Exercise Your Life #5: Clean Your Nest

The grime in your house can contain heavy metals, mold, dust, and pet dander.  These things will never boost your health.  In fact, they can make it worse.  Household filth also brews emotional muck, which can create stress that snowballs into even more health consequences.

A dirty house can cause quite a few health problems:

1.  Heavy Metal Exposure

Our shoes carry in heavy metal contaminants from the environment into our home.  Dust can contain heavy metals, especially lead.  Heavy metals build up in the body and wreck havoc on your health.  It’s not a week’s worth of lead contaminated dust that harms your health, but living in this type of environment day in and day out.  Each heavy metal can bring harm in different ways.  Mercury likes neurological tissues and lead likes the bones.  It’s easier to minimize heavy metal exposure rather than trying to get it out of your body later.  It’s a real pain in the you know what to detox from heavy metals.

To minimize heavy metal exposure in your house, take your shoes off at the door.  Vacuum weekly with a vacuum that contains a HEPA filter.  Change or clean that filter regularly.  Dust weekly.

2.  Allergies to Mold

Mold and moisture are best friends.  Because they are inseparable pals, mold wants to be everywhere that moisture is:  around window molding, bathtubs, and sinks.  But their hangout spots aren’t limited to the bathroom or kitchen.  They are sneaky comrades, and in the right environment, can throw a party on just about anything.

Mold isn’t good for anyone.  If you have any type of respiratory illness, you should especially be keen on ridding your entire home of mold.  Even if you got tested for mold allergies and it came back negative, your body may still react to mold in the form of inflammation.  Over time, inflammation becomes chronic.  Chronic inflammation leads to disease.

To cleanse your home of mold, first treat the cause of the problem:  excess moisture.  Run a fan when you take a shower. Use a dehumidifier if your home tends to be damp.  If you have mold in your home, consider using a ventilating face mask while cleaning it up.  A water and vinegar solution is an excellent non-toxic choice to kill and clean up mold.

3.  Allergies to Dust & Pet Dander

Dust and pet dander are airborne household contaminants.  Many people have allergies to dust and pet dander, but even if there’s no allergy, these airborne dirt specs can still cause inflammation in your body.  If you have seasonal allergies, asthma, eczema, or a chronic respiratory illness, consider treating your body by regularly cleaning your house from these airborne health hazards.

Cleaning your home from dust and pet dander is something that needs to be done on a very regular basis.  If you’re just the average Joe, the following house tasks need to be done weekly for optimal health:  changing bed linens & washing in hot water, dusting, and vacuuming with a vacuum that contains a HEPA filter.  In some cases, weekly cleaning is not frequent enough.

Be careful when you are cleaning your nest!  Don’t make your nest another health hazard by using toxic chemicals to clean it up.  There are plenty of natural alternatives that work just as well, if not better.  As I mentioned earlier, a vinegar and water solution is great for cleaning mold, but it is also an excellent choice for cleaning windows and mirrors.  Baking soda works great against soap grime in sinks and tubs.  For a dusting alternative, I just use an old sock moistened with a dab of water, but you can also find olive oil based recipes online.  You are not doing yourself a health favor if you’re using chemical dusting spray.

Why eat organic, go through the hastle of making organic green smoothies every morning, exercise every day, and shell out cash to see your naturopath, but never clean up the muck in your house that mucks up your health?  If you want to get serious about your health, clean your roost regularly.

What steps are you taking to keep your home a healthy place to live?

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