Compromise

When making the transition towards organic and detoxing my life, I had a lot of questions not only about what was healthy, but what is cheap? Like many people, I have to balance my desire for a pure lifestyle with what is reasonable.


Some of the best ways I’ve found is to be willing to make compromises. However, these need to be safe compromises. These include taking things slow. Instead of quitting all conventional cleaners and foods cold turkey, I would take things a step at a time. For every commercial cleaner I used up, I would replace it with a natural one or make a bottle of baking soda, vinegar mix. For every eyeliner I bought that wasn’t organic, I’d make sure to buy natural, organic lipstick – haha.

I did learn a few tricks though:

When it comes to buying produce, buy organic staples in the kitchen. For example, I make sure to buy organic potatoes. We eat them all the time and potatoes tend to leech toxins in the soil so easily. On the other hand I don’t stress over buying onions organic as they’ve been shown to be less likely to pull in toxins.

Here’s a short list of fruits and veggies to buy organic as they are the most likely to be filled with toxins:

Apples

Pears

Celery

Cherries

Grapes

Kale

Peaches

Strawberries

Lettuce

Nectarines

Carrots

Spinach

Sweet Bell Peppers

A short list of non-organic produce you may not need to worry about as much:

Asparagus

Avocados

Broccoli

Cabbage

Eggplant

Onion

Sweet corn, peas and potatoes

Tomatoes

Mango

Watermelon

These lists are edited from the 2009 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides.



Also to add to the list of things I’ve done to go green in the last post:

Add a bottle of water to the back of my toilet tank to prevent an unnecessary waste of water

Buy a EPEAT Gold label laptop made with recycled materials

Obtain a used, rather than new mattress

Give kudos to clubs for recycling bins