How Toxins Are Silently Damaging Your Health (and What to Do)

Welcome everyone to today's episode where we'll be discussing the connection between toxins and our overall health and wellbeing with Chelsea Ward, a registered nurse and a functional diagnostic practitioner. Hello and welcome to Beyond Diagnosis, a podcast to raise your awareness, decisions, and voice for alternative practices so you can take back control of your health. I'm Rita De Michele, your host, a mindset and empowerment coach, and the founder of the Onus platform. Join me each week so you can create the health of your dreams. Hello, Chelsea, welcome to the show.

Hey Rita, so great to be here with you tonight. Thank you so much.

Oh, you're welcome. This is a really big topic, toxins. It's almost like a buzzword these days, everyone talking about the toxic Toxicity of this, the toxins in our air, the toxins in our food. Can you break down some of the major players or disruptors we encounter daily, and where are we getting them from?

It really starts with the first thing we put in our mouth from the time we wake up. You know, the air we're breathing, of course, like you mentioned, but I think that food is one of the biggest places that we encounter toxins. So I look at toxin tests pretty much every day with my clients, and I look at environmental toxins, which are in the foods like herbicides, pesticides. I'm looking at heavy metals, and I'm also looking at mycotoxins, which are in— like, they're forming because of mold. And I find that our food is not only sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, but it also has a lot of mold. So we have grains that are carrying mold, things like berries, pistachios, peanuts, coffee. all those things, they are high carriers of mold. So just making sure we're choosing organic foods when possible, that's going to help decrease the amount of mold, but it's also going to help decrease the amount of toxins. And then we can look at— look a little bit deeper from the time we get up. You know, we've had our cup of coffee, potentially moldy, potentially filled with chemicals, uh, potentially, you know, highly processed, and we're not choosing great coffee. And then we go into our bathroom and we start our morning routine, and we start putting on our makeup and our skincare, and we've used our body wash. And the studies are kind of different on how many products or how many chemicals that we're encountering on a daily basis when it comes to those things.

Mm-hmm.

And, but it's hundreds, and we're just putting hundreds of chemicals on our skin. And then our skin is a large organ that is absorbing all of those things that are having a negative impact on our body. And so we're also exposed, like you said, through the air we breathe and the water we drink. But our home is filled with chemicals as well. Most of us are either working from home or working in an office. We are around the furniture that is off-gassing chemicals, fire retardants, those types of things. Our mattresses are covered with that. Our walls, you know, our floors and our carpets that we're walking on every day barefoot, right? We're getting all of those chemicals and we're absorbing them. We're breathing them in. And we're just exposed pretty much every time we turn around if we're indoors. Outdoor is a little bit better, but there are chemicals outside. People are spraying their yards with toxic chemicals.

Yeah.

The rainfall is bringing them into your yard, whether or not you're using them or not. It doesn't matter. Even if you're eating organic, you're still getting rainwater and wash from those non-organic fields that have been sprayed. So I'm seeing people that have lived an organic lifestyle, they're still filled with glyphosate and other herbicides and pesticides. So there's so many different ways that we can get exposed on a day-to-day basis through just living our normal lives.

God, it's scary. It is scary when you, when you actually— if you were to write that as a list, you know, you could be a huge scroll. You know, the amount that we have to deal with. When you say all the toxins in our furniture, our carpet, you know, even the paint on our walls Does that dissipate after a while, or is it always— you know, this is just— it actually wasn't something I was going to bring up, but I'm curious about that from what you were saying. Do those toxins— say you buy, you buy a new, new sofa, a new lounge, you have new carpet laid, and there would be toxins, you can actually smell it. You buy a new car, my God, it's overwhelming, you know, when you get into a new car that's actually been out in the sun. Do those toxins dissipate? Do they break down and don't have such an effect on you after a period of time? Are they, or are they always there and people need to be aware?

