I think that being diagnosed with cancer and becoming a patient is a great time to look at your personal habits. For me, I really didn’t make a ton of changes WHILE I was sick but I used the experience of being a patient as a motivator to start to seek better approaches for some areas of my life.
What does this mean exactly? It means that I took the time to think about how I live my life and gave some serious thought to what things I was putting into or doing to my body that are known or suspected to add additional biological stress or cellular stress that may contribute to cancer.
Instead of jumping down a huge rabbit hole on every single aspect of my life and how it may be contributing stress to my body, I used intuition to guide my approach. Rather than providing specific advice regarding products or services, I want to provide a few places to look to start to clean up your personal habits. I will list 3 general categories and some things I have looked at in my own personal effort to “clean it up”.
- Eating – Almost everyone knows what to eat and what not to eat. For me, I am trying to focus on eating the things I should eat (fruits, veggies, lean meats) while also doing the best that I can to ensure that the food is clean – organic, grass fed, glyphosate free, non-gmo, etc. The thought here isn’t that these foods are always what they claim to be but these companies have purposefully signed up to at least try to provide cleaner eating options. There are lots of lists out there – the “dirty dozen” fruits and veggies with the most pesticides and non-gmo food sources among others. Don’t worry about doing it right – just get started.
When my kids were younger, one thing we tried to teach them was the concept of “not food”. It was kind of a game – food or not food? When they asked to eat pure garbage (think cotton candy) we would ask “food or not food?”. It was our way of highlighting when they were eating or asking for junk. Ask yourself – “food or not food?” for a week and see what you start to notice.
- Drinking – I would say the same advice for drinking everything, except water. When I looked into the cleanliness of city water, it was somewhat of a wake up call for me. There is a ton of stuff in city water (I use this term for all water provided by a water company, municipality, etc) that is really hard to get out during treatment. Lots of leftover pharmaceutical residue, heavy metals, etc. Based on this, I bought a water filter system. Pretty much everything I drink or cook that uses water is supplied from my filtered water. Just because you don’t see particles floating around in your water doesn’t mean its perfectly clean.
To make things worse, I read an article yesterday that said that there are 240,000 plastic nanoparticles in every liter of bottled water. I don’t suppose that is an answer for “clean water” either.
Whatever your approach, maybe do some homework on your own water habits and ways to clean them up.
- Bathing – If I remember correctly, your skin is the largest organ for your body. One of the first things I did after I was sick was to find a “clean” option for the body wash and shampoo I was using. Go ahead and have a read on the ingredient list for whatever you currently use to bathe yourself each day. When I first looked at the ingredient list for my former shampoo and body wash, I realized that I had no chance of even pronouncing some of the ingredients. I went to the Google machine and found a few places that has lists of cleaner body wash and shampoo options. I picked a few, tried then out and never looked back. Much cleaner and way less chemical soup applied to my body each day.
- Environment – Intuitively, we should want to surround ourselves with a peaceful environment. There are lots of ways to approach this, cleaner air, less harsh lighting, noise reduction, reduction of EMF radiation. I made a few easy changes in this area and would encourage everyone to purposefully explore how to clean up their personal living environment.
- Senolytics – One thing I never knew about chemo is that the chemo treatment itself acts as a senolytic therapy while it does its job of killing cancer. Senolytics are compounds that encourage senescent cells to die. Senescent cells are also known as “zombie cells” – they are cells that have stopped dividing but never died off. They continue to run amok in the body, soaking energy and, at times, participating in shenanigans that eventually cause health problems.
To me, it made sense to be able to take out these cells if at all possible. There are some options out there for senolytics so do some research to see if this is something that makes sense for you.
This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive but it hopefully spurs some thinking. Whatever you decide to “clean up”, get started, today, on even the smallest step to build some momentum.
