Withdrawal

I'm supposed to be having withdrawal symptoms from not drinking Diet Coke. I'm going on day three of not consuming aspartame and it's going better than I thought it would. For probably the past 10 years I drank a diet soda pop a day, usually caffeine loaded. After talking with a friend (visit her at: www.homeschoolblogger.com/bethanyrae) about some physical symptoms I've been experiencing I decided to give up good old nutra sweet. I know that it's only been two days, but I haven't had any of those symptoms in that period of time. I sure do hope it continues to go well, because some of these things were really bothering me.

Here's another "habit" I've given up: shampoo containing sodium lauryl sulfate. I've researched this ingredient a bit and have found that it causes big problems in people. It's a chemical, a poisonous one, that is in almost every product you can buy from toothpaste to shampoo to degreasers. It's what makes a product really suds up and it fools you into thinking you're getting clean.

I know the chemical is bad because our third son, Evan, broke out in huge painful purple boils (on his chest and shoulders) about a year ago. I began making my own laundry soap at that time and the boils disappeared within a couple of weeks. Nothing else helped before that. At the same time he broke out with lots and lots of "pimples" on his forehead. The pediatrician prescribed an acne cream and called it teenage acne. Well, Evan used that cream faithfully for months with no results. I began making homemade shampoo containing NO sodium lauryl sulfate and guess what? It only took a week for the forehead to clear up. Now he has lots of scarring, but I'm hoping that a rose water solution will help them disappear.

These are a lot of words to say that I believe we should be very careful what we put in our bodies and what we put on them.