A lot of those are embedded in the material. You know, you take something like cotton, and cotton is sprayed with glyphosate, it's sprayed with herbicides, it's sprayed with chemicals, and we're wearing it every day. And they're still, they're creating furniture and things made out of those things. A lot of the chemicals can dissipate, you know, they can become lessened, but they're not going to completely disappear. You know, there's still going to be things. If you turned off all the filtration systems in your home and you turned your air off and you let your home sit for a couple of days, you're going to start to smell that chemical smell again. It's usually going to come back, you know, so it's not going to completely disappear. Of course, it's going to get better.

Mm-hmm.

And newer homes are going to be a lot more toxic. Because they have that fresh chemical, the fresh paint from the wall that you actually can smell. Those are going to be a little bit worse. But for the most part, we're still getting exposed to it because there is protection in, like, say, your mattress, for example. There are fire retardants in there and they are not meant to go away. They're meant to protect your— protect you if there's a fire. You know, baby bedding is the same way.

Mm-hmm.

So you lay your baby down in the bedding. And there's fire retardants in that, so, and it's meant to protect you, so, and it's a chemical, so it will definitely stay around long term.

So when parents are buying all— excuse me— the fire retardant clothing or pajamas or whatever for their kids, thinking they're doing a great thing, which they are, to protect them from fire, you know, and then there's the backlash of It's so toxic, you know, it'd be— anyway, and then we could go down a path with that one. So in what way do, uh, toxins contribute to chronic health, chronic conditions, and where can people start to protect themselves?

It really has a negative impact on the body's ability to get rid of toxins efficiently because we're exposed to so many toxins on a regular basis The body is almost bombarded with them. So we're exposed to about 2.3 pounds of toxins every day. That's the latest I've read in the research as humans, right? So we have to have a way to get rid of those toxins. And the way that we do that is through our breath. When we breathe out, we're breathing out toxicity. We're letting— we're releasing those toxins. We do that through our skin, through sweating. And we also do that through going to the bathroom and pooping good on a regular basis and having those great bowel movements. Our liver is our largest, our biggest detox organ. I like to think of that as kind of the grandfather detox organ. But then we have our kidneys that are detoxing all the time, our brain, a lot of our organs and tissues, our lungs. They're all detoxing on a regular basis. It's a part of their job on a day-to-day basis. And a lot of the healing in the body will take place at night. But because of the amount of toxins that we're exposed to, I don't know that humans were ever intended to be exposed to all the chemicals that we've we are currently exposed to, the organs just become very toxic and they become kind of overloaded and bombarded. And about 10 years ago, I really started a detox journey for myself, just not even realizing I needed it, but, you know, just kind of intuitively, and was really trained by another functional medicine doctor who magically came into my life and helped me understand detox for my own body. And I started using it, and it changed my life. And it's really because we have, we have bombarded these organs, and they're not working efficiently, so they're not draining properly. So your, your liver, for example, is involved in over 200 different processes in the body. And if we don't have proper drainage, and we're not getting rid of toxins, and the liver is constantly worried about the toxic burden on the body and trying to release toxins, then it's never going to be involved in a lot of these other processes that it's supposed to be doing efficiently, right? So now we have a thyroid epidemic. Why do we have that? Well, part of the liver's job is to convert the inactive form of thyroid into the active form of thyroid. So from T4 to T3. And that doesn't happen efficiently if the liver is bombarded With all of these toxins. So we're in toxic burden, we're in toxic overload. And a lot of the time I'll watch people go through a detox program or get rid of a lot of the toxins in their life, and thyroid disease will start to reverse. If there's not damage to the thyroid itself, then you can reverse that. So, and that's one organ system, right? That's one process. But just to answer your question, you know, by that, that one process.

It—

the liver is involved in so many different things in the body that it's every— everything's really happening in a similar way, right? So there's a backup. Estrogen detox doesn't happen. We can talk about hormones for women. You know, we're gaining weight, we're moody, we're, you know, physically tired, we're, we're kind of feeling weepy around our cycles, we're bloated, we're PMSing, we're, you know, struggling through menopause, all the things. And what's going on is that a lot of times we're in a state of estrogen toxicity, and we are not draining estrogen properly because these detox organs are responsible for that. If they don't drain that estrogen, then the body will be signaled that there is enough estrogen on board, and it will stop making its own natural estrogen. But you're gonna have a backup of estrogen as well. So that leads to estrogen dominance, and a lot of these symptoms are because Old estrogen is just in the body not being able to be used, messing up our cycles. And it's all— it all has to do with detox as well.

