Category: General Conversation

The Changing World

The world is changed.

I feel it in the water.

I feel it in the earth.

I smell it in the air.

Much that once was is lost.

Galadriel – The Lord of the Rings

It feels like another lifetime ago when I wrote my last blog post. In reality it has been about five weeks. Covid-19 seems to have altered life almost beyond all recognition.

I was fortunate enough to start a new job just before Coronavirus broke out. I almost thought I wouldn’t have started but I did and was at work for three days before they suspended my training to make way for emergency measures to help deal with the pandemic. I was moved to another department and I am still working every weekday.

I am grateful that I still have the opportunity to go out to work everyday in a world of lockdown. Recently spending four days at home over the Easter Bank Holiday period was so weird. I was bored. I didn’t know what to do with myself but I knew I didn’t want to go outside and do something because being out every weekday and dealing with people from different households to your own can be very stressful, particularly if they do not follow social distances rules and don’t seem to care about the situation.

What is worse is just how negative and hostile the world now seems to be. I almost avoid Facebook now and I have blocked people because of just the negativity and digs people make at random things.

Today, people were getting fed up with Tom Moore and how everyone is making a big deal out of him for basically doing nothing. For those that are not aware. Tom Moore, fought in the Second World War in the Royal Navy and at the age of 99. Decided to do 100 laps of his 25m garden with his walker in the hope of raising money for the NHS. He ambitiously set a target of £1,000 in a hope that friends and family would donate. However, it went viral. At the time of writing this post he has raised over £26 million and is now realising a song in the hope of making it to number 1 to raise yet even more money for the NATIONAL health service. To benefit the nation at a time of an international health pandemic.

I think more than ever I am now learning the need to distance myself from the negativity in life. Focus on enjoying the moment and letting go on the things I cannot control and focusing on the things I can.

I do not know how long this pandemic will last and what the world will look like when it reemerges from lockdown but I am grateful for my health and the lessons I am learning.

Plan of Action: March

Spring is here, maybe? I don’t know. The weather of late has been pretty sad and depressing. It has definitely put my off last month’s plan of walking more. However, I am still trying to make small but permanent changes that will hopefully over this year actually become permanent.

  • Protein Shakes

I started this last month and I’m going to continue in March. My plan is to have 4 scoops a day.

  • Exercise!

Last month didn’t really go down for exercise. My aim is to do 10,000 steps a day with running and walking. I’d also like to start working on my core and strengthening it, but this month will be more trying to work it into my day rather than pushing myself. So I will look at beginners plank challenges and work up to trying to survive a minute of planking (hate planking). My plan is also to get out when the weather is nice but if it is not I will go to the gym…and push myself to actually go.

  • Corset/Waist training

I own a waist trainer and I briefly used to wear it when I slept. However, I have been looking into it a bit more and I read about someone who wears a waist training for Anxiety. Since I am starting a new job this month I really want to focus on trying to find techniques to help my anxiety and depression. I also think that waist training will help to target the area of my body I have self esteem issues. It’s an experiment for a month with an inexpensive waist trainer and I’ll see how it goes.

  • Mindfulness

As mentioned above. I am starting a new job. So I planning to take me time in the evenings to relax and rest. I’m planning to make some cooling DIY sheet masks and I have just purchased an Aromatherapy Humidifier Light. I’m going to focus on relaxing and maybe look into mediation. Also I am going to try body brushing and Gua Sha for my face take the time to do something that feels good and take the time to relax whilst doing it.

  • Vegan-ish

I’d like to try and look at a vegan diet. Now my protein shakes contain Whey powder so they are not vegan. I also want to eat some butter and cheese to help promote healthy hair so there will be some limits to a vegan diet right there. That being said I also want to explore more vegan proteins, more vegetables and would like to aim to have one vegan meal a day. I would also like to try to explore alternatives to bread or a least cutting down my bread consumption, which isn’t high to begin with but I find that quite often when I do not know what to eat I turn to a sandwich and bread as a quick option. I’d like to try to meal prep a little more and look at freezing more portions of healthy meal preps and looking for healthier options when I am in that ‘I don’t know what to eat’ phase.

  • Water

I did have a pretty revolutionary break through with water last month. I’ve found it slipping a little bit this last two days. So that slight transgression needs to be nipped in the bud because it becomes a regression back into old habits.

I’ll check back in at the end of the month to see how well my goals have been progressing.

