A Journey Through Hormone-Balancing
(aka Cutting out Plastics)
Tynan Rhea, 5 AUG 2015
The other day a friend of mine came over and asked me where my garbage was. I said in the kitchen under the window. “This? But it’s so tiny!”
“I don’t make a lot of garbage.”
“What do you eat?” she said.
“Food.” I said.
She looked in my fridge. “Huh.”
I am fairly self-righteously proud of the lack of garbage I create in my home, especially compared to the amount of garbage I used to accumulate. It was a conscious decision I made only about a year ago, but I’ve already cut down on quite a bit of crap.
I have to admit, I didn’t have the Earth’s interests in mind when I started taking plastic out of my life. I was trying to get my hormonal-shit-together.
Enter, Tracey Tief.
I actually met Tracey a few years prior in search of non-hormonal birth control. I was engaged at the time and latex, the pill and I aren’t friends. It turned out Tracey sold FemCaps and Caya Diaphragms for the same reasons she was anti-plastics.
Enter, xenoestrogens.
Simply put, xenoestrogens are synthetic chemicals that mimic estrogen in the body. They can be found in pollutants and leeching out of plastics which get into our food or soaked-up by our bodies through our skin. The problem is when they get into our bodies (men and women alike) they block estrogen receptors, which can cause symptoms of estrogen-deficiency, estrogen-dominance, or both. Before plastics, if a person was hormonally imbalanced it usually meant they were estrogen-deficient. Plastics changed all that.
Tracey recommended a tincture, a balm, and conscious consideration of the moon cycle (which I’ll cover in a later post). Then she warned, “These things will help, but they won’t work unless you cut plastic out of your life.”
I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, so I started slow. First and foremost, I stopped buying any foods wrapped in plastic. I brought my own cloth bags to the grocery store. No more pre-washed plastic boxed spinach. No more bags of carrots. No more ketchup bottles. Still spinach, still carrots, still ketchup, just not the ones unnecessarily packaged in plastic. There are varying degrees of how hardcore I’ll be. Aluminum cans and juice boxes are lined with plastic on the inside, for instance. Perrier lemon water over a can of ginger ale, bottle of water, or carton of apple juice. Etc. Etc. I found this part surprisingly easy, but I forget that many people like to buy chicken in a box, in a plastic bag. Or a frozen bag of broccoli. I had a damaged digestive system for most of my adult life at that point so I’d been without pre-made meals for years. Now, if I have even so much as a meatball from a box I cramp and bloat to the point of not being able to stand-up straight.
The next step was switching to organic meat and dairy. Milk in glass jars. Steak wrapped in paper. In the city, it’s not hard (don’t get down on yourself for that which you can’t change, and try to focus as much as you can on things you can change).
I started saving money, surprisingly. It turns out food not in plastic is cheaper. The next step was chucking all my plastic kitchen utensils (especially my plastic cutting boards) in favour of metal or even better, wood. Wood is naturally anti-bacterial, so why not, right? I even bought some stainless steal food containers (a fairly expensive purchase but also the best food containers I’ve ever owned. My left overs didn’t have that lingering musk it used to, which I now recognize as having been from the plastic. Duh). I also started saving all my glass jars from salsas, tomato sauce, pickles and so forth. An excellent way to spend no extra money on food containers.
I also got really picky about my beauty care products. My face cream and lip balm are packaged in glass jars. My shampoo is liquified African black soap in an aluminum bottle (admittedly, plastic pump top). My tooth paste does come in a plastic tube, but my toothbrush is made of bamboo. I even switched to a special lemon juice and sugar product for hair removal with reusable cloth strips. I don’t wear a lot of make-up, so I made my own blush from mineral powder that I keep in an aluminum canister.
My last step, which I honestly have yet to embark on, is cutting out plastic from my meals on-the-go. Generally, cooking at home is better because I know my utensils are good materials, my food wasn’t wrapped in plastic, and my sauces are freshly made at home (if you read labels on pre-made food you’ll notice, there’s sometimes plastic IN the food. IN THE FOOD MAN). But I’m doing the-city-thing. The working-five-jobs-thing and sometimes I get hungry when I’m not at home. C’est la vive.
So, unintentionally, I no longer need a large garbage can. And my friends feel compelled to look in my fridge.
Over the last year, I’ve experienced a significant change and most of it has been in my head. No, really. I have struggled with addiction, depression, anxiety, all that fun stuff. All of these are intensely aggravated the week leading up to my period giving me a bad case of PMS. It was like a pittbull with rabies was screaming at me in my head. But now when I take my tincture of Vitex diligently, follow the moon, and boost my progesterone production with Tracey’s magical belly cream during the week leading up to my period, the PMS is like a pooch who’s been stirred during sleep. Still there, but too tired to care. A year prior I’d tried to start the same regime with little change. So I stopped everything until I got my plastic under control. Then the tincture, the cream, the moon, had enough space to create a shift.
A shift not just for me and my body, the mighty planet it is, but also for Mother Earth.
Written by Tynan Rhea; Aromatherapy Apprentice at Anarres Apothecary, Doula with the Sisterhood Wellness Collective, Sexual Health Educator and sole proprietor of RheaMoonHealth.com, and anti-plastic enthusiast. For guidance on your personal journey through hormone-balancing, contact Tynan directly: Tynan@AnarresHealth.ca