Wow. So that estrogen gets stored instead of detoxed out. That's amazing. And I don't think many of our listeners would connect— well, I didn't even realize as well that so many processes like that, they will attribute the estrogen to your liver function. Or, you know, because everything's sort of seen in the traditional medical, it's seen in isolation. Like if you've got a thyroid problem, let's treat the thyroid, but they're not maybe associating it to toxicity overload or your liver. And especially for people which I have is the, you know, the MTHFR gene mutation where you don't methylate properly. So all this toxicity is even a bigger burden because to get toxins out is a struggle. And I believe a lot of people do have that as well. So yeah, it's, it's a burden for sure. So what can people do to start to protect themselves?

One thing would be starting with good, healthy nutrition. You know, just focusing on eating organic foods, getting the chemicals and, you know, the toxins out from a food standpoint, and really focusing on, you know, I even go back to the mold in our foods.

Mm-hmm.

You know, and a lot of those are found in grain. They're found in conventional dairy. I didn't mention that one, but, you know, so just really learning those things and paying attention to some of the foods that we've mentioned that are a little bit more moldy. And choose— make sure you choose organic. We have the Environmental Working Group. They put out the Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen every year. So the 2024 just came out, so you can look at that and decide which foods you need to eat organic and which foods are okay in their conventional form. And then I would say the next big thing is our skincare, and that's because we're putting it on our skin. So what we're putting inside of our body and what we're putting on our body is going to be the biggest things that I would focus on first. So skincare, clean up your makeup, make sure you're using clean shampoos, conditioners, all those things for your hair and body, body lotions. And you can use again something like the Environmental Working Group. You can use that app and you can scan products in your home to determine whether or not they have a toxicity score. I usually look at things, anything that has like Less than a four, I'm usually okay with. Right? And the big things for me is I don't want it to have carcinogens or endocrine disruptors. Like those are the big things that I feel like are really kind of like messing us up. If I'm reading the details on those, then I'll just say if I'm yeah, if I'm reading details on those, I'll just kind of look at whether or not the product is. like more of a respiratory issue or if it's more like an endocrine disruptor. So I think your nutrition and your body are the biggest areas that I would focus on.

Just to circle back to that a little bit, could you explain for people who don't know what a carcinogen is and what an endocrine disruptor is? Just touch on those so people can understand or relate it back to themselves.

Of course. So anything that is an endocrine disruptor is going to be disrupting your hormones in some way. So that can be estrogen, or that can be our sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. That can be your thyroid. So I really pay attention to that again because we have this big thyroid epidemic. So they're going to be interfering with your body's natural processes to make hormones, to use hormones efficiently, They can be things that will come into the body and almost mimic hormones or totally just mess your hormones up so bad they don't work right, you know. And so that's more from the endocrine standpoint. So our hormones are running everything in the body. Like, we don't want to mess those up. I don't want to be putting something on my skin every day that's going to cause hormone disruption. So that's one of the big ones that I look at. And then carcinogens are cancer-causing.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So cancer, you know, and we look at it and it's like this big scary thing. And there are ways to improve our chances of not getting cancer. There are ways to resolve cancer if you do get cancer. So, you know, I know that it is like this big scary thing that we don't want to get, but the truth is, is we don't want to get it.

Right.

And it's a lot of times we get it because of abnormal cell activity. And these are like made worse by toxins. And there are certain toxins in our environment that are known to either cause cancer or really increase the risk if we have maybe a genetic predisposition toward cancer, or it can actually cause cancer cells to grow in the body. So certain chemicals we're aware of, and those are labeled as carcinogens. And like, if you're looking at an app, there's plenty of apps out there. Environmental Working Group is not the only app. I'm learning about new ones all the time, but that's just kind of the one I've been going to for years. Think Dirty is another one. So there's several, but they will list these products out, and they'll tell you what type of toxin it is. So they'll say this is going to cause endocrine disruption, disruption, or this is going to cause— this can cause cancer, or this one usually will be more of a respiratory type reaction.

