Ever since I’ve been married, my husband and I have had the same epic battle about deodorant. He would send me to the store to buy deodorant and I’d buy the wrong one without fail. “You only bought the deodorant—I need the antiperspirant AND deodorant.” I won’t gross you out but this man is known for his epic sweating abilities and if you could power a home on sweat, we could probably have provided enough juice for the entire block. OK—maybe that was gross. There is a point to this story, I swear! When I started on my journey to better health, I started taking a closer look at what I was putting not only in my body but on my body, and that included deodorant. The more I read about what was in most deodorants, the less I wanted to use them. I was also reading stories that told of people who stopped using the traditional deodorants and actually started sweating less and this was my experience as well. But my husband didn’t think this included him and so the months and years went by until one day I just bought him some natural deodorant—that’s right, ONLY deodorant–and asked him to give it a chance. He balked but reluctantly agreed to try it.
The first couple of days, he complained that he smelled, and he was sweating. Personally, I really didn’t notice anything different. I told him to give it a try for a little while longer, and then I forgot about it….until one day we were at the store and I checked to see if he wanted to buy some antiperspirant and he said, actually, he wanted to keep trying the new kind a little while longer. I left it at that. After several weeks, he finally told me—“You were right, I don’t sweat nearly as much as I used to. I don’t know how or why, but it actually works.” I nearly keeled over! You don’t even understand how huge this was! I can refer you back to the beginning of this article about how much he sweats…or rather, used to sweat! After all these years, and many unsuccessful industrial-strength antiperspirants, this was life changing.
So what does all this have to do with changing your diet?? Well, it just got me thinking that since we’re young, we’re taught that we need to wear deodorant, or more specifically, we need to use antiperspirant, and if you still sweated a lot, well, you were just weird. So how about when it comes to your food? How long have you been taught that you have to get your protein and iron from meat, your calcium from dairy and healthy fat from salmon? What if you’ve been fed a line about food just like the deodorant? It’s scary to try something new, but sometimes rejecting what you’ve always known to be true reveals a completely new truth, and that’s pretty groovy. So don’t let the idea of a more plant-based diet get discarded because it’s so different than what you’ve always known. Research it for yourself, give it a try, see how it works for you—you just never know, it could solve a problem you’ve always had because you’ve always followed the path most traveled. Forge your own path today—it might be uncomfortable for a little while but who knows what’s on the other side?