The room you are standing in
The cheapest thing I ever did.
Before any of the supplements or the protocols, there was a trash bag and two weeks of putting nothing on my skin, and it gave me back about seven hours of every day.
I was sleeping sixteen hours a day and still falling asleep at the kitchen table.
This was after Ireland, after a nurse practitioner told me my labs were normal, and after Dr. Dramov read the same bloodwork and found the Hashimoto’s. I had Izabella Wentz’s protocol in front of me, and I started with the part of it that cost nothing.
I did not know what I was looking at. I went through the house and gathered the laundry products, the cleaning products, the skincare and the hair products, and I scanned what I could with a product app, which was the best tool I had at the time. Anything that came back badly went into a trash bag and out of the house. Then I put nothing on my body or my hair for two weeks.
My days at that point ran like this. Drop the youngest at preschool, drop the older two at the classical school they attended half time, drive home, sleep, get up and collect them, then fall asleep again later while we did homework at the table. Sixteen hours, and I was still tired.
After the two weeks I was sleeping about nine, and the naps stopped. It was not gradual and it did not take months.
That was turning off the kitchen sink instead of mopping the floor.
Your body is reading the room.
A body is not built only out of food and minerals. It is built out of the information it receives about where it is, what time it is, and what season it is. Light, contact with the ground, and the chemistry of everything you put on your skin and breathe inside your own house are all part of that information.
Load matters more than any single item. No one product on my bathroom shelf was going to create the burden that had my body sleeping sixteen hours a day. All of them together, landing on a body already short of what it needed to process them, was a different question, and that is why taking a great deal out at once did something that swapping one shampoo never would have.
This is what I call total toxic load, and you will see the same idea called body burden or total toxic burden depending on who is writing, and it is what I am actually looking at rather than any one ingredient.
What the body reads
Light is a signal before it is a comfort.
Natural light early in the day sets the body clock, and true darkness at night protects it. That signal reaches more than sleep, as the same clock touches appetite, blood sugar and hormones, which is why light sits upstream of several foundations rather than belonging to Sleep alone.
The rule is the right light at the right time rather than simply more light. Outside in the morning, even on a grey Oregon day, does more than a bright bulb indoors. And a genuinely dark bedroom is worth more than most of the things people buy to help them sleep.
The ground itself.
A body thrives in contact with the earth, and most of us have kept rubber, concrete and flooring between ourselves and it for our whole lives. The research on grounding is thinner than its advocates suggest and more interesting than its critics allow, and I am not going to oversell it to you.
What I will say is that it costs nothing, it asks nothing of a depleted system, and nobody has ever been harmed by standing on grass. That combination is rare enough to be worth taking.
Start by taking things away.
If you do one thing from this page, do this one. Go through the house and gather what goes on your skin, in your laundry, and on your surfaces. You do not need to know the chemistry, and I did not either. You need to find out how much of it you have never once looked at, and it is usually more than you expect.
Most people find that almost nothing they own passes, so it helps to start somewhere rather than everywhere. Fragrance first. The word covers a mixture nobody is required to disclose, it turns up in laundry detergent and shampoo and dish soap and hand cream, and for anyone at all sensitive it is usually the loudest thing in the house. After that, work by contact rather than by category, as what sits on you longest and covers the most of you matters more than what you use once a week on a small patch. Laundry detergent stays against your skin all day, and a lipstick does not.
The test everybody repeats is to avoid anything you cannot pronounce, and it is a poor one. Plenty of harmless things have long names, and some of the worst offenders are short and easy to say, so it sorts by how a word looks rather than by what it does. A better rough start is whether your great-grandmother would have recognized the thing. Soap, oil, vinegar, baking soda, salt, beeswax. Pre-industrial rather than pre-1990, and for some of us that is a great-great-grandmother. It is a starting point and not a rule, as a great deal of what our ancestors lived alongside was terrible for them. Nobody wants the lead paint back, or the radium, or the radon nobody knew was in the basement.
Then take two weeks off. Nothing on your skin or your hair that you have not chosen deliberately. Wash with water. It is uncomfortable for about four days and then it stops being uncomfortable.
Bring things back one at a time as you find replacements you are happy with. I went from not knowing what I was looking at to close to expert inside six months, mostly because I looked up every ingredient and every interaction rather than trusting a rating, and the more I learned the cleaner I got. There is no finish line to this. Friends started sending me photographs of bottles from the shop aisle, which is how I ended up as the toxin lady.
The kitchen takes longer.
We traded plastic and nonstick for cast iron, glass, carbon steel and stainless over several years, a pan at a time, as money allowed. We are close to plastic-free now and there is no nonstick in the house, because of what the coating puts into the air when it gets hot rather than because of anything it leaves in the food.
None of that has to happen at once, and trying to do it at once is how people give up.
What this will not do.
A page about household chemicals is the easiest place in this entire industry to frighten somebody, and I am not going to.
Taking the load off did more for me than almost anything else I tried, and it did not fix my thyroid, clear my parasites, or replace a single nutrient I was short of. What it did was take a weight off a body already carrying too much, which is what let everything I did afterward actually work.
I am also unusually chemically sensitive and always have been. Dyes, perfumes and food chemicals have bothered me my whole life, and I used to come out in a rash on my face from makeup. What was dramatic for me may be smaller for you, and smaller is not nothing.
There is also a version of this that goes wrong, where the list of hazards gets long enough that a person starts optimizing and the optimizing becomes the illness. Take the load off, then go and live.
Where to start.
The newsletter takes this and the five foundations one at a time, slowly, with something you can actually do in the week you are having.