February in Review

How cool is today? The 29th of February. This is the 9th Leap Year I have lived through and the 8th 29th of February I have seen (I wasn’t born in February 1988 to officially see it). I cannot believe we have two months of 2020 under our belts already. Where has the time gone?

I think February has been a productive month in a sense. Looking back over my goals for February I wanted to:

  • Do 10,000 steps a day
  • Introduce Protein Shakes to my diet
  • Not calorie count
  • Up my Water consumption

The 10,000 steps a day was a fail. I started off so well and pushed myself to go out…but when Storms Ciara and Dennis developed, I did not want to go out walking in the at times 80mph winds and the impressive rains. So I did not do as many steps as I would have liked to. I think hopefully with the turning point in seasons, we are very much at the end of winter so hopefully with Spring the weather will improve to encourage outdoor activity.

I did write a first impressions of the Protein Shakes, why I choose them and I still want to post this, even though my first impressions were over a month ago now. I would like to give a more prolonged view of them. The thing that held me back was taking photos. I did introduce protein shakes to my diet and stuck to it really well until perhaps this past week. With a new month though I am going to remotivate myself to take them.

I was successful in not calorie counting. I did make some delicious meal preps that focused on putting a lot of vegetables and looking at healthier options. This past week I have slipped though so I would to jump back onto that. I have also been looking at promoting healthy hair, whilst I think the quality and condition of my hair is very good, I would like to continue looking after it. I think it is important to keep a certain amount of good oils and fats in your diet so I have been trying to eat cheese and butter regularly. I think with the addition of Protein Shakes I am going to start getting a lot more protein into my diet to help with healthy hair promotion.

Water. By far this month I am impressed with my water consumption. I posted that the Microcurrent Facial was instrumental in getting me to drink water, prue water, not mixed with squash. I have largely drank either 1,600 or 1,200ml of water everyday since the 10th February. However, for March I am thinking of dropping this down to a goal of 800ml to 1,200ml. If you are not used to drinking at lot of water or you are not sweating it out…you body in the beginning does not know what to do with all this water, particularly as it is winter – you are not losing it through sweat as much. So I find I am going to the toilet ALL the time. Well that is an exaggeration but it feels like I need to go a lot more than normal, so I am cutting down for the moment. If I find myself becoming thirsty I will drink more.

I am really impressed though. This month I am not as bloated as I have been previously and I am finding I am not conscious about my weight. My issue I have always had is my stomach. I am happy with my body apart from my stomach which I felt was were I was carrying my stomach. Whilst it is still not flat and beautiful it is not as bloated as it used to be and this makes me feel better. I think I need to look into core exercising. Something I’ve never really done before to see if I can tone my stomach. I think trying to boost a healthy diet and tone my problem area is more important than what the scales are telling me and that I need to count calories.

Devacurl: What Should We Be Learning?

For the past two days I have been watching YouTube videos about a haircare product brand called Devacurl.

I am based in the UK and I have straight, straight hair – like no curl or wave whatsoever. No joke, I onced curled my hair and it ended up straighter than when I started. Another time, I went out with curly hair and my friend walking behind me asked if I decided not to curl the back. I curled it – the curls just fell out before my night out had even begun. Naturally, coming from an Irish family though, I love Irish dancing and Irish dance music (it is literally music for my soul) and I dream of curly hair like the beautiful Gillian Norris and would have killed to have beautiful curly hair. So not only was it difficult for me to potentially get Devacurl products, as I think they have only just begun distribution to outside America (correct me if I am wrong)…but I would have zero need for them on my hair. That does not mean I cannot sympathise with people experiencing potential reactions to Devacurl. When I was 19 I developed Alopecia (hair loss). I don’t really know what caused my Alopecia. I remember sitting in a Doctor’s Office with the Doctor saying, that you are experiencing Alopecia. We do not know what causes it. We do not know what can be used to treat it. We cannot tell you how much hair you could lose. We cannot tell you if your hair will grow back. But there might be around an 80 percent chance that if your hair does regrow it could fall out again. We can do some blood tests and investigate a bit. My blood tests came back fine I had no underlying health issues. I do not know what caused my Alopecia. SO I know how devastating it is to be in a society that is so beauty conscious and experience hair loss.

