#136 – Ancestral Habits and Lifestyle Outside of the Kitchen: what we do and why it matters

If we understand the importance of eating nose to tail, preparing bone broth and fermenting our grains, we understand that these ancestral principles for preparing food help our body to benefit more from the food we are eating and to avoid some of the damaging effects of industrial foods.

But are there other areas in our life where industrialized habits, behaviors and products are damaging our bodies and lives and are there ancestral, traditional ways of living we can look back at and try to imitate or recreate in our lives today, for optimal human thriving, longevity and happiness?

Yes, there absolutely are. There are ways of ancestral living that reach beyond the doors of the kitchen that support our habits in the kitchen, and our habits in the kitchen support our life outside. It’s all inextricably interconnected. In this episode we talk about what some of these ancestral aspects of modern life are, and how we have been integrating them and what you can do to bring them into your life today.

We have a further aftershow on our private supporter podcast, Kitchen Table Chats, where we discuss some important habits to cultivate, and we dropped a lot of links and resources in the show notes to support all of what we are discussing today. Rather than push our body to the limits of its tolerance, let’s place ourselves in a prime position for thriving and succeeding, and enjoying our life more every day.

Resources:

Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth

Whoop sleep study (one of many!)

Episode 76: Essential Oils in an Ancestral Kitchen

Episode 37: A Peek into Alison and Rob’s Ancestral Lifestyle

Episode 12: Why I Gave Away My iPhone

Decluttering help from Minimal Mom on YouTube

Whoop Podcast (they are on YouTube also)

Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne  – signs of PTSD in children in heavily programmed lives matching signs of PTSD in children raised in war zones

Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

Whole Body Barefoot: Transitioning Well to Minimal Footwear by Katy Bowman

Move Your DNA by Katy Bowman

Nutritious Movement, Katy’s website

Xero Shoes

Many, many styles of barefoot shoes for all ages and styles: Anya’s Reviews

e-Ink Screen devices

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Transcript:

Alison:
Hello, Andrea. How are you?

Andrea:
Hello, Alison. How are you all the way across the pond?

Alison:
Yeah, I’m hot. It’s very hot here. Anyone in Europe would know really when we’re recording this from the fact that I’m saying there’s a massive heat wave. So I am here in t-shirt and I’m trying to keep the sun away. Although because we’re videoing, I have to have some light here somewhere. So I’m okay. Yeah. How are you?

Andrea:
I’m good.

Alison:
Not in a heat wave over there.

Andrea:
Figuring out the lighting. This is a new curve for us since we’ve lived in land of audio only for so long. But we are, for the listeners’ knowledge, we are fighting our way through learning some YouTube things. Yeah, indeed. Which is fun and challenging.

Alison:
Challenging is the word I use, yeah.

Andrea:
That includes lighting where it’s early morning for me and evening for you. So, as the sun comes my way, it’s leaving you. And you can see that visually when we’re recording. Trying to tackle all of that is a learning curve for us, but here we are.

Alison:
Indeed. Have you had some food yet today?

Andrea:
Well, I wanted to tell you what we had last night because it was kind of fun. Okay, go on. It was more interesting than this morning anyways. And last night was our oldest. We celebrated his birthday. So we don’t usually end up actually getting to do somebody’s birthday dinner kind of on their birthday. So i call it you know jacob’s birthday observed.

Alison:
Whenever we actually.

Andrea:
Get to the.

Alison:
Birthday dinner it’s like the english monarch is that they have two birthdays a real birthday and then a birthday when everyone celebrates really i didn’t know that yeah yeah oh yeah the english english monarch has two birthdays their real birthday and the day that the whole country says is their birthday yeah so jacob’s like that we.

Andrea:
We uh fall right in line with that in our royal tradition uh we may have separated 250 years ago, but we have found little ways to retain vestigial remnants of our ancestry, I suppose. So anyways, he always wants burgers. That’s like his favorite special sort of meal. So I had homemade buns and made burger patties and sliced cheese and we had greens and buttermilk dressing and my sister made like a sauce to go on the burgers. And then every year He asked for a strawberry cake And every year I kind of try something different To see if I can find, The greatest strawberry cake I can make And this one was fun It had a lot of strawberries going on So I made kind of a butter cake Mix If you will, And I blended up, I ground up strawberries and mixed them into the butter cake and baked them in rounds. And then I made, I used kefir cream as kind of cream cheese and made a frosting and I ground up.

Andrea:
I bought these special freeze-dried strawberries exclusively for this. If you’ve been following along in Discord with my anti-grocery store journey, you saw my post where I said that Gary said the birthday is.

Alison:
Birthdays yeah is allowable.

Andrea:
To go get the.

Alison:
Special things.

Andrea:
For you know he’s like I was like I can’t I can’t break this you know no grocery.

Alison:
Store street for.

Andrea:
Anything and he was like I think the kids special requests for birthday you can.

Alison:
Sometimes I feel like our men are able to bring some sanity perhaps into our control freakishness with in this because Rob does the same thing for me I’m like no we have to we have to he’s like no Alison you know this is an exception it’s what you do most of the time that matters. No, it’s not right. And it sounds like Gary’s the same.

Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah, just an element of reasonableness because I could tend to be like, well, this ship, we shall all go down together.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And Gary’s like, or we don’t go down at all. So anyways, we… We made it very special. And it was just tons and tons of fun. And then I piled strawberries on top and all around. And what I do when a kid has a birthday, I stole this idea from my mom, inherited it from my mom. I don’t know how to say it.

Alison:
Yeah, I don’t think you can steal ideas from your mom. I think she gives them to you for free.

Andrea:
That’s right. Came as a bonus with my membership of being in her family. And she would i don’t know how she i don’t know how she did it i never, she was so stealthy but she would go and steal some of our little toys and wash them and then use them to create a scene on top of the cake, so oh wow for like when adelaide had her birthday i use little cow figures that she has, and I use chocolate chips to look like cow piles, and made a scene of cows in a pasture on her cake with little fences and stuff.

Alison:
I can’t believe you even did the cow poo.

Andrea:
Of course I did. And there was sheep too, with smaller… Tracy’s anyways uh just so you know no one had a problem eating it um for jacob i stole all these little figurines from this video game halo.

Alison:
But i thought you did little mini muffin cakes how did you put the.

Andrea:
Things on the top no i was oh sorry i cooked it in eight inch rounds like um okay i get it yeah.

Alison:
Okay i get it.

Andrea:
Um and i made a scene of these guys like trying to come over the ridge and protect their treasure, which was buried in, like, chopped up strawberry piles. And then the bad guys are, like, climbing up the side of the cake on the other side.

Alison:
Did you do this with Lego figures or something?

Andrea:
Yeah, they’re like Lego figures. I don’t know. Like, you clip them together. I don’t know if they’re Legos or not. But what do I know? Anyways, it was really fun. It entertains me. I always have to come up with, like, a story in my head and, like, create the story.

Alison:
Do you tell him the story or does he just know what it is from looking at your wonderful handiwork?

Andrea:
I’m like, look at the picture, see if he can figure it out. And then they’re all, because it’s a birthday cake, they like have burning brands of candles all around them. So it looked very common. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, it was great fun. So that was a fun little birthday.

Andrea:
What did you eat, Alison? And was it as cool as a birthday cake?

Alison:
No, no, it wasn’t as cool at all. It was actually unexpected in a way because, I was away at my parents until yesterday. And so I thought, oh, there’s going to be some things to catch up on this morning. I want an easy dinner. Let’s get something out of the freezer. Hot on the Heels of Your Freezer Meals episode. And it was one of those occasions where I needed the meal, the whole thing sort of done, you know, not just ingredients to put in the meal. And I thought I had some cabbage rolls in the freezer. So last night I said to Rob, well, can you get the cabbage rolls out? They’re in the middle drawer and just put them in the fridge. And I got down this morning and they weren’t cabbage rolls at all. What was it? I don’t know. I think we must have eaten the cabbage rolls. It was venison burgers. Last time I made a venison burger, because I had a massive batch. Well, not massive, just one whole food processor full of, you know, the batch. And then I, instead of having three, which we normally have, one each, I made nine and I froze six of them. So the container he got out had venison burgers in.

Andrea:
Did you cook them first?

Alison:
No, I froze them uncooked. And, um, so there was venison and I think there was onion and oatmeal. There might’ve been some mushrooms in there. I think there was mushrooms in there as well, all in the food processor with some spices and herbs, obviously. And yeah, I just made them into raw patties and then put, um, grease proof or parchment paper into a larger Tupperware and froze them. So I got them out and I thought, oh, they’re burgers, not cabbage oils. Okay. Um, better get some greens out, found some kale in the fridge. And then I was making a gluten-free bread this morning so I knew the oven was going to be on so I thought I want to put these in the oven rather than waste the rest of the heat and cook them separately, and then I also got out some sausages yesterday because I’m trying to create more food available for Gabriel because he’s getting older and hungrier, in the fridge and he often will have half a sausage as a snack so I thought I’ll just cook three sausages at the same time so, i we had some mushrooms i chopped up some mushrooms put them in the bottom of a, casserole dish put the venison burgers on top of them put sausages on top of them and so that all cooked in the oven and all the juices from sausages and the burgers went into the mushrooms which was absolutely delicious, and then on the stove i cooked some kale and some broccoli and the boys had it with bread rob had rye bread with lard gabriel had spelt bread with I didn’t fancy any carb for lunch, so I just had the burger and the greens.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Very nice.

Andrea:
That sounds good. And were you steaming the broccoli and kale or kind of toasting it?

Alison:
Yeah, yeah, just steaming them. Yeah, it’s simple.

Andrea:
Do you have one of those little baskets that sits in a pan? How do you do that?

Alison:
We used to have one, but I found that I was using it more and more. So we actually bought a special steaming pan, which has got three layers. So you put the water in the bottom, and then it’s got two, three, actually three layers that you can put separately. So we had two of them full of the grains we used that three layers three layers, what.

