feel overwhelmed by it. we have so much here and yet we feel our houses are small because we have no room for it all. i was especially motivated to get rid of stuff because living in our home for 4 years before having kids really allowed us to overflow into the future kid rooms. but we don’t want our poor kids to have to deal with our stuff in their closets.

it got really addicting when i got going and i just wanted to purge everything! what is this, a shirt i’ve had since i lived overseas ten years ago? cans of food that expired in 2008 which means we moved them to our new house in 09?!?! lotions as gifts from students that i don’t even like the smell but felt bad throwing away, decorations i don’t really love, outdated paperwork, the list goes on. i think just going through my closet i got through seven bags and to be completely honest with you i was in shock because i don’t buy a lot of clothes and don’t care about fashion as much as i probably should. so it was a little embarrassing to think how long i hold on to stuff.

i did it this year and i plan to do it again!

join in next time! it’s fun!