However, just because you do not use a product on your hair, does not mean that you should ignore what people are potentially saying or experiencing from using a product. I once volunteered in a school and there was a class in which the teacher was going through the answers to a recent GCSE test paper. She was giving the class the model answers to the most popular set of questions answered. There was a girl sitting there chatting with her friend. I asked her why she was not listening to the teacher and not writing the information down. Her response was that was not the question she had answered. I said it does not matter. She is giving you a model answer, that is great for the information alone. You will firstly learn something. You will learn how to build and structure a model answer for a future exam you are taking next year. You could also be given a model answer for a question that could likely come up in an exam because there is a limited about of material covered in the syllabus and often examiners do repeat questions or word questions in similar ways; so you could very well have the same if not a very similar question on your paper. The girl did not care, she did not write down the answers. However, I think this potential Devacurl situation has a similar parallel. Just because you do not use Devacurl and just because you did not use Wen Haircare (I so wanted to use Wen Haircare products when I saw a glossy hair advertisement for them), does not mean you should not learn the lessons that are being taught from these two companies.

In brief, there may be people reading this that have no idea about Wen Haircare and Devacurl so let me explain.

Wen Haircase is a company that specialised in a cleansing conditioner type product. It was supposed to revolutionise the way people washed their hair. I first came across it when I was looking to move away from commercial haircare and follow the No Poo method (basically giving up using commercial foaming shampoo and looking to reduce how much oil is stripped from the hair whilst washing. I did document that journey on my old blog and I no longer follow a No Poo method). Wen’s Cleansing Conditioner was a thick conditioner like substance that was not cheap, and it required you to use a lot of product, from what I remember it could be up to 16 pumps, four pumps on each section of hair, with your head being divided into four sections. Wash off and get beautiful hair or so you thought. If you did get beautiful hair though it was temporary and a lot of people using the product reported hair loss. So much so that a lawsuit was filed and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began to look into the product. When I went to look for the product information just now I found I could not buy products directly from the Wen website and was directed to Amazon and the Cleansing Conditioner is not sold on there. The FDA reported that they had received 1,386 complaints up to the 15th November 2016. A subsequent investigation by the FDA into Wen Haircare found that the company had more than 21,000 complaints into the use of their product and the reporting of hair loss, hair breakage and hair balding.

However, what the Wen Haircare scandal highlighted was just how unregulated the hair and beauty industry is in America. The law in the US does not require companies to share a beauty company’s safety information nor the number or nature of complaints it’s products receive. The FDA said that although still in the process of conducting an investigation, it did not know what effect Wen Haircare was having to people to cause a hair loss reaction. It also stated that Wen Haircare could also not provide a correlation to their hair product and hair loss. More alarming is what really the FDA can do about a product. Firstly, it could tackle a product that did not comply with the law (if it is adulterated or misadvertised). It could work with law enforcement to seize a product to prevent it being sold on the market but it cannot recall a product off the market. It can only request that a company does recall it. Now, I live in the UK. I could not tell you how products are tested and what safety standards are in place. I know that all good imported into Mainland China have to be tested on Animals, which is why a lot of companies choose not to distribute their products in China, or even in Chinese Airports which can be subjected to random (not mandatory on all products) Animal testing.

Now, fast forward to Devacurl. Stephanie Mero, who has the instagram tag of @thecurlninja started reporting her hair issues and concerns that it was linked to Devacurl six months ago. Over the past two weeks to a month this issue has exploded with more people reporting similar issues and a lawsuit has been filed against Devacurl. Now Stephanie Mero, reported that her hair reacted very badly when she attempted to dye her blonde and ended up with dark purple hair. That should not happen. She noticed on herself and her clients (she’s a hair stylist) that their hair was being damaged. Issues being reported include suffering dryness, hair breakage, loss of density, scalp irritation, burning sensations, dandruff and baldness. Stephanie has also developed Raynaud’s phenomenon which has been also reported by others in the Facebook support group. Now Mero was alarmed when she read that Vinyl Chloride exposure could cause Raynaud’s phenomenon. Why is that important?

Well, Devacurl retains samples from their batches and they had released statements saying they have tested them and the product is fine. Yet Mero does not necessarily think it is the formulation of the product that is the issue. It could be what the product is packaged in or how it is distributed or a combination of the two. So Devacurl makes the product and retains a sample of that product. The product is then packaged and shipped off. So if the issue is not in the formulation of the product, but the packaging and the distribution then Devacurl’s sample would not show any issue. So the FDA is relying on Company’s doing their own tests to maintain the product is safe, they are only testing the batch product. Not the product on the shelf, not the product in your home.

