What are the bad things in life to be avoided?

Bad things to avoid

My thoughts on this question have changed over recent months, but my answer today is that there are four things that can be avoided if you want to have your life move more in the right direction.  They are (not in any specific order);

• Toxins
• Excess food
• Excess alcohol
• Negative thoughts

Toxins

These are any bad things that get into your body that are harmful to it and then the body tries to get it out again (and hopefully succeeds). These toxins are everywhere – not just in polluted air. The major sources of toxins to worry about are;

• Food (additives, colorings, flavour enhancers, preservatives, aromas, MSG, pesticides, artificial ingredients, etc.)
• Cosmetics (added perfumes, colorings, artificial ingredients, etc.)
• Sunscreens
• Household products (cleaners, soaps, shampoos, etc. – all with toxic chemicals)
• Furniture (eg. with chemical fire retardants)
• Clothing (eg. where heavy metals are used in the coloring)
• Carpets, towels, sheets
• Dental fillings (amalgam)
• Medications (all medicines are toxic to some degree, just look at all the warnings on the pack)
• Vaccinations
• Water (in the US, the standard water supply now has significant traces of anti-biotics)

That’s a huge list and I’m sure I’ve missed a few. Basically anything that’s not natural that comes into contact with our body is most likely toxic. And we commonly forget that our skin is exposed to the outside world and soaking up everything that touches it. Ever wondered where that cream goes when we “rub it in”? It goes into the body. The chemicals make it into the bloodstream. Don’t believe that? How about muscle rubs? That gets to the muscles apparently. How about nicotine patches? They deliver nicotine doses into the bloodstream. It’s true – anything you put on your skin, you’d better be happy to have that stuff in your bloodstream. Some people say that you shouldn’t put anything on your skin that you wouldn’t put in your mouth. That’s true. It’s effectively the same thing for your body.

Now it gets a bit weirder. If you sit on something, sleep on something, touch something that has toxic chemicals, then those chemicals are getting through your skin and potentially into your bloodstream. Then what happens? Your body has to try and flush them out, and that can be hard work. It would be better not to stress out your body with all this extra work getting rid of toxins. The body would be able to do all the other things important things it has to do more effectively if it didn’t have to deal with so many toxins. So, if we progressively reduce our exposure to toxins, then we’d expect our bodies to progressively become healthier and more vibrant.

There are a lot of other toxins and general bad things on the list that I haven’t discussed here. I’ll leave that to future posts.

Excess Food

Even if I can get foods that are relatively toxin free, and are generally nutritious, organic, whole foods, it’s still bad to to eat too much of them. Basically, I would be overloading my body with excess digestion work and, if the food contained quite a lot of sugars and carbohydrates, I might get high levels of glucose in the bloodstream hence needing the pancreas to emit insulin to turn the glucose into fat and store it away. See the point? More work for the body and the potential for unneeded fat deposits to build up. If I were to do this chronically, then a lot of my bodies energy would be diverted to this task instead of other important tasks that the body needs to take care of. Even if the excess food itself is not the direct cause of a problem, the chance of another health issue popping up “out of the blue” is higher because so many of the bodies resources are diverted to dealing with all the food.

Keeping food intake to reasonable levels means the body spends a reasonable time on digestion and has plenty of time to look after all the other processes that must keep running well to be healthy.

Excess Alcohol

I don’t fully understand the process of how the body deals with alcohol. I do know (from Dr. Alejandro Junger’s books, “Clean” and “Clean Gut“) that the body can naturally produce alcohol from the digestion process (a little alcohol can be “fermented”) and the liver has a natural process for dealing with this. But this process is limited. When we drink too much alcohol, the liver can’t deal with it and the alcohol stays in the blood for a long time and the brain is effected by the alcohol in the blood (this is why most people drink alcohol anyway). As soon as you can feel the effect of alcohol in your head, your liver is not coping with it. For me this happens at about two standards drinks. I’ve been observing my body closely for about a year now, and I’m pretty sure that if drink a lot of alcohol in one night my body puts nearly all it’s effort into dealing with the alcohol. I don’t think it’s able to digest the food I’m eating properly. I think it just quickly packs it away as some sort of temporary fat or mucus (I can easily put on several pounds with a couple of days of heavy drinking and then lose it quickly in the few days afterwards with different bowel movements to normal). It seems like my body goes it a “red alert” status because of the toxic levels of alcohol. If my digestion is altered or put on hold, there must be lot of other bodily functions also put on hold.

At the moment, I’m limiting myself to a maximum of one alcoholic drink on any given day (and allowing a “blow-out” of two drinks in a day occasionally). This seems to be working well and I’m feeling good. See this related post as well.

Negative Thoughts

This is a new one on my “avoid” list and I’m just realising how important it is. It’s one of the really bad things. It’s just as important as the other three and maybe it’s the most important. This is going to take a lot of explaining in other posts because, basically, we should never have a negative thought about ourselves. Never! All our thoughts can be positive. The impact this has on the relationship between the conscious and subconscious minds is enormous and the impact on our relationship with nature is huge. Everyone of us would like to receive compliments from our family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and even strangers, but then we spend nearly all of our time putting ourselves down in our heads (or even out loud to ourselves). There is never a case for me to think negatively of myself. If I do something wrong, forgive myself and keep moving on with positive thoughts only. If we try and reduce toxins and eat and drink better, but keep negative thoughts in our minds, we will really have a tough time keeping it up. It’s so important. More on this in later posts.

Think about this. When we were born, did we come with negative thoughts? No. How could we. At the moment of birth we were a perfect part of nature, that’s obviously clear. Things like toxins, poor diet and negative thoughts come later, from our artificial world that we’ve created. Negative thoughts are not natural and they can be eliminated from our heads.

In a strange way, reducing toxins and improving diet make it easier to be positive. Everything is related. The important thing is to try and take small steps in each of these areas and keep taking more small steps. As each small step is successful, the next small step will be even easier. Don’t miss out one of these four areas, or that area will sabotage your gains. Small steps in all four, and keep them going. Little by little. Then you can really make some gains.

Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on the bad things in life to avoid. Thanks.