Andrea:
Do you mean like like the water’s in.

Alison:
The bottom basket in a basket the water’s in the bottom one the water’s in the bottom one and it looks like you know just a normal saucepan you can use it as a normal saucepan the bottom bit as well because there’s a lid that fits on it but then we’ve got another basket that goes on top of it and another basket it goes on top of it and another basket it goes on top of it so you end up with like this tower, of steaming pan and you put the lid on the top and um so you can literally do a whole meal in it i mean even different vegetables You can put the potatoes at the bottom because they’re going to take the longer to cook, so they need to be near the steam. And then you graduate it up. Maybe you’ve got a fish next, and then you’ve got the greens at the top. If you plan it, you can put it all on at the same time and have it all cooked at the same time. Sometimes I do that.

Andrea:
I’m interested in this. We have a steaming basket that sits in a pot, but it’s like in a huge pot. So I don’t gravitate towards it.

Alison:
Yeah, I used to use those, but I find them frustrating because also sometimes I want to take the stuff out and the steaming basket always collapses when you take it out yeah and i’m like oh my stuff’s going everywhere i don’t like that no okay so.

Andrea:
Hmm interesting just.

Alison:
Thinking about things that i am i was going to say i used to have a plastic steamer you know like you plug it into the socket and you put the water in the bottom and then it’s got a plastic basket but i just, i don’t like those so much the plastic bits get gunky after a while and it’s plastic which don’t like and also because we’ve got quite hard water the bit that holds the water at the bottom tends to get all um, sort of you know hard scale on it yeah whereas if you’re doing it in the frying in the saucepan you just wash it each time and that doesn’t happen really yeah so yeah yeah this is.

Andrea:
This is going to be a future episode i put it in my notes i think you saw.

Alison:
For like.

Andrea:
A future episode i want to do.

Alison:
Um which.

Andrea:
Is just talking about, Tools that actually do work in the kitchen, that actually do improve life, not just add clutter. And that is a very personal thing to everybody. That is very different. You know, a tool is not going to turn you into the kind of person who does something. But if you see that you are steaming all the time and you’re just a person who suffers from the frustration of the basket collapsing on you, you are the candidate for buying a tool that does a better job at that. Absolutely. And knowing what those tools are. So I want to do an episode on that in the future. Good quality tools that aren’t clutter.

Alison:
Because there are tools that I use really very often. And those are the only ones that stay in my kitchen because I’ve never had any room for any other ones.

Andrea:
Don’t we know it.

Alison:
So I think really hard about it before I buy them. And then generally, you know, 95% of the stuff that I buy I use regularly.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
So, yeah, that would be a really great episode to do. I’m up for that.

Andrea:
It’ll be a future one.

Alison:
Or down for that, depending on what you say.

Andrea:
Well, before we go to our topic, I was going to tell you, so we had our KTC Live, which is once a month we get together, except for in the summer months, but once a month we get together with our listeners and we just, have good conversations, which are sometimes very wild. And Allison, usually I can stay on a little bit longer than you So sometimes, after you go, then we have more chat But, this past weekend, we had that chat And the question, which you were there, we opened Which we don’t always start with a question But I had this burning question in my head when we got there Which was just, what are you guys making for dinner? And that was… If you’re at an ancestral party, there’s your icebreaker. What are you making for dinner? We could have talked.

Alison:
We could have gone round and the whole episode could have just been that. It’s such a conversation starter.

Andrea:
And it’s so interesting. Yes, because it’s actually parts of their lives, not just kind of, oh, I’m going to open a bag and cook it or we’re going to drive by someplace and pick this up, which can happen, perhaps. But really, it was, you know, let me talk about intricate details of my life and how that plays in. A couple of people said, that’s a good question, actually, which was so fun.

Alison:
No, yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah. But it was so interesting. And then after you left, we talked about T-Mill more. So I think we’ve introduced now a couple episodes back the company that we’re using to make our Ancestral Kitchen t-shirts. Which, Allison, now people will be able to see those on the YouTube. I just realized the YouTubes.

Alison:
Yes, exactly.

Andrea:
When they watch our YouTube videos, they’ll see us wearing our swag. Well, mine should be here soon. But you can see you wearing yours. And I had asked on a different KDC Live, guys, we’re going to make these t-shirts. We need ideas for funny things to put on them. And Francine had said, this is a sweatshirt that you’ll see if you go on the website now, But she had said, I’d love to stay and chat, but I have to go feed my sourdough, which was so perfect.

Alison:
I didn’t realize that was Francine’s suggestion.

Andrea:
I saw the t-shirt there. It was. So anyways, that was just fun. Like, I don’t know. I feel like the ideas we’ve gotten, you know, we had had a conversation a ways back where we said, like.

Alison:
Yeah cuts.

Andrea:
Of shirts should we be doing and things like that.

Alison:
And do you want a hood do you not want a hood you know all these questions that we didn’t realize existed until we had to yeah make a choice as to what we want you to you know have the option of wearing and choosing yeah we’ve got apron, i i love my apron we’ve got bags which i’m using at the market mine’s starting to get a bit grubby because i’ve used it so much and i’m getting a bit sad about that um well i’m sure you could wash.

Andrea:
It like hanging on a line.

Alison:
Right yeah i think we can i should do that and then i could report back as to how it washes couldn’t.

Andrea:
I really want the bag i’m waiting on my back that’s what i.

Alison:
Actually want if um if you’re wondering what it all looks like and you want to go and have a look the website is just one off our website ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash merch m-e-r-c-h and that redirects that’ll take you to the site where you can find, all the goodies and for most of the stuff on there 15 of the price comes to the podcast the rest of it is basically buying you a high quality ethical sustainable organic cotton um goody.

Andrea:
Yeah good stuff, Well, are you ready for me to introduce the episode?

Alison:
I am, yes, certainly. Certainly.

Andrea:
So this is something that you and I have, I feel like half the time when we get together not recording, this is what we’re talking about. And we kind of said, well, we should maybe turn it into an episode. So when you are eating nose to tail, when you’re preparing your bone broth, when you’re finding the importance of and the value in fermenting grains, you start to think, okay, there’s a lot of ancestral food principles or tenets that we are familiar with hearing about. And Allison, some of these, I don’t know where you are, but you’re catching it even out in mainstream news now. You know, I hear people say things like the word lard, and I’m like, sorry, what did you just say?

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So, some of the food principles are becoming more acceptable, if you will. Mm-hmm. The longer you spend in that food world and you say, okay, they found it really important to have the grains fermented for these reasons, which we now have backed by science, but we didn’t maybe know about before. You start thinking the ancestral food preparation principles are so important for getting the most out of food versus just the modern industrial food methods. What are other aspects of ancestral living that are also important? Can we even escape the facts of industrial life and once you start thinking about leaving industrial aspects of living how far do you go and where do you even begin, and then because i know this is probably coming up in some people’s mind even when they saw the title of the episode i’ll also say if we are a podcast that’s talking about ancestral food in a real-world kitchen, which is our, tag for everything, why are we now today talking about ancestral living that’s not in the kitchen? And what does that have to do with food at all? So I want to take a quick break and then come back and answer that question. All right, Allison, the question we asked before the break.

Alison:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
I, the reason why I feel like talking about non-food things is very important to talking about food is that I see our life as a whole. And your diet is simply a part of your philosophy of being. I don’t see us as disjointed fragments that we eat in one, part of our life and we wear our clothes in another part of our life and we sleep in another aspect and there’s work me and there’s home me and there’s church me I don’t see that I see one human, everything we do and the ideas that we are engaging in in our day-to-day life, it all affects every part of our life. And.

Andrea:
To speak to the very practical side of getting in the kitchen, having the physical energy, the literal metabolic activity, the firing of your cells, producing enough energy that you can, stand up on your two legs and go and do the work in the kitchen that it takes to make the food to survive. This is supported by the things you’re doing outside of the kitchen, and that’s a continuous cycle. One supports the other. One cannot exist or function without the other. And we can’t say, you know, just produce all this food that is so important out of thin air with no energy. We have to talk about the whole life and what it is that gets us to the point of being able to walk into the kitchen even. And i’ve found that this is allison you’ve seen this in the discord we’ve seen this in emails people have sent us a personal conversation that ancestral food, kind of like in a gateway sort of way it draws people towards more ancestral living, and the slow food itself kind of begs for slower days, and then slower preparation, of the food. Yeah.

Alison:
Yeah, I agree. I feel like, you know, when you were just, well, when you were just talking, the first thing I know that I’ve got something to say here, but there was another thing that came up for me, which is that, you know, when you, when you start eating this way and when you go more deeply into this way, you, you know, you learn about the, like you said, the grain preparation methods, you learn about the farming and you see the friction that is in the industrial way of eating. You’re like, well, there’s, there’s this friction here. I don’t want to eat like this. I want to eat like this. And that friction helps move you closer to where you want to be, you know, within the resources and the time, et cetera, that you have. And I think when you start doing that in the kitchen, you just can’t help but see friction in other areas of your life. So you’re sitting in front of the TV or the computer and you think, but hang on, this doesn’t feel like it’s right. This hasn’t been around for that long. This is hurting my eyes and there’s a friction that you notice or you might look at your clothes and think.

Alison:
Well hang on where are these all come from they all came from some sweatshop in China and if I’m caring that much about animals that I’m paying extra basically to go to a farmer who cares then why am I buying this stuff where, people are being treated like slaves in China and there’s a friction again and you you feel that friction in these different areas you notice it’s like the blinkers have come off and you notice it and then you want to change the thing I originally wanted to say was that, I feel like when you when you start sourcing your food this way and you step outside of the supermarket where, they’ve got it all set up so it’s like you know a conveyor belt the lights and the music and the buy one get one free and the beeps and everything and.

