Soap Nuts: not just for breakfast anymore

I am finishing up my last load of laundry for the week and the bag of soapnuts that I have used for the week will soon go in the compost pile to degrade with the rest of my compost and turn in to loamy soil for my vegetable garden.
Do I have your attention? Do you think I am crazy? Perhaps, but soap nuts are the most natural thing I have found for doing laundry and they really do clean your clothes.
The “nuts” are actually the dried fruit from the Chinese Soapberry tree grown in India and Indonesia. Each tree produces thousands of “fruits” and they fall to the ground, are gathered and dried.
When these soap nuts are added to water they release saponins that make the water very slippery just like chemically laden laundry soaps do only this is the most pure laundry soap you can find. Your clothes come out of the dryer (sorry I don’t have a clothesline here in suburbia) smelling fresh and clean with no chemical residue. They are naturally soft, so you don’t need to add perfumed and dangerous softener sheets.
If you find this intriguing there are several sites that sell soap nuts and a search on Google will reveal the site you would most like to order from or you can go directly to http://www.amazon.com or Mountain Rose Herbs.

P.S. One last note to help you figure it all out. I put 5 soap nuts in the supplied cotton bag at the beginning of my wash week and wash one load of colors, one load of white, one load of towels and one load of something else be it sheets or another load of colored clothes. When they are fully used they turn a grayish color and you throw them out. FABULOUS!

PACE with Kathy Smith

I have had Kathy Smith’s DVD called Functionally Fit Peak Fat Burning (FFPFB) for sometime and enjoy working out to it immensely. It had occurred to me sometime ago that it fit very nicely in to the Progressively Accelerated exercise program that Al Sears devised and I thought it was worth a mention to those who like PACE.

Kathy Smith does it with a bit of humor as she does occasionally make mistakes that are not edited out but I enjoy a smile when I am exercising, so that is alright with me. She takes you through a stretch and warm up and then in to the exercise itself quite effortlessly. The exercises are accelerated for 2 minutes at a time for 6 different segments and following each accelleration there is a cool down that she uses to work your lower body. The total workout is 45 minutes ( longer than Al Sears suggests you need) but it flies by and you feel energized when you are done.  At the very end you can do her stretch or your own stretch. I happen to like the stretch she does on her DVD titled Power Walk for Weight Loss, so I choose to do that when I am done.

I do FFPFB every other day and mix it up with the Power Walk because she works your upper body in that program and it is shorter for those days when you don’t want to spend lots of time getting fit. It also does have you work out at different levels but it is not a PACE type of exercise.

If you  mix this exercise with 5 minutes in front of your Vitamin D sunlamp three times a week and 20 minutes in your Sunlight FIR sauna almost every day you have done everything a body needs to be healthy and you will feel fighting fit.