What is Living Granola?

So how, exactly, does one live life like a breakfast cereal? True to it's heritage, back in the 60's when the hippie movement started, living a granola lifestyle encompassed ecological awareness, healthy living and safe, whole foods. As much as I respect my forebears and their granola munching ways for leading the way to healthy living in our modern world, I would be hard-pressed to call myself a hippie in any other aspect of my life. As a licensed esthetician and a beauty product junkie in general, I like the glam-side of life as well.

My first hurrah into this lifestyle actually started with beauty products. My son was just an infant when I read an article on parabens, a synthetic preservative, that was found in high concentrations of biopsied breast tumors that were malignant. I thought it prudent to start looking through my beauty care products to see which ones contained that ingredient. It turned out all of them had parabens and none as much as my son's Johnson & Johnson's baby products that had no less than five different parabens in them! One huge garbage bag of bottles to the curb later (note: the bottles were recycled) I started to take a good look at what was being used in or on or about my home and daily life. It turned out my home needed a major overhaul from beauty to cleaning to eating but I was quick to find out that the best and safest products were more likely than not to be out of my family's price range.

True story:  I thought paying over $5 for a bottle of shampoo was indulgent. My shopping cart looked like a well-played game of Tetris because all the coupons in the newspapers were for boxed goods. A bottle of Lysol could last me three months at like three bucks. So you can imagine my horror at my first Whole Foods shopping trip when the bill came to over $100 for like ten items. Seriously, did they just quadruple ring me for something? Nope, that supposedly was the cost of safe living- but a cost that we could not afford on a day to day basis. There had to be another way. The last seven years for me have been trial and error and error and error, etc. and while this lifestyle can never be deemed as frugal living, I have learned some things along the way to make it attainable and more important- doable. I hope you join me on this blog as I share what I have learned and continue to learn in Living Life Granola.