from skeptic to advocate

I have always been a fairly health-conscious person.  I am a lifelong athlete, playing soccer at the collegiate level and transitioned to endurance athlete and coach.  With that being said, my health and fitness have ebbed and flowed with life and the changes that come from being a single person to married person to parent.  One of the biggest endurance events that I completed was that of an Infertility Patient.  

I have survived (along with my husband) an unexplained infertility diagnosis and accepted the realization that I would never, experience pregnancy, or the birth of one of my babies.   If you have ever gone through the endurance event of infertility treatments, it tests your strength, your patience, and your faith.  

Then there’s the barrage of rules to follow and I hate to use the term…If you know you know…Eat this, don’t eat that, exercise but not too much, unless you’ve never exercised, cut back on the alcohol, and the caffeine, but don’t go cold turkey because that will shock your body.  Eat lots of pineapples.  Sleep. Go to acupuncture. Most importantly don’t stress.  HA.  Sure thing Karen.  I followed all the rules, and yet I could never get pregnant, not naturally, not with reproductive assistance.  There was one thing I remember the nurse telling me…avoid parabens in your shampoo.  Hmmm ok.  Easy enough.  Go to Whole Foods, get shampoo.  I can make that sacrifice.   I can use hippy shampoo.  

None of that worked and no one could tell me why at 35 I had “aged eggs” or “the egg quality of someone much, much, much older.”  And it was just accepted by all the specialists that most men didn’t have great sperm quality.  What?!  Why is that “normal” to have abnormal sperm?  I mean they only need one good swimmer right? (insert eye roll). After a couple of years and multiple rounds of treatments, I had enough and really couldn’t envision a successful outcome through fertility treatments, so through the miracle of adoption, my husband and I became parents, not once but twice.

A few years later my friend and fellow endurance athlete, Katie Tansey started touting the benefits of clean beauty…and quite frankly I thought  I need botox and about 1,000 hours of sleep.  I had gone back to my favorite shampoo from the salon.   I didn’t have time for this hippy-dippy nonsense.  But the beauty junky was intrigued and always wants to try the next best thing.

And then she told me that there was a lack of regulation within the entire beauty industry which allowed ingredients that were linked to skin allergies, cancer, and infertility to be used in the products that we put on our skin every day.  

So remember those parabens, they weren’t just in shampoo…they were in lotion, moisturizers, color cosmetics, sunscreen, skin care, baby products you name it.  According to the Environmental Working Group, Propylparaben is classified by “The European Chemicals Agency classifies a closely related chemical as a substance of very high concern due to endocrine-disrupting properties and associated effects on male fertility,” according to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) 2020. Substance of very high concern (SVHC).  

I was horrified.  How could the products I was using every day be allowed to be on store shelves, and WHY as an infertility patient not have been better informed?  How could my infertility be “unexplained” by the medical community and at the same time be sold products every day that contained ingredients that were scientifically proven to disrupt my normal hormone function?

So like most things, I wanted to jump all in.  Would I have to throw away thousands of dollars of make-up and skincare?  No, Katie said it’s about progress, not perfection, and being an informed consumer.   Like with food, you have to read the labels.  Wow.  That’s a lot of work.  I can’t even pronounce some of these words…but to be fair I didn’t know how to pronounce calendula either.  One of the best resources for learning about ingredient safety is the Environmental Working Group and their Skin Deep Database®.  While not a perfect ranking system it does allow you to assess the level of risk and concern in 3 areas: Cancer, Developmental & Reproductive Toxicity, and Allergies & Immunotoxicity.  

“It’s much easier to switch your lipstick than run a marathon if you want to improve your health.”

Thank God for companies like Beautycounter who do the work for you so you can go all in knowing that they have screened all the ingredients they use for safety and choose not to use over 1,400 ingredients linked to health concerns and at the same time produce high performing products that I was used to using…and quite frankly performed better!  My skin felt immediately softer and cleaner and I loved everything she sent.  Not only does Beautycounter provide a safer solution through high-performing products, their goal to empower people like you and me to educate and advocate for more protective health laws in the US and Canada so that everyone has access to safer products.  It’s way easier to switch your lipstick or your sunscreen than it is to run a marathon if you want to improve your health. And it really sings to me that Beautycounter uses education and commerce as a vehicle for change to create a positive impact on all of our health. 

That was 6 years ago, and I am happy to say that my attitude has changed towards clean beauty…I think all beauty should be clean beauty and which is why I partnered with Beautycounter so that I could share what I learned with you too!  Click here and I will send you a box of samples for you to try too.