Right.

So if something's a respiratory reaction, like I'm washing my hair with a shampoo that has the potential to cause a respiratory type reaction, well, I, I'm gonna know if I have that, you know, I'm gonna know if something happens. So I don't necessarily worry about things like that as much. And I look at the scores and I kind of determine like what is okay for me and what is not. But if I'm looking at something major that's gonna cause a super disruption in like you know, my hormones or something that's going to impact my health majorly down the road, I'm definitely, you know, avoiding those.

It's around responsibility as well, isn't it? Taking responsibility for what you put in your mouth, on your body, um, whether you smoke, whether you don't, you know, all of those sort of things. Really, you have to think about what you're putting in your shopping basket as well. You know, when you walk around or what you're putting on your body, as, as you said. Is it realistic to live a toxic-free life, or is it more realistic to think, this is everywhere, how can I live a low-tox life? And can you— yeah, can you speak to that?

I love this because You have people on both sides of the coin, and this is— I'm more of that middle-of-the-road person, like, let's really think about this and talk about it logically, right?

Right.

So you have this corner that says that you can't detox, like, that's not possible, you can't get rid of toxins. And then you have this corner that's like the detox junkies. And, you know, I'm— I kind of lean more toward the detox junkie side, I'll tell you, just because I know the impact it's had on my life. But I will say that, no, you're not going to get rid of every toxin in your body. Like, it's And you can't just wash the cells completely clean. You're not going to ever come up with a zero on a tox test. But the other side of that is you want to be doing everything on a regular basis that you can to make sure that you're living a low-tox life. And the sad part that I see, I think, is that we are exposed to all of these toxins and then we change our life and we clean up all these things. And I work with women All the time now, and it's like, okay, I've done all the things. I'm organic. I've cleaned my skincare. I've done all these great things, and I look at their tox test, and it is a wreck still. And I think it's because we're still so bombarded with toxins on a regular basis that our organs are just tired. They're sick. They're not functioning as they should. They're not getting rid of these toxins as they should. We can go down the whole gut microbiome process. And I could talk for days on why that's the case. I'll save that for another day. But I just, um, I want to encourage you, like, while you're cleaning these things up, sometimes there are toxins that can still linger. And that's really the importance of bringing practices in that are going to actually help you detox your body, detox your cells, and things like that. You can do Anything from infrared sauna, you can use castor oil packs, you can use just those natural at-home do-it-yourself things, you can use coffee enemas, like a lot of different things just to kind of help purge toxins out of the body. But you know, sometimes just thinking about going through like phase 1, phase 2 detox products or using detox programs to help you, and the Detox in a Box Over the counter, the teas and things. While they're nice, they can give you some nice herbs and things like that. They're just not going to be enough to take you through a true detox. So detox requires that we go through three phases of detoxification. One, we have to make sure we're moving our bowels and we're releasing the toxins. If not, it's going to start coming through our skin in the form of a rash. We're going to get horrible breath, like all those things, because the toxins are attempting to escape the body. So you gotta make sure you're having good bowel movements, and you have to have certain vitamins, minerals, and amino acids on board for your body to be able to truly detox and start getting rid of these toxins. There are also certain binders that can help in situations where you have heavy metals or environmental toxins. So I use very specific combinations of herbs and things to bind up toxins depending on what's on a person's toxin test. So just making sure that you have an understanding of, you know, like all of this when you're going into it, it's, it's a lot of times good to just work with someone or talk to someone who actually can guide you on some products or things like that if you want to dive deeper. But the first step really is just removing a lot of this stuff from your environment. So many people are just going to feel amazing doing that and they're not going to need to go deeper at all. You know, but a lot of times people say, okay, I did this, but there's still something more. I feel like there's something more that I need to do. And that's really the time when you want to dive in a little bit deeper.

