♡ Cleaning Up Our Act ♡

Cleaning up your act is a lifelong task, isn't it?  Frank and I got started with this in our twenties.  After a fine rebellious rising up in our late teens and early college years, we discovered, as most do, the toll that the fast life can reap.  Dehydration and hangovers make poor test results both in the classroom and in life.  So, we started back then, finding the more moderate road.

Our thirties brought on some serious work and striving as we sought to meet our life goals.  This begged an even cleaner home base from which to draw our strength.  So, out went most of the toxins, found in commercial products: shampoos, cleansers, cosmetics, plastics and processed foods.  We also realized that natural fibers and home cooking gave us a sturdier base to launch and land from.

Our forties began the years of deep cleaning, to edge out the sludge of a lifetime's accumulation, not only mentally, by seriously rethinking who we are and how we wanted to be in the world, but also physically, regularly cleansing the internal organs through fasting and juicing, along with taking sabbaticals for inner renewal.

Then came our fifties, the decade that determines how the quality of your later life will be.  It's easy to drop the joys of physical exercise at this age and trade them in for a more restful and relaxing way of being, but it is so critical to step it up instead.  Dancing, gardening, swimming, biking, walking, whatever it is, our activities keeps us flexible and alive.  Enjoying regular movement holds that eventual downward pull toward the compost pile at bay for a few more decades.

Now that we are in our sixties, we see that slippery slope beginning to claim our peers.  The "Standard American Diet" (S.A.D.) of processed "food," lots of sweets and too many animal products along with sedentary days has been collecting it's toll.  So we are conscientiously upping the ante with exercise classes and time spent with friends recreating.  We've also gone nutritarian to compliment our periods of detoxification.  It's not servings, it's pounds of vegetables, fresh and raw along with berries and seeds for clean sugars and proteins each day. 

Recently we invested in a new super fast juicer.  Frank calls it, "The Kitchen Chipper," because it can juice and entire head of celery in about two seconds.  It only takes us five minutes to make our quart of breakfast juice and five minutes to clean and dry the machine.  So now, it is no big deal for us to make our green juice and consume our pounds of veggies every day.    

Chia seeds, sunflower seeds, a few almonds and walnuts go into our berry and herbal tea smoothies at lunchtime, so we have more than enough protein without burdening our kidneys and livers.  These delicious fresh drinks also provide tons of micro nutrients and complex combinations of bioflavonoids at a lower cost and with way more abundant bio-availability than stuff that comes in a bottle or a jar.

With this and some nice raw sauerkrauts, kimchis and other fermented foods, we hope to round the bend into our last three or four decades with the glow of our own "health care" rather than being subjected to prescribed disease management.  Wish us luck, as we continue to do our best and clean up our act year by year, decade by decade with love for our selves and for all.

© Josephine Laing, 2015