Alison:
When you start saying, no, I’m not doing that and you go to the markets and you meet the farmer who’s grown the gooseberries or you, talk to the person who butchered the sheep or you try and get some, you know, some back fat so you can make lard, you actually start meeting the people, who make your food and you realize they’re a human being and you look in their eyes. And when you when you think oh my gosh my food comes from real people, and you you’re buying your grains from a farmer my food actually comes from real people then when you look at your clothes you think well hang on who made these this someone sewed this seam you know someone put this lining into this jacket, and and how I can’t see them if I’m buying this you know just from a store you start to think, well, what was their life like? How am I, by not caring about what I choose in the rest of my life, how am I affecting the rest of the world? It feels like it’s a thing that the tendrils kind of come out and you naturally start to think consciously. Because that’s what really eating ancestrally is. I feel like it’s being conscious in your food choices and then leaning on ancestral wisdom. And then you become, you start to think consciously about the other areas of your life, not just going along the kind of, the conveyor belt that everyone else is.

Andrea:
So yeah, that’s what I wanted to add. The predetermined rut that you can fall into in food or clothing, shopping or anything. And as a conscious, we’ll say consumer, eater of food, what have you, You are kind of becoming awake to the fact that those ruts were shaped by someone, developed by someone.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
They’re not even really your choice. And you’re falling into them because you are expected to. In some areas of society, you’re even required to. Mm-hmm. As we’ve had this recent conversation kind of going on in Discord that Hannah had brought up, sometimes you’re ostracized if you step outside of those kind of expected ruts.

Alison:
And so we’ll talk about that aspect of it too. Like you said, the ruts have been put there by people. They didn’t exist, you know, when humankind was born. They’ve been put there by people. And generally, if we look back, you know, we’ve said this about food many times, they’ve been put there to make money, to prioritize money over other things. And you look at the same, the same’s true of clothing. It’s to prioritize money. The same’s true of so many other things. It’s to prioritize money. That’s why they’ve been put there. And when you start to not prioritize money in your food, you think, well, hang on a minute. Why? This is all wrong. We shouldn’t be prioritizing money on our food. We should be prioritizing human health and care for the world that we live in. And and so why why would you not prioritize other things in the other areas of your life other than money that someone else has said they have to you have to.

Andrea:
Prioritize yeah and i yes to be clear i don’t know that there’s ever been a time when there aren’t expected ruts and i don’t know that there’s ever been a time when you’re there’s not some degree of tribal ostracization for, falling out of line but the priorities have been different a lot of cultures their priority was longevity um yeah or the priority was, you know even aspects of religious life which when you kind of distill them down they are longevity and a lot of the priorities were you know, communal survival by yeah producing and packing away enough calories that you know at least 50 percent of us are going to see it through the winter and, Of course, the Vikings, they had different priorities altogether. Go smash stuff and steal stuff.

Alison:
Yeah, they did quite well of that.

Andrea:
That’s another aspect for another day. But, you know, these priorities and ruts and expectations and things have always been there. But like you said, I think when you start waking up to the fact that the priorities are being set by huge corporations who, literally hate you and their highest interest is money, then you start to realize then why am the emperor has no clothes like why am i you know, bowing down to these idols of whatever it is i’m i’m expending my life, to the highest degree on something that is really at the bottom of the day is just benefiting somebody’s um huge paycheck huge company and.

Andrea:
Really is not good for me at all and is, in fact, killing me.

Andrea:
So, as you and I have, I think, probably belabored to the point of exhaustion on this podcast, you cannot change every aspect of your life at once. And it’s typically not even recommended to do so. You know, most of the time that’s kind of a recipe for meltdown or nervous exhaustion. But you can dabble you can learn about the importance of various aspects of life like the things we’re going to talk about just becoming conscious of them was kind of my first step just realizing it was even a paradigm that existed, and we can experiment and also one thing that i’ve, consciously done is when there’s something that i feel like it’s important to learn about you know be it, the fermentation of grains or something i examine that thing front and back because I want to be convicted of how important it is. Because if somebody tells you, it’s a really good idea to do this, and you’re like, well, okay, I’m glad you think so.

Andrea:
That’s one thing. But if you’ve studied it and you feel, you know, I know what’s happening in my cells when I take in this much sugar, it bothers me that that’s happening. Then you’re more convicted and you have something to stand behind. This is something, and you and Rob have been cultivating this lifestyle for some time, Alison.

Alison:
Well, I feel like you’re completely right. You can’t do it all at once. And we certainly haven’t done it all at once, but we have been doing it slowly for 20 years. And 20 years of doing it really does create some change, particularly when you, like you said, you look at it and you question and you learn and you take it on and then you move on. And I mean, at the beginning of when Rob and I got together, we used to watch TV. We never watch TV now. And when we got together, there wasn’t such a thing as an e-ink screen. They weren’t invented. And now we have e-ink screens and we use them. That’s how we survive. And that’s how we’re healthier using computers. You know, we didn’t know about the issues with light bulbs that we’re going to talk about later when we first got together. It’s been a huge, like 20-year slow learning curve and slow picking up of all the different things and slow feeling of that friction all the way and thinking, I feel that friction but I can’t quite change it yet and not being able to change it for a couple of years sometimes you know but slowly going in that direction definitely.

Andrea:
How helpful do you think it is Allison if you need to change something or somebody near you you see they need to change something how helpful.

Alison:
Do you think.

Andrea:
It is to just lay on guilt like frosting on a birthday cake and berate yourself or them and do you think that will.

Alison:
Move them towards no way no way we’ve talked about this in several kind of ktc’s in a biased.

Andrea:
Form at all.

Alison:
But no not at all um so yeah really chain any change that’s gonna stick needs to come from your own intrinsic motivation and really laying on guilt like that even when you do it to yourself you know not not someone else laying it on you but we all know what it feels like, to have guilt laying on us and when you do it to yourself it’s not the way to change either the way to change is to, is to follow threads of curiosity and feel what’s happening inside of you, feel the pain and the discomfort around things that aren’t quite right, and to be okay with feeling that and to question it and to learn and to be patient enough, to slowly move forward with it, which is really hard.

Andrea:
That is exactly, you said exactly what was in my head, Alison, but in different language, which is I have found that rather than punish myself into changing something, it is more effective to educate myself into changing something. And what’s cool about that is it leaves you better equipped to help other people, too. Like when somebody comes to you and says, I’m interested, then you can actually give them something. Worth and value instead of saying, well, I heard this on a podcast and I just, you know, flogged myself until I changed.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:
So you and Rob also did an episode, which is a really good one. I recommend everybody goes back and listen to this one. Also because you know that I love the way you and Rob like banter. So it just, I get such a kick out of it. So episode 37, it’s like way back in the beginning. It’s a peek into Alison and Rob’s ancestral lifestyle and it’s kind of a it’s a good introduction to be, getting into some of this and you also talk in there you guys gave sort of some visuals on what it looked like progressing into, of course Rob is always like oh we just tell you how it really was you know um which is so good, and we do he remembers he remembers the bad.

Alison:
Stuff i try and.

Andrea:
Blot it out i tried to block it from my mind why did you remind me, we also talk about it a lot on the ktc so that’s our more informal podcast that you and i have which is just a private podcast that supporters have access to but, we take questions on there and then also we have questions for each other on there and yeah absolutely we just kind of chat more about what What does it really look like? And, you know, do we know what we’re doing and what didn’t work and what did work? So, yeah, I guess I would say that just in the same way that a food is, in the same way that, you know, Doritos and high dosages of, the only word I can think of is grapefruit soda. I don’t even know if that exists, but like sodas.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
In the same way that these modern and industrial foods are hard on the human body, the modern and industrial lifestyle is hard on the human body. And it just does not engage with our bodies in a natural way. And then the ways that it interferes with our natural circadian and hormonal rhythms, those are so embedded into patterns of life. So, for instance, laying in bed and scrolling. I’ve never done that.

Alison:
Of course not.

Andrea:
I hope no one else here has. Those are so embedded in patterns of everyday life and common cultural norms that stepping outside of the effects of one of those things, even just a little bit, like I just alluded to, can leave you being branded as weird. Try telling people you don’t put your cell phone in the bedroom when you sleep. I need my alarm. And I need my 42 alarms. you know um, i need my 16 snooze settings and well oh is that also because you are not sleeping well because you were looking at the phone at night and you’re exhausted and you know these things can leave you branded as high maintenance or weird or a luddite um, so just so you know that might happen it probably and.

Alison:
Of course all of those things are the other person who’s doing the branding’s problem, not yours, really.

Andrea:
Obviously, obviously. And just remember that… This is a thing, Allison, but late night shopping on a phone or early morning shopping. I didn’t really know this was a thing until I heard somebody say that, like, the biggest thing they did to save money was they stopped shopping in the morning before they got out of bed. Like, what? Okay. Clearly our habits are not the same. But it just made me think, normalizing and driving these habits is making somebody money. Because they’re impulse buying and getting literally clutter that they’re going to have to, that is then stressing them out more and then making them buy more stuff and then they feel like a bad person and then they’re out of money so then they feel bad about that too. Like these are patterns that are not built for your success. They are not good for human thriving. So, you know what, people are going to call you weird and that’s just the way it’s going to be. So what does a day in the life from somebody from the past look like, Alison? Well, it’s kind of a broad question.

Alison:
Yeah, indeed it is. Several thousand years. Okay, go on then.