And it sort of sounds— I guess it's, it's where someone's baseline is, whether they can remove things from their environment and, like you were saying, and feel quite good. Maybe their baseline is a little better than someone who's maybe more overloaded, which To me makes sense that this is a little too complex to be doing on your own. Like you were saying, you know, going to get something out of the health food store, the over-the-counter or something like that. That really you need the guidance of a professional. Also, what are some of the main symptoms? Like your clients will come to you if they have, say for example, mold toxicity because that seems to be one that a lot of people are talking about is the mold. So people understand, like, oh, maybe I do have something. Maybe my body is totally overburdened and I'm thinking it's completely something else. What are some of the common symptoms that you see in your clients? What do they present with?

Some people have hardly any symptoms at all, and it's kind of crazy. And I'll go back to a comment that you just made, and that is like, you know, the difference in certain people and do we need to hire an expert and like, how, how do we know? And the thing is, is one of the best things that I do is DNA testing, because that lets me look at a person's methylation, their detoxification, their antioxidation, their vitamin D status. Um, all of these things play a huge role in detox and a person's ability to detox. Now, is that necessary? No, but that can really give us answers as to why you may feel horrible. And you know that you need to detox. Like, I have clients, they would call me and say, hey, can I detox? And I'm like, sure, go ahead. Like, don't ever have to ask me. Like, your body's gonna tell you, you know? And we look at their, like, detoxification status. And they're— they have the genes for poor detoxification pathways. So they feel it, right? Where someone else may not feel the symptoms that they need to detox.

Mm-hmm.

My husband's one of those. I'm like, We're detoxing you. I don't really care. Like, he, he just doesn't feel the impact of anything. Like, he just— and, and 2, some people are more in tune with their body and other people are— they just don't really pay attention. They just kind of like let life go on and they live with their symptoms a lot easier. But a lot of the things that you are going to experience can be things like brain fog, can be foggy vision, or just like just issues with night vision or just eye type symptoms, dry eyes. You can have a cough, so it can be like a dry cough or just clearing your throat a lot. You can have like itchy ears or just like even scaly spots behind your ears, kind of itchy, or itchy like little eyebrows. You can have scaly like skin on your scalp. You can start losing your hair, those types of things. some of those are due to hormones and other things, but they're also related to toxicity. You can have heart palpitations. You can have like smelly armpits, you know, just sweating a lot, or, or even the inability to sweat. So a lot of people will get in a sauna and they say, I get in the sauna and I don't even sweat, you know. So that is a sign that your detox pathways are a little bit clogged up. You can have PMS, like severe menstrual irregularities. I've worked with women who just had unbearable cycles and did detox, never did a hormone test, and completely reversed all of their hormone symptoms. It was all related to toxicity, right? So, um, there's so many things that you can experience— skin conditions, you can have, um, achy joints, and, you know, the list really goes on.

The list is huge. Mm-hmm. It's absolutely—

yeah, it impacts pretty much everything.

It does. It has a huge impact. Does our mindset and our emotional well-being, uh, influence our body's ability to detox? Does that have any correlation at all?

I believe that the, the body is like— it is more than just a physical body, right? And I think that's where we miss it so many times. in medicine is that we kind of silo things and we look at the mind as the mind, and we send these people to get help with that, like the psychologist, psychiatrist, down that path. And then we treat the physical body as symptoms, and we never integrate everything. And so a lot of times you may have someone with chronic health issues, and of course they're depressed because they can't Really, they can't live life, they can't do anything. So of course the physical symptoms there are impacting the mind. But I also noticed that when we do cellular cleansing and we start really doing a lot of deep cleansing in the body, we're peeling back layer after layer after layer. And we start— I like to think of it as like peeling back the layers of an onion. And when we start peeling back those layers, years of just built-up emotions are going to come out. And it's going to— there, people are going to say, I don't know what's wrong, but I feel so angry. I've been so angry through this part of the cleanse. I'm not really sure. Or I feel kind of weepy. I'm not really sure what's going on. So, and the liver really stores a lot of anger. And you know, when you're cleansing just from like hormones and things like that, you can experience more of those just emotional type symptoms.