From making the product and taking the sample. There are then multiple more steps from adding it to the packaging, to transporting it from the origin of manufacture to the place of sale, to the consumer. There can be a lot of additional steps. Mero believes that perhaps something in the distribution phase or the packaging is causing a problem. Now if Devacurl has not reformulated their products it would not be the formula that is the problem. Yet, over the past year or so that Mero has been noticing changes to her hair, and doing some subsequent digging there is a report that suggests this may coincide with Devacurl potentially began changing the way they package and distribute their products.

Now, why is this important? Mero was concerned that Reynaud’s phenomenon could be caused by Vinyl Chloride, which is used to make Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), a plastic. Now, Mero is not saying Devacurl has caused her Reynaud’s phenomenon. She is merely stating that she has Reynaud’s phenomenon and that a potential component of plastic can cause Reynaud’s phenomenon. This highlights that perhaps how a product is stored before it reaches the consumer and what it is stored in is just as important as the formulation of the product itself.

Now the lesson I was beginning to learn by watching skincare videos and I began to learn when I started No Poo is: What am I putting onto my skin and my hair? Do I know? Honestly, I sometimes use Honey, Lemon and Bananas in my hair and skincare routine. I know what I am putting on my face and hair then. I make my own soap, sometimes I use it on my face and hair, but mostly on my body. I know all the ingredients that go into the soap I make, but I don’t really understand the chemical reaction of saponification (the process of turning oils into soap) and how that alters chemicals. I also heard about the hype and wonderful benefits of Coconut Oil, one of the oils I use in my soap, but there has been a bit of a backlash questioning if Coconut Oil is actually that great for your hair and face.

One of the things that drew me to No Poo in the beginning was that prior to the 1930s, when commercial shampoo as we know it came into being. Women did not really wash their hair anywhere near the amount we are used to today. The Victorians were very particularly about how often they washed their hair, about once a month. We see from photos that their hair was beautiful. Personally for me I would LOVE to go a month without needing to wash my hair and it look great. Who wouldn’t? It may also seem that because we now wash are hair more regularly because of commercial haircare products that potentially we are stepping away from remedies in the past that were better for your hair? BUT, the old methods don’t necessarily mean they were any good. Queen Elizabeth I, suffered from the Pox, had awful scars on her face and used to cover it with a thick white paste/powder…that contained Arsenic. Arsenic was a very popular method of poisoning because it was so readily available.

The message I am taking from this is to really begin to think about what products I am putting onto my face, how they are packaged and how far along in the distribution phase (in terms of time since manufacture and location and methods of transport) am I from the product. Just because a product has a big chemically important name does not mean it is necessarily bad for you. Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it is going to be great for you (I used to wash my hair with Baking Soda, and with Rye Flour, my hair wasn’t happy with the results. I wasn’t happy with the results and I am now using commercial shampoo).

I think for me, it is time to look at the ingredient lists, question what is contained within them. Question is this safe to put on me? In producing the product, is it causing a negative impact on the environment? Is the packaging having a negative effect on the product? Is the packaging having a negative effect on the planet? How could the distribution of the product affect the product? Does the company have full control over that? Does it store the product in it’s own warehouses? Does it rely on another company to do that? Does that company store the product according to the manufacturer’s guidelines? Does the store/supplier I buy it from store it safely? How old is the product when I get it?

I currently rely on the fact that I pay for products and the amount I pay equals quality and efficacy. Yet, companies may not always be passionate about their product being the best quality it can be or be kind to the environment. They might just be driven by profit and as a result people might be being hurt by that. In writing this I am beginning to internalise what I am thinking by watching this products and it has helped me to question what I am putting on my face and hair – and if it is good for me. I hope in voicing this, you may also begin to consider these things and I hope that it has a positive impact on you.

January in Review

So 2020 already has a month under it’s belt and it seems scary that the time has flown by so quickly!

In terms of successful keeping on New Year’s Resolutions. I think I have broken every single one already. However, it is not a failure. It is incredibly difficult to set resolutions with the aim of overhauling your life and stick to it religiously. Old habits need time to be unlearnt and new ones take time to adopt.

For me, my major stumbling block this month was depression. I suffer was Anxiety and Depression. I went back on medication at the end of November and have had a wave of side effects, heart palpitations and feeling incredibly anxious gave way to exhaustion. I have been so tired for weeks and it has been a real struggle to do anything, let alone getting on a hoodie and some trainers to go out in the wet and a cold for a run (I hate the wet anyway and hate water hitting my face).

I’ve been craving foods I like, sugary snack foods, crisps, chocolate, cola. Completely wrong to eat but they make me in the short term feel better.