Andrea:
Several billion people to sift through. But there are some generalities. So, by and large, the day was driven by natural light, which, as one may note, is a variable product in different places around the world. There’s places where there’s a lot of dark season. There’s places, you know, equatorial places where the length of day never really changes. There’s places where it’s hotter, places where it’s colder. So that is a huge range. But by and large, days were shaped and driven by natural light. And I remember, Allison, there was a season when we lived in California that we did not have any lamps. This was for no special reason other than the fact that we didn’t have money. And it was amazing how automatically and immediately controlled by the rising and setting of the sun the day was. Because there wasn’t light. And I didn’t have a laptop or a smartphone or, you know, gadgets. Again, I wasn’t trying to be healthy. I just didn’t have those things. And…

Andrea:
We were, I just remember effortlessly waking before dawn and getting dressed by starlight or moonlight. And this is because we were effortlessly in bed extremely early. And if you’re saying, wait a minute, but the dark, you know, I’ve thought about this before. Why is it true? I don’t know. But somehow it’s easier to get up and start the day in the dark than it is to carry on after dark at night, just like staggering around in the darkness.

Alison:
I think it’s easier because you’re less tired because you’re just rested. And so you can get up and you’re like, I can do this. I can do this. But in the evening, I’m like, oh, I’ve been I’ve done stuff.

Andrea:
I don’t want to dry.

Alison:
I want to curl up, you know, a little bit. I feel like, you know, that because of Rob’s sensitivity to light, that sounds like our life now.

Andrea:
Kind of.

Alison:
It’s harder in winter because obviously we have less night, but we really don’t stay up much past dark. I have a memory of about six months ago going out in a car with a friend because Gabriel was going somewhere and a friend offered us a lift. We don’t have a car. So it’s unusual for me to go in a car to start with. I’ve been in a car. I could count the number of times on my hands that I’ve been in the car in the last two years, I think. and.

Alison:
Going in that car, we were out past the sunset because it was winter and there were lights everywhere and there were lights in the car. There were lights coming at us. And I was just completely like bamboozled by it because I’m not habituated to it anymore. I don’t live like that. It was horrible. And it was horrible for Gable. We both got out of the car the other way. We were like, we have to sit down and recover from this. And that’s kind of an extreme example. but it the way that we live, because we’ve been pushed into it because of rob’s light sensitivity we really don’t like to put the lights on in the evening if we don’t have to yeah and so, we get up when the sun gets up and we follow the rhythms of the sun and in the winter we really don’t do much past dark in the summer or it’s like still when we go to bed but yeah that i i feel like that’s been a.

Alison:
A big part of keeping me sane you know because I’m a I’m a highly sensitive person and my sleep, is a strong priority for me because I have struggled with sleep at times in the past for various reasons which it could be another podcast um but it’s very important for me with that in mind to structure my days in a way that, like you said don’t take that toll that human life, modern life has on our body that keep my body in the rhythms that it naturally wants to go in. And when that happens, I’m able to be a healthier, happier, more well-slept person. So yeah, I’d agree that that’s how life was.

Andrea:
You’re a good case, Alison, where we can see a snippet of time travel where if somebody came from the past to now, I think about this all the time as I’m just hurtling down the highway casually. And I’m thinking, if you brought somebody from the past here, they’d be like, witchcraft! Get better! It’s true. But yeah, most of history… You didn’t go far. You know, we travel to town weekly, farther than most people went in their entire lifetime. We would have traveled, yeah. And that does shape things.

Andrea:
For most of history, most of your day, most of human expenditure was working towards having enough food to survive. And if you look at skeletons clothing tombs things like that, people and often even the wealthy they weren’t, they didn’t have access to calories in the excess that we have now, so we have an excess of light we have an excess of fast movement we have excess of calories we have excess of access. We have excess of people that we’re interacting with that aren’t even, you know, genuine communities in the sense of, you know, the old lady you don’t get along with. And, you know, we have these filtered communities, which have a reasonable place, obviously, as speaking as somebody who’s part of a food community of a bunch of weirdos that actually don’t think each other are weird.

Andrea:
That’s important to have elements of that in a day when you are, being ostracized perhaps for not having a blue light shining in your eyeballs at night but, we have excess of so many things um there would be in history you you find all over the world there are certain people who are set apart, in a community for non-agrarian professions so things that aren’t producing, food and often aren’t producing a product per se this is like your Hebrew Levites or, priests or, you know, monks in medieval times, you know, they’re not producing a product necessarily, but the community finds it’s important to the community’s health that those people are there maybe giving offerings or praying or what have you. And those people were often supported by tithes or by patrons so they could pray or paint or carve sculptures or whatever, and then there’s other craftsmen as well you know weavers and fullers and um.

Andrea:
Just people in non-food related trades that are important for human survival. And of course, then they can trade, barter, sale, you know, not every culture had currency per se, but there was ways for them to produce their craft other than their food. And in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamian times and medieval times and, you know, pretty much anywhere you, almost anywhere that I’ve looked, you can find that peasants, that’s us, the low-class, humble peasants, they would work a certain number of days per year for their manor lord or their pharaoh. And if you do the math on your taxes, we do that too. About a quarter of our year is spent working for the government. So growing, tending, collecting, harvesting, preparing, storing calories, this is the majority of the day. And anybody buying groceries these days probably agrees with that assessment that most of their workday is going towards trying to buy food. And so if it feels like a huge percentage of your day is spent earning enough to buy food, this is not abnormal to human history, just so you know.

Alison:
Yeah, I agree with you. You know, whether you’re working to have the money to buy the food, or you’re actually producing the food yourself which is what our ancestors would have been doing, the thing that’s missing here is that you know we’re doing processing in the kitchen to make the food into something that is nutritious and allows us to thrive and I feel like you know for Rob and I consistently throughout our life anyone who you.

Alison:
Doesn’t get that doesn’t understand why we need to be at home as much as we’re at home I know we’re going to talk about home a bit later in the episode, and you know we have to be at home to do all the things that we need to do to keep the food going that we’re, that we’re eating um and you know very often particularly when we’re in Italy, you know people will come to us and say come and do this on this sunday come and do this on this sunday and and we we just couldn’t we can’t take a sunday off because if we don’t take that if we take that sunday off we’re not making the bread for the rest of the week and so then yeah those loaves of bread need to be shoved into some other day that is already full of other stuff and on that other day i might be doing some fermentation or i might be doing something else preparing some food that’s going to go in a freezer you know there’s a our time at home is a lot of it is spent doing, things for the kitchen that are routines and and that means that we’re not available to go and do all the things that everyone else writes in their diary, and just like you were saying earlier on with what you know what Hannah was sharing on discord of being treated like um.

Alison:
Like an outsider because of the way she eats we’ve felt that people just don’t get the fact that we have to be in the kitchen doing this stuff and we choose to be in the kitchen doing this stuff because we love the way that we’re eating and what we’re supporting and how we’re, how we’re preparing food for the table but it does mean that we’re homebods much more than other people around us which our ancestors would have been yeah.

Andrea:
And part of what part of the, friction, I guess I’ll say, of eating ancestrally and living ancestrally in this modern day. And part of why you and I have found such really comfort and support in the community is there, once upon a time, you can point to where everybody was doing their bread on the same day. And, you know, you read Lark Ries to Candleford, where flora is describing you know the kind of the turn of the century late victorian era and, she says well everybody did washing on the same day every single woman was out hanging her laundry on the line i mean you just knew that that was what was happening that day yeah it is there are there’s less decisions, when you just know that that’s automatically happening and i know that as moderns, we look back and say, no, there’s less choice. But you know what more choice gives us? Anxiety disorders. Yeah, exactly. Let’s now acknowledge that having an endless stream of decisions coming at you, which is the operative word of choice, that that…

Alison:
Fewer choices is the way to go in life. I feel like, It does become stressful. Rob and I have always applied that to our working life and to everything we’re doing, that, you know, we end up doing too much. Okay, what can we cut? Particularly if we want to go on a new path and learn something new or branch out on something new, experiment, then we have to cut something. Because the fewer options you have and the more you burn bridges so you can’t go back over that way, generally, for me and for Rob, the happier and the healthier we are. for sure yeah.

Andrea:
Um, when we in, in, um, Rachel brought up the question on a discord conversation that she said, could we have like more discussion? Actually, a couple of gals brought this up and said, could we have more discussion about people’s rhythms in the kitchen, the things you’re doing weekly and you and I, and I think she said, can we just turn this into an episode? Because really, listen, there are people in our group with really good habits and patterns that are really helpful to see. And they’re all in different places around the world and they have different sized families. And so it’s really helpful to see those. And part of the things we’re going to hit on today that are not involved in the kitchen, they are critical to getting those kitchen rhythms in place. Because like you said, if you don’t drop those other things out of your diary, you are unable to stay home and make the bread because you have commitments outside of that. And yes, it does feel like kicking upstream a bit because nobody else is saying that they’re going to give up that extra commitment in order to stay home and bake bread because you can buy bread. But they’re… There are sometimes reasons why you want to stay home instead and have more.

Alison:
I prefer being home in the kitchen baking bread than all the hassle of going out.

Andrea:
Frankly.

Alison:
I mean, I do go out sometimes. It’s not like I’m a recluse or anything. But I get so much joy out of, being at home in my kitchen, preparing food for myself and my family from food that I know where it’s come from, and it’s done good for the people and the soil that it’s been in. I mean, just for me, that satisfaction really doesn’t get much greater than that, I don’t think.

Andrea:
Yeah. Well, and I am a extroverted extrovert. I…

Alison:
What’s one of them?

