Balancing your health and your wallet can be, and in most cases is, a very vacillating and tenuous relationship. Put forth your best effort to get healthy and your wallet suffers. Skip out on a few of the healthy suggestions you read in about the local paper and your wallet appreciates it, but your overall well-being suffers.
Let me provide you with a glaring example: It is strongly suggested that you avoid exposure to Xenoestrogens: these environmental estrogen-like compounds can have dire effects on your mental, physical, and emotional health. To avoid them, you would have to never again eat or drink from a plastic or Styrofoam container, or buy foods in metal containers. Instead, you would utilize only glass, ceramic, or stoneware food, drink, and cooking containers.
You would have to get rid of all of your furniture, clothes, mattresses, and fabrics with flame-retardant (that’s everything you own). You would have to swap the conventional household cleaners, laundry detergent, dryer sheets and dish soap for organic cleaners, or use hydrogen peroxide and baking soda on everything. You would never again use traditional makeup or other personal care products and, instead, use wallet denting organic items – or just don’t use anything and go ‘organic’ yourself.
It is certainly best to avoid these things and it can be done, but to do so you might as well kiss your money good-bye.
Balancing cost and health is manageable if you approach it with, well…balance. Avoid the Xenoestrogens where you can – avoid plastic drinking bottles and don’t use Styrofoam. Occasionally buy organic cleaners to limit your exposure. Take a day or two a week and go au naturel.
But even more important and wallet- saving is to have an overall healthy lifestyle that allows your body to clear itself of Xenoestrogens and other toxins. Exercise to a good hard sweat most days of the week, sit in a sauna when you have the chance, and drink plenty of water (but not from plastic). These are all healthy and wallet-sparing. You can obtain and maintain health and still easily balance your finances.
