Lemons: Day 2

I woke up in the morning with literally no BO smell in my pits. After showering, I generously applied another dose of sweet lemon juice all up in my pits, hopped on the express bus downtown on an unseasonably cool and foggy summer morning, feeling a bit more confident than yesterday due to the Day 1 success and the cool temps. During my lunch hour with my co-workers in our break room (haters gonna hate), I decided to fill my cohorts in on my current experiment. There were about 4 of us, all college educated, reasonably healthy, given up on our dreams, etc. I announced my current experiment and its structure and asked what they thought. Their rhetoric was interrogatory, and their tone judging me absurd, which was my reaction when I heard lemons could be used for deodorant as well. So I explained what the hippie and black magic sites stated, and prophesized my Day 1 success. I asked if they would ever consider trying lemons for a week. ‘No.’ Unanimously. Of course I inquired further, and the most popular responses were that it was too weird, too much time in the morning to deal with, and another mentioned they were unaware of any risk of modern store bought deodorant use. I cannot and will not prove that deodorant kills you. But the cancer incident rate in the US exceeds most other countries while boasting top medical facilities, medicine, medical education, doctors, etc. Click here for a chart yo. How can we have the best facilities and still be so unhealthy? Apples and oranges. My theory is this: Medicine aides an existing illness. Our habits either prevent or create that illness (for the most part). It sounds so simple I feel ridiculous even calling it a theory, but so many people talk about genetics as if it has just as much weight in this discussion. Genetics is definitely relevant, but I think it only speaks to your susceptibility to certain diseases, not the cause of them. We as adults, our habits, knowingly or unknowingly cause the disease (for the most part anyway… obviously the body can be diseased without such habits i.e. babies who get sick, disease in countries without a western diet, etc.) using and consuming products our bodies have not had time to evolutionarily adapt to and process without incident (processed food, our portion sizes of certain foods, etc). Since we Americans can’t fully blame 1 cause conclusively (diet, stress, pollution, Bieber fever) why not eliminate as much exposure to risk as possible. Minimizing any risk, even as seemingly marginal as deodorant, could be worthwhile, at least to me. With all the research on the western diet now, and the toll it takes on the human body, I think we can all agree it is the #1 suspect when it comes to irregularity and disease in the human body, but that’s a whole other animal.

I have to say, kudos to the companies that make deodorant. They have created and maintained such a market for their product, most customers do not even contemplate its absence/alternative. Some may switch scents or brands, but not eliminating the risk (the risk being that there are designed penetrating properties in deodorants to help it absorb the anti-persperant or fragrance (aluminum chloride and the likes) into the body to ensure maximum effect. Again, I’m not saying using deodorant is suicide, but I think we can all reasonably agree that our bodies are safer without it or with an equally effective all natural alternative providing the same service.) So the lunch room became more a discussion of how harmful deodorant really is. Something tells me this will be a recurring topic the rest of the week.

I had a sand volleyball game this evening. I did reapply some lemon before I went, though based on smell it wasn’t necessary. I just wanted to play it safe. It was still pretty cool outside, and the league is somewhere between recreational and an arm flailing contest, so the exercise was minimal. I did walk home about 4 miles after the game. I did a serious smell test when I got home. Very strange…. It smelled like celery. Clean celery. Even more strange… I haven’t eaten celery in days. Not that I smell like celery when I eat it, just saying it would make more sense if I had celery recently. Day 2, also a success.