Andrea:
What’s that like? And I still, I still would agree with you, though, that I… I, I need that time of being home. And I don’t.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And the more we live here, the, you know, yesterday I had to go run an errand in the morning and Gary was literally like pushing me out the door at a certain point. And I said, I just don’t want to leave because I love being here so much. I hate leaving. I don’t want to leave. And, and he was like, you need to go get this errand on and you’ll never be back. So, you know, I love being here. So, yeah. So, so yes, your days were largely driven by light. And that’s kind of going to be the theme that you hear as you run across a lot of ancestral stuff. And before we end this section and take a quick break, I was going to say that I was talking to my grandma the other day. My grandmother was born, and her mother, my great-grandmother, passed away later that night or after midnight on the next day. Okay so i’ve always been very grateful to my great-grandmother because she really gave her life for my family line and so my grandmother was raised by her grandmother, right and so i’ve grown up with my grandma telling me stories of what it was like growing up on her grandmother’s farm, and all the geese and the chickens and the horses and the goats and uh the huge she said you You know, grandma had a big kitchen garden, and then she had a huge canning garden. And…

Andrea:
It’s interesting because my great-great-grandmother, who raised my grandmother, was born just before the end of the U.S. Civil War. And so to think that that’s a short—that’s a change back to, you know, in the context of England, you know, pre-Victorian times.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And that’s who I’m hearing about. And my grandma said to me, oh, it was no wonder she had to get up at like 3 o’clock in the morning to start getting things done because of how many things she did all day. She did everything at the house. They made everything. They produced everything. And you know she wasn’t staying up until midnight.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
There wasn’t nothing to scroll on. Nobody was going to be making money off of her scrolling.

Andrea:
So let’s take a quick break, Allison, and then we’ll come back. And what I want to do is, we have some longer episodes on some of these things, but I want to at least introduce some ideas to people, some things to look at in the everyday, both products and habits. All right, these ones I categorize as the big ones. And the first one is lights, I’m just going to say. Lights and light bulbs. And not all light bulbs are the same. And if you’ve ever turned on a light next to me or Allison, then you quickly learned that. As we throw our hands up like a vampire, don’t turn that thing on. It’s just the way it is. So, Allison, tell me a little bit. This was something you were much farther down in the education of when I met you. I was barely on the cusp of even learning about the difference in lightbulbs.

Alison:
Yeah. So it’s just come from Rob because he has a sensitivity to it. You know, when we realize we have a sensitivity to something, it’s the thing that forces us to go and educate ourselves and try and find alternatives. And, you know, I don’t say I had a sensitivity to it, but, and at the beginning I was very skeptical of what Rob was saying, but now, how many years down the line, oh my gosh, I realize it really applies to me as well. And it applies to Gabriel. So I kind of think it must apply to a lot of other people but I wouldn’t have known about it if it hadn’t been for Rob who couldn’t tolerate it so the problem with standard lights that we have in our modern homes is that they flicker, with the electricity circuit they flicker on off on off we can’t see that our eyes can’t see the flicker on off it they they compensate our brain and our retinas and, compensate for that flicker Rob would describe this better than me but I’m trying, so it’s unnatural for our optical organs and our brain our eyes and our brain are put under stress when we go under, a light that is modern because it is behaving in a way that is not like natural light.

Alison:
Dimming that light makes that worse because usually the flickers longer it takes longer so our brain is struggling to cope with this off on off on slower and slower, incandescent light bulbs which are the light bulbs we used to have before LED, and halogen came in don’t flicker and neither do halogen bulbs. So for us in our house we have, mainly incandescent light bulbs and where we can’t have incandescent light bulbs we have halogen light bulbs and just that simple change has meant.

Alison:
A huge difference to the way Rob’s health is the way Rob’s headaches are the way Rob is able to have less brain fog and just exist when there’s not natural light. The other thing with modern lights is the frequency spectrum. So we’re made to have the frequency spectrum of the sun outside my window as we’re recording and.

Alison:
And our lights now do not have that frequency spectrum. And as the day goes on, the light changes. And that’s why now you see people who have blue light glasses to block the blue light that’s coming at them from screens later in the evening. And sometimes you’ll see that there are expensive lights that you can buy these days that have like a red filter on them. So you can change them to the evening to be a red filter. The problem with most of those lights is that they still flicker because they’re, they’re made with led bulbs.

Alison:
So what we’ve um learned, is that really it’s better to have incandescent light bulbs and modify your habits you’re just like we were talking about before we’re supposed to get up with the sun and go to bed with the sun and our lifestyle, is like that so much that if i go in a car, like I was explaining, I’m just completely discombobulated because my body has got used to the natural light around me and those rhythms. I think that our bodies will work with the sun and the moon and anything different that we expose them to, our body can cope, it can tolerate, but why do we want to put it in a situation where it’s tolerating something, you know just like if we we have problems with gluten well you know we can probably still eat it if we’re not celiac, but why would we want to put that strain on our body why would we want to eat tons of sugar that our body can’t cope with and put that strain on our body if we don’t have to um.

Alison:
Which is why i mean sometimes we’ve talked about this a lot in discord, this lifestyle is choosing the hard option and with a society around you that, is saying go out at night and everything goes on at night then it’s the hard option to say no I’m I’m staying home and I and, But the more that you go along this path, and whether it’s because you’re interested in it or because you’ve had health problems, the more you see and notice that these things are making a difference. And that’s what’s happened with us, with lights. Does that explain the light bulb thing, Andrea?

Andrea:
That does. That does. And…

Alison:
Good.

Andrea:
The… If you listened to, which of course you did, because I know everybody listens to 100% of every episode. If you listened to the episode on what we ate for a week, where we talked about, where do all these snacks come from and all these extra meals and things like that. Staying up late is, again, the purview of the ultra-wealthy in history. Because you need to have fuel to burn to stay up late, lights to keep on. And you need to not be getting up at pre-dawn to start you know sowing seed before it’s too hot to be outside in the blistering sun so, you know you have again we’re imitating you know the lords and earls staying up late and having their dinners at 9 p.m or whatever and trying to put ourself back into that um, that weird unnatural.

Alison:
Bracket but at least they were using candles that don’t flicker it’s even it’s.

Andrea:
Better you know they.

Alison:
Weren’t there with their iphones.

Andrea:
They would have if they could have but yeah yeah true the light bulbs also it’s worth noting that incandescent are harder to get your hands on now and part of the reason is, well all of the reason is money but they take more power as somebody who has to know every watt that something takes, then I am distinctly aware of this.

Alison:
Yeah, of course.

Andrea:
As I look at the light bulb sitting next to me, and I know, I’m like, yeah, that thing kills, like, the value of, like, 10 LED lights. So you might ask yourself, so if it’s taking more power, then should I be using it? Well, let me tell you, you should be turning it on less. You won’t be running it as much. You’ll have fewer of them. We don’t need to be in surgical, blinding, bright light from every aspect, every side of our entire life.

Alison:
And also, you know, what we’re going to talk about later about home, you know, we don’t have to have every member of the family in a different room doing a different thing in the evening with the light bulbs on we can all be together perhaps reading and then you only need one light bulb.

Andrea:
You’re outrageous allison i just want you to know.

Alison:
I know i know.

Andrea:
So something that we’re not going to get another big topic that i’m not going to go too far into today because we have another episode fully on it oh on the lights i should say also that you can um go back and listen to well if you’re on the ktc, the kitchen table chats podcast than Rob and I, well, that’s kind of more screens, but he did talk about light. Rob and I did an episode just talking about that.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So daily chemical exposure. We talked about this more in episode 76, which is actually essential oils in the kitchen, but we kind of touched on chemicals to introduce them. And if you wear clothes, which I will grant, not everybody does wear clothes, but if you wear clothes, then the chemicals in your laundry are touching your body every day, all day. And even if you sleep in the nude, you’re probably sleeping on sheets or on a mattress, and those may or may not contain chemicals. So it’s worth looking at, Your laundry products and then beauty products are another huge hitter for toxic exposure. As I think I said in the essential oils episode, the modern woman applies over 800 chemicals to her body before she has breakfast. And this is very abnormal from history. And like you said with the lights, Allison, you said maybe we can tolerate it. Why should we push ourselves to those limits? And I’ll give a kind of brutish example, which is somebody’s in a relationship with somebody who is, pretty, like, kind of verbally abusive, always tearing you down, always gaslighting you.

Andrea:
You can survive that. You can. But it will wear on you. And if you have other people around you in this relationship, like children or something, maybe you’re trying to protect them or shelter them, that will wear on you. And eventually it does break you down. Why would we do this to ourselves? Why would we gaslight them and say, you can handle this much light, you can handle this much sugar. You can handle this much chemicals. You can’t. My liver will cope.

Andrea:
You know, my body will pump out insulin hormone from here to kingdom come and try to force my sugar back down. But why? Why push ourselves to our absolute tolerances? The human body is made to be pushed incredibly far, but not chronically. And that is extremes. Yeah. That is kind of what we do in our everyday life is we push our body to these absolutely unprecedented limitations of sugar tolerances and things like that. Things that the body could handle periodically and has systems in place to handle periodically. Also kind of like a budget. Periodically, you can handle buying a house and just kind of shutting down all the extra expenses, pulling together money for earnest money and fees and things like that, but you could not come up with that every month. And we are often asking our body to mortgage a house every month in the way that we are.

Andrea:
Pushing it to its tolerances. So yeah, jump back and listen to episode 76. We talked a bit more about chemicals in there.

Alison:
Yeah, great.

Andrea:
Screens, you kind of hit on this too. This is something that Rob has really brought to our community, which is the awareness of by being such a willing participant as a canary in the coal mine. And then also being willing and going out and doing all this research on, You know, it is kind of a fact of life. Yes, there are ways you can avoid it, but it’s kind of a fact of life that some things are going to happen online. And, you know, you’re writing a book, Allison, and you’re doing it, you know, you’re basically narrating a book.

Alison:
Yes, I am, into an e-ink computer.

Andrea:
Yeah, and, you know, physically you wouldn’t be able to write it by hand with, other shoulder issues and things. And so it’s kind of a modern miracle that you can verbally write this book. You can dictate it into the e-ink screen. So we are grateful. You and I are discussing things over a computer right now. We’re grateful for that. But there are ways to minimize the damage of screens, which the damage, let me just say, is legion. It is insane. And I will also say that the effect of blue lights, everything we know about blue lights and how, you know, spectrum and one of that spectrum includes, this highly unnatural blue light, which is only there’s aspects of blue light that are only visible from the sun at high noon when your body is supposed to be at its peak awakeness. And we are forcing massive doses of that into our eyeballs at 11 o’clock at night. That was actually a new last night messaging you, Allison. But at 11 o’clock at night, and this is not functional. But just keep in mind that those effects are far worse in children. It’s actually proven.