Mm-hmm.

So it's really all connected. And I think that our mindset really plays a role in how well we heal, how fast we heal too, because I think so many people are like, I need to heal, I want to heal, what do I have to do to heal? And they're doing all the things like it's checking something off a list, right? I'm doing my castor oil pack, I'm going to yoga class, I'm taking my supplements, I'm doing my hot bath, I'm doing like all the things. And it's just like it becomes a list and You become stressed and overwhelmed with this list. The truth is, is that body cannot heal in a state of stress, right? So when we're stressed out, we actually send energy to our extremities. And just like our ancestors running from a tiger, right, our energy is sent to the extremities so that we can protect ourselves from danger. And that means that all of the energy that is needed for healing our main organs, which are at the center of our body, We have nothing there left in our reserves to focus on our healing. And then we, we lay down, we go to bed, we have a million things running through our head, and we don't sleep at night because we're so stressed. Life is stressful. You know, I'm on this healing journey. My life is a wreck. My kids are going crazy, like all this stuff. And then I don't heal because I don't even sleep at night. And your body goes through a lot of repair at night. You know, so you're, you're stressed during the day, so you can't do any healing during the day. You're stressed at night, you're staying up all night, you know, you're not sleeping well, you're not healing at night. So absolutely, it's going to impact it from, you know, and I just gave a million examples, I know, but it impacts it from so many different directions. You know, the mind and the body work so like they need to be in sync.

Absolutely. I love that. I love that because I'm glad you gave so many examples because it's hard. Like you're saying, people do tick things off on a list and they think they've been really help— you know, healthy. And absolutely no judgment whatsoever, but they go, I've had my smoothie, I've gone for a walk, you know, I've stretched, or whatever. But that's not deep enough. We're not going into what really at the, at the core level needs to happen. And maybe they're not just not connecting the fact of my stress is stopping me from getting rid of toxins out of my body, my lack of sleep is making me hold on to those toxins. Um, I don't know if I would have actually connected it all together like that, you know. That is so fascinating. Which brings me to, like, what are then 3 recommendations that you could give our listeners today that they could put into action? to start reducing their toxic load, whether it's physical or emotional or combination? What are 3 things?

One is get back to the basics, get back to nature. You know, we're, we're stuck in front of our technology. We didn't even talk about EMFs. It's another form of technology.

You know, that's because I've got an earthing mat under my feet. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Those, those elect— those just like invisible toxins in our air. So one is just get back to nature, you know, as much as you possibly, possibly can. So that would be getting outside in the mornings and going for a walk in the natural sunlight. No sunglasses, glasses, or contacts if you can, and get the natural sunlight in your eyes. Let your body naturally wake up. Breathe in the fresh air. You might be in a city, but I I promise you it's fresher than what's inside your house. It's going to energize you. And get in nature as much as you can. You know, get your feet in the bare grass, get your body in around trees and just nature and bodies of water if that's possible for you. You're breathing in the immune system of the forest. I love that. And it's amazing for just like boosting your own immune system. You get to borrow the immune system of the forest. Just a couple hours in nature will actually boost your immune system for about 30 days. And the way that that impacts you from a toxic level is amazing because your body is going to be running more efficiently because you're like your gut and all those, you know, just your digestive tract that's involved really hugely when it comes to detox. So if you can work on a lot of those detox organs and you can work on like your liver, all those things, you can boost your immune system. So 80% of your immune system is found in your gut. So if you're boosting all of that and you're improving that, just that entire cycle, then that's gonna help detox. And I would say the, the other thing is really just focus on the low-hanging fruit for you, right? So I talked about some of the big things like focusing on nutrition and the things that you're putting in your body and on your body. Right? So that would be the food that goes in, and then that would be the personal care products. So what are some things that you can really do today that are gonna be great for getting the toxic burden off of you? You know, can you look for different products in your home and say, I'm running out of shampoo, let me look for a nontoxic version? Or I am going to the grocery store this week, can I replace a spice in my spice cabinet? Just one. That's okay. Just one, your favorite one, you know. And can I just buy organic groceries this week? Can I, can I look up the Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, and just like look at their Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen? You can literally like Google right now, type it in your keyboard, Clean 15, Dirty Dozen. The list is gonna pop up for you. Can you shop according to that list? You're really just gonna find those, the low-hanging fruit, the things that seem so super easy for you. to do and just throw that checklist out, you know, that, that to-do list that's adding so much stress to your life already, and give yourself a moment to rest. For me, that's going to be in nature, right? I just said get out in nature, and, and I love nature. And I think that I wasn't always that person that fell in love with nature, you know, but I think that now it is more than just getting out there and it's like taking a walk and there's trees and things like that. It's— I know the properties of nature and what it bears. It's like it has an immune system. It's creation. Like it was created for me to enjoy and love and just— and all those things. And that brings joy if you let it, if you can really kind of be present in that moment and you can really appreciate your surroundings. So that's going to improve the joy factor. that we talked about for all of this to kind of just marry nicely together. So you're approaching this from a mind-body perspective.