My quest to read books with the aim of one every three weeks also has not happened yet. I’m halfway through one and I am not sure if that it because I’m not gelling with the characters in the book or I am not used to reading fiction.

Tomorrow, is February though, a new month. A chance to turn the page, literally in my journal’s case and have a fresh start, a new blank spread to fill in February. I’m going to get back on it and start again and try to slowly break down those old habits and work on forming new more positive ones.

New Beginnings…

A photo I took in 2019 in a nearby park. Thought it symbolised the beginning of this journey nicely.

Hello, I’m Emma and welcome to my blog. It’s the 1st of January 2020, so I imagine today…the day of fresh beginnings and new starts…is a day when a lot of new blogs are starting and this blog is embracing and jumping on that age-old tradition.

This is not my first blog. I have had a few over the last six years. I needed to start one for university, to track progress on an extra-curricular activity I was doing. I enjoyed blogging that experience, writing over the summer for an assessment-based element of the programme I was taking. It is a blog that still exists, it has never been made public.

My second, very brief experience of a blog, started where I attempted to have the random musings of a second-year history student blogging about the current trends of historical thinking, various topics, gaps in the literature. However, in truth, two blog posts in and I had run out of momentum, run out of steam and honestly, I did not have the best university experience. University for me was a battleground, turning up to classes, writing assignments and generally trying to survive it to get to the end goal of getting a degree became an extreme challenge. The blog was just too short narrow a subject, in a field I just was not enjoying at that time and an additional task I did not have time to do. It died a death very, very quickly. I may revisit those two blogs and incorporate them into this blog at some point.

My third blog was my most successful. I started it in August 2015, two summers on from my first blog. It achieved 201 posts and my last post was in October 2018. I’ve not blogged since then. To overcome the problem of a lack of content from my second blog, I incorporated a lot of my life into that blog, various things I was doing, experimenting with and writing reviews of films I saw at the cinema. I think that including elements of that blog, such as the film reviews was a mistake. I saw a lot of films. I had a cinema card where you pay a set amount a month and watch as many as you like for the set monthly price. Often, I could not keep up with the blog posts of each film and in reality, I was not that into films, directors, cinematography from a point where I could contribute meaningfully to a discussion on Films and cinematography. I felt that I was hard-pressed to review a film and I did not enjoy writing the reviews. There were also other elements, a No-Poo Hair Journey (I abandoned that and I am currently full on #TeamShampoo, if there is such a thing?!), I loved using a Filofax and planning, making pages and some of my most successful elements of that blog were those (with the help of Mr Philofaxy himself, Steve Morton who helped to support my blog writing and try to get me into the world of youtube filming). However, life, depression and anxiety got in the way and the blog did die a slow death this time around.

I discussed with my penpal and friend Nicole, about wanting to blog but whether to revive my third blog or start again, I gave her my pros and cons of starting a new blog versus reviving the old one. To her, it seemed like a no-brainer to start again, although she did not quite agree on my waiting until the 1st January 2020 (I kind of agree with her because I actually started writing this blog post on the 9th November 2019…) but there was something positive and amazing about a new start for January that I always try and embrace. One of the cons though was I had posts on the other blog, themes that I might want to continue and I was not ready to abandon them. The work around to that is that you may see elements and reworked posts from that blog come into this one. I still have similar interests from that blog, I still want to write about the same subjects, but I needed that break, that new journey, that new start. However, like everything, A new start comes from somewhere and it is often part-way through that journey of life, so there is a history there. As I have established with this post.

I enjoy writing and now that University has gone, I do not have the forced need to write and research anymore. They are wasted skills; I want to expand more about that. I want to journal and maybe this blog is a digital way of journaling.

What direction is this blog going to go in? I do not know. I cannot tell you. It will be very organic it will grow and reflect my life, my interests, things I have visited. I would like to include some photos if and when I take them. Watch this space. Come on my journey with me and hopefully enjoy the ride. I will try to keep it organised, categorise themes and topics so you will be able to explore elements of it you want to explore and not filter through bits that do not interest you.

I feel that the words of J.R.R. Tolkien resonate with me now…

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

― Bilbo Baggins to Frodo Baggins J.R.R. Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings

I very much would like to be swept off with this journey, this blog, my life, but I think I might need to keep my feet a little bit slow and steady to try to work on consistency and to keep this blog going.

For now, I’ll leave it there for my first post, I hope you enjoyed reading it. I hope you enjoy what is to come.