Andrea:
And this is, I’m not laying on the guilt. I’m educating myself and everyone, that this the effect is far worse on children and it isn’t necessarily always, um we don’t have to just accept it as a part of our life.

Alison:
I think we’ve seen that kind of thing in reverse with Gabriel and an e-ink computer, so the e-ink screens that i’m talking about don’t flicker so every non-ink screen which is like 99.9 percent of screens out there flicker and.

Andrea:
Oh just.

Alison:
Have the same effect on you yeah.

Andrea:
Can i add something else and just a visual to help everybody if you’ve ever filmed a computer camera you can see the flicker.

Alison:
You see it.

Andrea:
Don’t you the film yeah you’re right and so that’s why it’s so hard because the frame rate is slower than your eye frame rate and if you have ever done a like, film your christmas tree do like a slow motion film of your christmas tree on your blue screen, do make a video of your christmas tree and you will see the insane flickers coming off of those um or do a slow motion video of like the lights in your hallway and and then you can pick up and see if there’s Okay, carry on.

Alison:
Wow. So an e-ink screen doesn’t flicker. It’s literally like looking at a piece of paper. And Rob has this kind of theory that I believe. He has a lot of theories that I’m like, well, that’s a bit crazy.

Alison:
But I think if… You have an e-ink phone. I don’t think you use it as much. I think that we are becoming habituated as a society to not only to the kind of social media part of the scroll, you know, the kind of, oh, I’ve got a black hole and I need to fill it kind of scrolling. But I think we’re getting habituated to the actual flickering screen. Our eyes see it as something kind of unusual and novel and we’re going back to it. We’re getting habituated to it. And I feel like, and Rob feels like it’s part of the addiction to phones and to screens. No one else is saying this. Everyone else is just saying it’s the social media. But I feel like the actual physical way of producing the light is also affecting us and making us used to it. We’re becoming habituated to staring at a flickering light. And Gabriel has the option of using an e-ink screen to do things. And he exhibits It’s behavior that is very different when using an e-ink screen to using a normal screen. He is far more addicted to the tasks that he does on a normal screen to when he’s using the e-ink screen. When he’s using my, he uses one of my computers that’s e-ink, when he uses that, he just, he can just get up and walk away and leave it. And yet when he’s using the other computer, he can’t. And I’ve watched that happen to him and.

Alison:
It’s made me think that what Rob is saying about this kind of idea of, the actual screen is also causing us to have an addiction to that device as well as, the already huge pull of the social media channels and how they’ve been designed to keep us there.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
So, yeah, that’s screens. We do, like you said, we’ve got an episode on, let me just say again, we’ve got that episode on the private podcast feed where Rob talks about screens in more details. A couple of listeners I know have come to me and we’ve talked through E-Ink screens, but there is lots of information on that podcast if you want to know more about them.

Andrea:
And your episode, Why I Gave Away My iPhone, I forget the number on that one.

Alison:
But that’s an early one.

Andrea:
It’s very early.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So, I agree with Rob’s theory 100%. Oh, okay. I, so this is, this is a, A comparison that puts us back in the kitchen, which is people talk about food addictions a lot. And when people only have access to very real and nourishing and high nutrient density foods, it is harder to have those same addictive behaviors. Versus if you hand somebody a bag of chips that is tuned to.

Andrea:
The highest pitch of appetite cravings that a brain can produce and has a logo on the side that says, I bet you can’t eat just one, because they have a science-backed, study saying that your brain will beg for more. And gosh it’s um i think rob is right also because i’ll while i don’t have an e-ink screen after the why i gave away my iphone episode and rob and i did that episode together, then i had turned my phone black and white for the first time, and it was kind of like like you look at it and you’re like ah i don’t know nothing to see here it’s yeah yeah it’s like you said it’s just It’s easier to turn off. And I think there is a certain aspect of that stimulation, both from the Doritos, and from the Pop-Tarts and from the blue screen. That is, like you said, it’s unnatural for your brain, and it’s something that your brain sort of naturally seeks out.

Andrea:
And high noon should be a time of day when you’re very productive. And eating calories and getting sugar, fat, and carbs in should be something that drives productivity. But what we’re doing is we’re kind of just pouring this fuel into an engine that is going nowhere. And that does become a problem. So, yeah, I’m definitely in agreement with Rob. I will back his thesis. 100%.

Alison:
I should tell him. He will be pleased.

Andrea:
Another thing that I wanted to talk about as a big one is sleep. And this does, obviously, it nestles right in with the light and the screens and everything. Whoop is one of those wearables companies, you know, where you wear a thing that tracks sleep. Behavior and and um and those things are interesting because with self-reported behaviors, signed hannah hannah of belgium will back me up on this i think that self-reported behaviors are really hard, to get accurately reported in studies because people often want to report about the person that they hope they would be. And we under-report bad behaviors, and we over-report good behaviors. And this isn’t necessarily people lying. This is just the way that we protect, our brain kind of protects ourselves. Like you said, with the flickers, our brain is trying to compensate, and maybe I’m not really a criminal after all. And with wearables.

Andrea:
There are, of course, many pros and cons you could discuss, but what happens with wearables is you just kind of get tracked data with no, you know, option to make yourself look better or worse. So, Whoop uses the data from millions of users to run studies, and you can volunteer to be parts of them or different aspects of studies if you want to.

Andrea:
So they did a sleep study, and I’ve linked this in the show notes. Whoop analyzed 3.7 million nights of sleep data from UK participants. There was 60,000 people that participated in this. And they found that regular sleep patterns moved the needle more effectively for health and longevity than just spending the eight hours in bed. So what that means, and I’ve heard, I’ve listened to a number of their different podcast episodes where they talked about this. There’s a whoop podcast you can look up where they said, you know, we’ve been told eight hours of sleep, nine hours of sleep. And probably that was a more important message in a time when, you know, your day was being more driven by the light of day. Even like when we were kids, Allison, you know, there wasn’t a smartphone to lay in bed and scroll on. So, yes, you could turn the lights on in the house and read all night if you wanted to, but like you weren’t being encouraged in behaviors like scrolling and shopping all night or whatever. So being told it’s really important to get eight or nine hours is probably.

Andrea:
You know, a necessary message. But now what we’re being told is that the consistency of sleep, which is defined as falling asleep within roughly the same 30-minute window and waking up within roughly the same 30-minute every day, the sleep consistency is actually more predictive of sleep.

Andrea:
Positive health aspects and sleep inconsistency or sleep variability as they term it, independently predicts cardiovascular disease metabolic dysfunction mood disorders cognitive impairment, better than just sleep duration alone so this is fascinating because there are obviously it is important to get enough sleep. And they did a good job in this article of saying, you know, we’re not discounting the value of sleep time, but probably the highest predictor is actually your consistency. And that is possibly something that we can develop more control over. And if anybody listening is like me, you’re immediately coming up with 32 reasons why that can’t be for you because, you know, I’m just a victim of my life. But like Allison, you said, 20 years, you’re developing and shaping a life. You’re shaving things off that aren’t contributing to your well-being. You’re shaping habits and developing important behaviors that support, you know, better ways of living. And I would argue that capturing this sleep.

Andrea:
Aspect of your life is going to be extremely important because, we can talk all day long about the metabolic dysfunction that happens from getting too much sugar in your body or too high of rancid seed oils in your diet, but we cannot discount the fact that you can put that nail on, of sugar in our metabolic coffin, and then we can hammer it home by not having a sleep consistency. That’s daunting.

Andrea:
So their summary was that both sleep consistency and sleep timing strongly predict next day activity. So anybody who’s trying to be more active, this is important too. And they found that earlier and more consistent bedtimes, I know this is just going and blow everybody’s mind, leads to up to 30 more minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity. And they can actually document what that is because they, you know, they’re tracking heart rates and heart rate variabilities and things like that. So they can actually, you know, you don’t say, I think I was really active. Like, they actually know what you were doing. Well, irregular or late sleep going to bed later reduces movement even when the duration of sleep was the same.

Alison:
It’s interesting isn’t it.

Andrea:
Yeah so bringing sleep consistency into the conversation I think is you’re probably going to see this more and more but it is something that, I think is you know if you are following the sun you’re, Your sleep consistency is always, while it may drastically change between summer and winter, it’s only going to be moving by like a minute at a time. Yeah, yeah. If you look at the sunrise and sunset times, they slowly shift. I mean, they crawl. So you would be gaining your consistency even while you moved with the sun.

Alison:
And I think for me, changing something like a consistent habit takes time. I can’t just go, right, okay, tonight I’m going to change my sleeping and I’m going to go to bed at seven o’clock. It doesn’t work like that for me because my body is used to what it’s used to, you know. And so I feel like if people listening desire to change a habit and to go to sleep earlier or to be more sleepier earlier, because, you know, you can get in bed and you lie there and you’re like, but if you’re used to going to sleep two

Alison:
hours later, you’re not sleepy. I feel like it becomes part of the whole kind of planning of your day, you know, that you’re doing things in the morning so they’re not left to the evening. And then for us, we generally eat at 5 p.m. Sometimes we’re as late as 6. But then after that, we’re switching everything off. So there’s no computers on after that time. And we’re reading and we’re sitting together on the sofa. And sometimes Gable goes out to play if the weather’s good. But then Rob and I are together. And we’re using that time to rest and to relax and to let go slowly, to unwind from what’s happened in the day and…

Alison:
Habitually now because we read that’s like my signal for for relaxation that’s my signal for safety, and then generally we come up to bed at the same time every evening and I have the similar routines once we’re up in the bedroom you know we do the same things and because of that I’ve been able to, my body knows that that’s the time to sleep and so if you’re wanting to change those habits just something you can do slowly but you can do by putting markers in around that time and then just consistently following those markers until your body begins to understand that this is how it’s going to be now, yeah and something that you.