Fantastic. God, do I love that statement, that line, you know, the, the forest's immune system. I've never heard that before. That is just brilliant. I love that. So for our listeners who are feeling a little stressed and overwhelmed and they think, you know, I've got work, I've got the family, you know, I've got This pressure, I've got that pressure, and now I have to look at every product. Like, they usually race through the supermarket, know what they want, throw it in their trolley, get out, gotta get back to the— What message would you like to leave our listeners with today to make this whole process maybe just a little easier, or just so they're not adding more stress, so they don't feel more overwhelmed?

So I just spoke with a client yesterday and she, she said, I have revamped my entire, like everything that I have. And she's very sensitive to chemicals. She's sensitive to smells and all those things. And on top of, she wanted everything to be non-toxic, you know? So it was challenging for her to go and find like non-smelling and non-toxic. So, but she said she accepted the stress and the challenge as like, this is a— this was— this is a challenge for me. And in a good, positive way, like, you do this one time and then it's done. Like, you know the brand of shampoo you normally get. So it's gonna be the same way once you make your pantry over, once you make your cabinet over, right? It's gonna be Finding the nontoxic item and then replacing it. So I would say if you're stressed and overwhelmed, just take this as knowledge, right? This is a piece of knowledge. This is something that you learned and know that you're going to be exposed to toxins every single day. I use a nontoxic— I mean, I use a toxic hairspray. I'll be very transparent about that. Most of my home is nontoxic. Everything from cleaning to makeup, all the things. But I like my toxic hairspray and I'm probably going to keep it. You know, it's just I haven't found anything to replace it. So that's to say you will not get rid of everything 100%. You really have to focus on what can I do today? If you go to— and it's just like I said a few minutes ago too, if you just go to the grocery store and can focus on that right there in the moment, it's like— What can, what can I buy that's organic? Or what can I do the next time I run out of something specific? Can I just replace that one item? You know, it doesn't have to be anything. You don't have to go remake your whole life, you know, and just take it one step at a time. I think that's the easiest thing.

Great advice, great advice. And it is, it's just that one thing at a time. Don't overwhelm yourself. Start slow, you know, you'll get there. And like you said before, like we discussed, you're never going to get rid of them all, but a low-tox life is preferable. Chelsea, this has been amazing. I've learned so much, and I'm sure so have our listeners. And you know, it's, it's a big topic, and I really hope that so many people who feel that they've got a toxic burden will reach out to you because all of Chelsea's details will be in the show notes. You can contact her and really do your liver and body a favor. Thank you so much. I appreciate you being on the show.

Thank you, Rita. It's been my pleasure.

Thanks. I would love to know what was the biggest insight or Aha moment you got from this interview, so you can now speak up, take action, and make informed decisions for your health. And if you like this episode, get instant access to your free ebook, Alternative Wisdom: Taking Back Control of Your Health, at life-onus.com.