Step into Health!

Welcome to my blog! It has come to my attention that some of the things I post on my facebook for friends, or just out of plain excitement, should be shared with the rest of the world. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Melanie, and I'm a single Mom to 2 beautiful, wonderful children.

Over the years, I have had some major problems with my daughter's health. Although an allergy is considered by the medical community to be an IgE mediated response, I consider an allergy to be an incompatibility (permanent or temporary) between two things. Make that a person and a food, person and a chemical, dog and a cat.... I was checking to see if you were really listening there. Glad you're here!

One of the things that took the longest for me to figure out is that my daughter is highly sensitive to petroleum products... including plastic. She had an anaphylactic reaction after ingesting water stored in plastic, and even is so sensitive she cannot wear 100% polyester sweaters due to red itchy swollen eyes and behavioral changes.

Whether the exposure to plastic for so many years after she was weaned made her more susceptible to other things, or allergies to other foods made her more sensitive to petroleum I don't know. But I do know that they can't even test for this type of allergy! So they dismiss it, which is not acceptable and kept leading us in circles.

In the process of discovering her "allergy" to plastic (petroleum being the culprit, thanks to two good friends) my family has gradually stepped into health. I say it that way because this is the way it SHOULD be - unless you are born into a family that doesn't eat or live the way the average (note: average is NOT equal to normal) American family does.

This blog is dedicated to my children, and other people who want to make their lives healthier and happier. I hope it is easy and enlightening! We will learn together along the way... health is a process.

Health, to me, is the ability of the body to handle stresses without manifesting them inside the body. There are several types of stressors... chemical, physical, and emotional. Studies have shown any type of stress manifests itself the same way in the body. And we all know what that feels like, right?

My goal is to help myself, my children, and as many other people as possible to be able to better handle stressors by taking baby steps along the way. Feel free to join me in this journey!