Andrea:
Mentioned there alice and well all of that i absolutely love all of that and the idea of looking you know when somebody says well i i can’t fall asleep and it’s because, you know, a busy activity is late at night. Facing the fact that we can start to sort of evolve those things out of our life and change the culture around us. Here’s the thing. I know sometimes that we’re weird. I know that. But when you look at what is optimal for human thriving, Other people are going to push towards this as well. And you’re just going to be in front kind of of the pack. And when everybody else says, boy, howdy, did you know that it’s not good for you to scroll on your phone at night? You know, you can be like, yeah, I already lost that habit some time ago. Like I learned that and then I started changing my habits.

Andrea:
And also what you just so briefly mentioned there is actually hugely important. This is another thing that whoop has kind of, drawn data on which is eating close to going to sleep it it actually puts your nervous system into a different state, where it’s working on processing and digesting and and it’s doing different functions that it shouldn’t be doing while you’re asleep, and it can kind of prevent that, natural sleep pattern that you should be having and almost nothing worse than you can do is drinking alcohol, because that really disrupts your sleep but it can make people sleepy and fall asleep but it actually does not lead to better sleep during the night, um so you know now we have all these people talking about fasting and how important it is to fast and stuff and and part of the reason is because we’ve become a society that just eats kind of non-stop. Yeah, absolutely. Right up until bedtime slash in bed. So really recognizing that maybe not everybody needs to be fasting, but what’s not, that is a term for it, time-restricted eating, which just means, you know, you’re not eating in the, this is going to sound like a lot, but in the three hours leading up to bed. And that sounds about.

Andrea:
On par for you. Allison, if you’re eating around five and then you’re in bed around eight, then that’s probably, you’re giving yourself time to digest. And if you’re not also, you know, ending the day with like a huge, heavy, greasy meal, a massive amount to process and, you know, a bunch of alcohol to wash it all down with, then, you know, you’re in a better state for resting. Yeah, well, those are some of the big drivers of ultramodern fast-paced and industrial life, which are all words that I know are triggering for all of us. So, Allison, let’s take a quick break, and when we come back, I just want to hit on a couple of, actually, style points.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
So, again, some of this we have discussed more on other episodes, so maybe we can just lightly touch on these, Allison, but I want to make sure that they’re mentioned. There are aspects of style that are working against the human body. And this is not new.

Andrea:
This didn’t not exist in ancestral times. You know, in China, they practice foot binding and there’s different places in the country where just style and appearance are not necessarily optimal for your health. And today is no different. So what we can do is look at what the body functions the best with. And there are cultures that you can look back in time to and see, or it’s still cultures today, that you can look at, you know, where people are actually needing their body to work for them, not just their clicker finger. And so they try not to abuse their body in the sense that they make their body functional. So the first thing is shoes. And you’ve probably heard the term barefoot shoes. And you’ve probably hopefully heard about being barefoot and grounding, which is a fancy word. I couldn’t believe it. The first time I heard the word grounding, I was like, well, what does this mean? And I was like, oh, you mean putting your feet on the floor?

Andrea:
Putting your feet on the ground, getting, you know, touch grass, as the kids say. And actually, we live in a time where we have to say that. This is kind of like the fasting thing. We live in a time where we have to say, hey, don’t eat 24 hours a day. That’s called fasting. Well, I don’t know if it’s called fasting. I think it’s called not eating 24 hours a day. And then we live in a time where we have to say, grounding is important. What does that mean? I mean, it’s, I don’t know, stand on the ground, get outside. And so it’s kind of weird that we live in a time where we have to say that, but this is just the reality of modern industrial life. Allison, you guys have been on the barefoot shoe train for a while. Looking at your timeline, I’m trying to think the first time we were introduced to barefoot shoes. It was before we had kids. So it would have been between 2009 and 2011.

Alison:
Okay, so kind of similar.

Andrea:
Yeah, similar, but it’s not necessarily like I was really researching it. It’s just Gary was doing barefoot running, and I just like being barefoot, so I was just barefoot a lot. But it wasn’t like I was…

Alison:
Yeah, I see.

Andrea:
I didn’t have a goal with it. Yeah.

Alison:
Well, Rob read Born to Run, because Rob’s a runner.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah.

Alison:
And there’s a book called Born to Run, which is about the Tarahumara tribe and how they run.

Andrea:
I was thinking of them when I said there’s people who need their bodies to work.

Alison:
That’s where it started. And Rob said, I’m going to do this barefooting thing. And that was in 2009. So that’s literally like 17 years of me not wearing any heels, 17 years. Katie Bowman really influenced me and in regards of barefooting, but also she’s influenced me in many other bodily ways. If you don’t know who she is, she has a website, Nutritious Movement, and she’s written a load of books. I’ve read every one of them. She’s wonderful.

Alison:
And really, I think from just after Rob read that book, I read it, and then we just started buying barefoot shoes and threw away all our shoes with heels on um there’s a company called zero shoes which actually is spelt z, no x e r o which are in the states they were producing sandals, with um barefoot soles so like minimum like two millimeter rubber soles and laces that you made yourself you cut it out and you made it yourself, and rob was the first person to um have one of those pairs input imported into europe he phoned and we’ve never imported into Europe before um, and so he literally cut out as we cut out the shoes and then we chose a pair of laces and we made a hole in them to put the laces in and then we wore them rob wear those rob wore those shoes for our wedding literally that’s how committed we are to those shoes um.

Alison:
I feel like it you know the grounding and what you’re talking about being barefoot outside on grass is really important, connecting to the earth but barefooting is also about the position of your feet, what position they’re in and how that impacts the position of every other bone that is above your feet, i.e. the rest of your body. So your pelvic position is hugely influenced by the amount of heel you have. So if you think about women’s shoes and large heels, it pushes the leg into a different position. It pushes the pelvic into a different position. It affects the length of your hamstrings, your ability to squat. Everything kind of is built on the fact that as humans we were supposed to be walking on our feet that’s what they’re there for um.

Alison:
I don’t want to talk about this rages, but I do also just want to say a quick thing about arch support. I thought when I first got the barefoot shoes, well, what I’m going to do about arch support? I need arch support because I was wearing Birkenstocks like for, I don’t know, maybe 10 years before I met Rob, I had, you know, many different pairs of Birkenstocks and I went to them. They were the only shoes that I wore when the weather allowed. But I’ve learned that if you, that our arches are there for a reason and our arch is supposed to support our foot. And if you allow your arch to do what it’s supposed to do gradually, it will do. It’s there to help your feet work ergonomically and it doesn’t need support. It can provide that support for itself but if you’re if you’re used to normal shoes and arch support it might be something that you have to do very very gradually rob, when he started barefoot running did it too quickly too soon and damaged his feet quite badly from the impacts you know because also he was running on concrete which i like we did that you know we were we as humans we’ve been on, earth which gives you know has some um.

Alison:
When you hit it doesn’t just slap you back with all the kind of repercussions back up through your bones um so i would say it’s not necessarily an easy transition for anyone who wants to go barefoot and particularly if you have um issues with your feet but i do believe that, whatever issues you have with your feet and katie bowman would certainly say this that it is possible to move through them if you do it gradually um and i mean i just, neither of us have looked back since then and gable doesn’t wear shoes with heels it just feels like well this is a natural thing to do who invented heels i mean why why do i need something underneath my heel when my body was made to just have a heel.

Andrea:
I’m gonna probably blame the french Which, I don’t know.

Alison:
Yeah, it might be.

Andrea:
Seems reasonable. The, and to be clear, a heel doesn’t mean, you know, we’re not talking stilettos. A heel can be like on a tennis sneaker. Yeah, just any heel. Did you guys use the word plimsolls? American girls told me you best say plimsolls. Yay, plimsolls. All right. So it can be on something as simple as that. And it’s not going to look like a heel. It’s not like, oh, men don’t wear heels. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. Like this is just literally there’s a little bit of a rise.

Alison:
Any rise, yeah.

Andrea:
If there’s no rise, it’s called a zero drop shoe, which is kind of probably where the name zero came from.

Alison:
Yeah, it does, yeah.

Andrea:
And this is something where if you have kids, I would beg you to invest. It is the most expensive thing you’ll ever do is buy these barefoot shoes for your kids. Because since they aren’t made in these mega factories, they’re usually very small companies. Like the shoes our kids have are handmade. And they’re made from, you know, this heritage sheep wool in Germany somewhere that was getting wasted. And it’s like, it’s a whole thing, but they’re not cheap. But here’s the thing. The standard shoes that children wear, and we’re just talking normal shoes that I see every other kid I know wearing, you know, to school, they have like a thick, hard sole, they have somewhat of a rise. And while you do, you know, you get the shoes fitted, ideally, they still do change the shape of the foot. That cannot be reversed in adulthood. You can undo some of the damage and you can certainly as like Allison you talked about you can certainly strengthen your feet and improve your, musculature and structure and flexibility of your feet but what is gained in childhood of being barefoot and wearing barefoot shoes is, you cannot recreate that in adulthood. And so this is…

Alison:
I totally agree. I wish that I’d been able to have access to, you know, those shoes or more barefoot time as a kid. You know, my feet are in good condition. They really are. But my toes are scrunched, and in a way that they shouldn’t be, you know. And I feel that’s a shame and it It impedes how I can use my feet to steady me and will do as I get older, you know.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
I can only reverse as much as I can reverse now at the age that I started barefooting. I am… I remember when we first went to Italy and we had these barefoot shoes in 2009, I had a YouTube channel and I made a series of videos about running barefoot. And one of them, I had a great big winter coat on and it was snowing and I had these barefoot shoes on. But I must have been, I think I must have been like 30, 34 or something, you know, and I started then. But there’s a lot of damage that I can’t reverse. It’s just, you know, my feet were how we’re treated to the shoes that they had as a kid. And the earlier you can start or not put those other shoes on your kid, the better it will be for them for the rest of their life.

Andrea:
Yeah. Your body will cope, as we’ve already discussed. But when you think about the most extreme example of, you know, the now, unfortunately, extinct, hopefully everywhere, Chinese foot binding.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Those women could hobble about, but that is not ideal or optimal human thriving. And, we can harm ourselves to a much lesser degree, but still harm ourselves. And why not have the strongest base we can? The thing that I found, I was barefoot a fair bit as a kid, and my feet are so wide that there’s almost no brand that I can wear of shoes. And even when we were looking for my newest pair of barefoot shoes, then, because they are expensive, you know, you kind of wear them into the ground, literally.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:
And before you’re willing to cough up, you know, the three-digit figure for your next pair. And… We ordered and sent back three different pairs of shoes for me. And I was starting to get very frustrated because I told Gary, I was like, they all say wide toe box. And these are, but I said they’re for people who are beginning as adults. And so it’s a wide toe box for a foot that is learning to grow, but it’s not a wide toe box for the foot that’s already too wide. And Leah has said the same. her feet are i think even wider than mine and hannah as well my friend hannah yeah you know via the internet and and i, we’re just limited on the shoes we can get because even in the barefoot community our feet are wider than the people who are occasionally i bought.

Alison:
Men’s shoes it’s lucky.

Andrea:
For women that they can buy.

Alison:
I bought men’s shoes because my feet are too wide for the women’s version.

Andrea:
Yeah what the the barefoot companies that i bought from they don’t really have men’s versus women’s there’s just size okay so it you know it’s like men’s size or women’s size um, so i guess that kind of knocks that out so if you’re a white even for a man how’s that yeah, but um i’ll put some links i’m going to put the zero shoes in the show notes and also leah introduced me to this website called anya’s reviews barefoot shoes doesn’t mean going barefoot and it also doesn’t mean just having like a leather string tied around your big toe it can be very cute looking shoes there’s really cute little pumps and dressy shoes and things i only have, well that’s not true i’m gonna say only have one pair of shoes, I have work boots, and I also have a pair of, like, dress boots that I’ve had for a long time. But I have one pair of functional shoes because they’re expensive. So my shoes kind of just do the duty of everything. You know, I run them through the wash and dry them on the boot dryer, and I wear them, to church, and I wear them to walk and everything.

Andrea:
But if you want to spend a lot of money on shoes, you can go to Anya’s reviews and look at all different shoes. Um clothing which is kind of just an out shoot of um shoes allison yeah this is another rabbit trail that you could spend the rest of your life on and, you know again fashion has not always been friendly to the human body this isn’t necessarily you know a post-industrial thing but you know there are have been many times in history when fashion is not friendly to the body, um there’s a ton of waste in textiles, and we’re not just talking you know clothing getting thrown away we’re talking you know toxic water waste and scrap waste and material waste in the processing um there’s most clothes are made out of my microplastics and i have, propagandized my kids i think pretty heavily on plastic because like i don’t want to wear plastic pants and things like that. But anything with poly in the name is made out of petroleum. And we just don’t need to be wearing that. And we don’t need as many clothes as we’re told we need. We don’t need thousands and thousands of outfits.

Andrea:
I feel like Leah is probably my, best in real life example that I know of somebody who’s whittled their clothes down to like a couple laundry baskets and she has three kids so, it’s not like just her on her own and um, all her kids clothes are you know adorable and wool and cotton and linen and just kind of really good materials and she, when she came out here the first time I just got so inspired and basically in the year following her first visit we got rid of everything that was plastic wow in our clothing i think there’s a few like there’s a few special items that remain but um, we just didn’t keep any of it and gary’s been switching out his stuff you know he’s limited on some stuff with you know his workout fits he has to wear certain things but he’s like everything that’s touching my skin that’s like closest to my body you know, i want it to be clean and t-mill allison this is what why it took so long to get t-shirts because, it’s really hard to find companies that are doing clothing ethically and organically and the ink is its whole huge issue um, and so t-mill was the first company i’m so thankful you finally found them, and they but you will immediately find when you look at the high quality clothing you’re like oh this cost two or three times as much yeah and and There’s a reason why people aren’t getting paid.

Andrea:
Behind those factories. There’s.

Andrea:
A—in all your avoidance of blue screens, everybody, if you want to watch a documentary, there’s a documentary on Netflix called Buy Now. Obviously, it’s about Amazon. But they—, I can’t necessarily vouch for every detail in the show, but what they do a really good job of is showing you paths of waste and how things are being thrown away. And there’s beaches, beaches in Africa that are just heaps of laundry. I mean, it’s shocking. And you’re looking at these piles and piles of everything you’ve ever seen in a mall. And children are like running over it like giant sand dunes and you’re just like this, is not okay this is not okay and um the thing is that as those clothes break down in the, water they are basically dispersing microplastics in the water and that’s turning up you know that toxic waste is turning up in animals like above the arctic circle and yeah you know in you at women’s breast milk and things like that so and.

Alison:
In the fish that we eat.

Andrea:
And in the fish that you eat so um and this is this was a, probably the latest and the most recent bridge that i decided to cross was the clothing one yeah because it felt so daunting but um, i think it is a worthwhile one you know when you are ready to start looking at clothing to start reading you know reading the Labels of your clothes is as important as reading the labels of your food.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And being able to… Put on clothes and know that that they’re not harming you is it’s a, it’s definitely a source of peace so if you’re in discord um leah has, leah has shared many many resources we ended up making a channel just for talking about clothes and she’s put a bunch of links in there and the conversations come up all the time people are you know i’m looking for, a bra that’s wool and is not super washed, which is a chemical treatment of wool, and how to take care of these clothes, because this is another art we’ve lost, is the art of maintaining our clothing, because we’re used to just cramming it in a washer and then cramming it in a dryer and then cramming it in a drawer, and then cramming it in a trash bag. And learning how to take care of clothing is a skill, But I think it’s one that we’re capable of learning and it’s a part of a life that moves more slowly.

Alison:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I think that you’re probably a little bit further ahead than us on that. Most of my clothes come from charity shops and I always look at the label. So I’m just, I’m usually at the rail in the UK. A lot of the charity shops have vintage rails that cost more, but they’re a better quality. So I’m just generally go there and then I can see the things that I’m looking at the label is it 100% wool I’m feeling it I’m looking at it is it cotton you know and you know after a while.

Andrea:
After you shop like.

Alison:
That for a while you’d feel like you see it yeah and you feel it and you’re like I already know I can tell you definitely um, and you know sometimes they even have home knitted stuff in there you know that’s got no label on it I’m like um and I’m I’m quite good at finding i mean i’m tall and i’m slim so i’m it’s perhaps easier for me, um but i’m quite good at finding really nice clothes in there and i also do buy knitwear that and i’ll buy 100% wall knit wear, really because i want to keep warm i mean acrylic doesn’t keep me warm i want to keep warm and but also because i know that there’s no plastic in it um i haven’t thrown away all of my you know i haven’t got rid of all of my clothes that have plastic in them if i had budget you know if someone handed me like you know two thousand pounds or something i would have, give away all of my clothes that had plastic in them and get a few nice things to replace them. But I’m not quite there yet. I think probably as time goes on, slowly as my clothes kind of wear out, then I’m replacing them with fewer clothes and clothes that are either, you know, organically produced cotton or wool, which feels really good.

Andrea:
You want to know the sad thing, Alison, is that we didn’t even really have to buy much replacements. We just got rid of the plastic clothes that’s how much.

Alison:
And you’ve got enough you just wear the other.

Andrea:
Ones yeah so i’m just saying it’s a win all around it’s just a win all around actually you don’t have to wash so many and you need the wardrobe.

Alison:
Space yeah perfect.

Andrea:
And most of the clothes that we’ve bought because i have had to buy some things for the girls and some things for kenton especially um yeah, i was going to or am going to like consignment type stores and, it immediately whittles down the list like the overwhelm of looking at those shelves drops away when you say I’m only getting you know the organic or the 100% whatever it is, if you kind of know what your parameters are I mean you can just, that’s like 90% of those clothes and just you don’t even have to look at them, and at first I would have to grab each thing like look at the label now like we were saying I can spot it I can see it from across the room or I pick it up and I’m like I could already tell you this is mixed With polyester or whatever So you know after a while And, the process gets easier So yeah, Um, Allison, do you think we have time to talk about habits or should we take that to an after show? Cause we’ve gone on.

Alison:
Yeah, I think probably we should do it in an after show. Okay.

Andrea:
Let’s do an after show. So, so then let’s wrap up here. What we’re going to talk about in an after show is just because we’re waxing long hair is there, there are some habits that I think are really important. So we’ve talked about, you know, the big products we’ve talked about style and I, I really want to talk about habits, but we just don’t have time on the main feed. So, um thank you for listening everybody and do join us on kitchen table chats our private podcast for supporters at companionship and above there is more there waiting for you there’s more episodes there than we have on the main feed actually yeah there’s some, really fun kind of unfiltered entertainment there i i am surprised all of a sudden how many people say actually that those are their favorite episodes that we do yeah they are because they are just much more casual but, it’s really wonderful having the support of everybody. If you’re just listening and sharing the podcast, please do that because that really is how we get found is, you know, the algorithms see that people are listening and rating and reviewing and that is how they put the podcast in front of other people. So thank you for doing that. You’re supporting us in so many ways that way. So, Alison, good to chat with you as always and I’ll see you on the after show.

Alison:
Yeah, me too.

Andrea:
Bye.