si dawson

I'm not really a fan of New Year's res­o­lu­tions. How many do you end up keeping?

How­ever, a new year's exper­i­ment — where you try some­thing new, just for Jan­u­ary? Ahh, that's awesome.

So, a few years back I read a book a day for all of Jan. That was.. enter­tain­ing, although I didn't do much else with my time.

Then I tried eat­ing no meat for Jan­u­ary a cou­ple of years later. That lasted about 3 days, until I realised I'd have to learn how to cook tofu (Eww! No thanks!) where­upon I dis­cov­ered the raw food diet — no cook­ing, no tofu? I'm sold! Which was great, and extended out more or less con­tin­u­ously from there.

This year, based on read­ing this, & this, I thought I'd try wash­ing with no soap or sham­poo for all of January.

To para­phrase the the­ory, one rea­son we smell is because of bac­te­ria on our skin, which is amped up when we strip nat­ural oils etc out using soaps (which also leave a thin film of chem­i­cals on our skin). Skin is some­thing which is vastly under­rated, but given that it's our largest organ, we should prob­a­bly con­sider a lit­tle more than we tend to.

There's also a the­ory that you should never put any­thing on your skin that you wouldn't eat. Since our skin is absorbent, I've gotta say, that holds a lot of water for me.

Peo­ple that have done the "no soap" thing before say it takes a cou­ple of weeks for your body to adjust. There's a lot of flush­ing of tox­ins, plus your body get­ting used to not hav­ing to con­stantly replace the oils. After that, things hum along — clean shiny hair, glow­ing skin, etc etc.

Per­son­ally? I've gotta say I'm skep­ti­cal. I have some unusual skin. It's very moist (a der­ma­tol­o­gist once showed it to me under a micro­scope, say­ing it was the moistest skin she'd ever seen). I also have a hyper­ac­tive lifestyle — work­ing out until phys­i­cal exhaus­tion (ie, mega sweat+dirt) four times a week, & do occa­sion­ally get very slight patches of eczema if I'm under a lot of stress or don't clean super well. I also find that my pores clog up a lit­tle if I miss a patch on my leg, say, when I'm clean­ing (par­tic­u­larly after hard exercise).

These are all very minor things, but I sus­pect they'll be exac­er­bated with­out soap.

Up until now I've found the best solu­tion is to use a very mild, non per­fumed soap. I also do dry skin brush­ing (when I remem­ber, I'm a bit lazy on that front, I'll admit), which helps slough off dead skin cells.

Of course, I'll still use soap before food prep, after the bath­room, or if (like today) I get myself cov­ered in oil up to the elbows. Best not to be a com­plete idiot & ignore all that sci­ence has dis­cov­ered in the past 200 years.

Also, this does NOT mean no wash­ing. Hell no. Just not using soap. I'll still be scrub­bing my body as if I were using soap — so that fric­tion will help clean off dirt etc. I already use a nail brush (with­out soap) to scrub real tough grime out — eg grass stains on the bot­tom of my feet after training.

At present I'm a few days in, and def­i­nitely in that "argh" stage. I'm going to up the skin brush­ing a bit, & have more reg­u­lar show­ers to help my skin flush away any crud that's com­ing out.

By the end of Jan­u­ary I should have enough data to make a defin­i­tive con­clu­sion — for my own body at least. Up to you to fig­ure it out for yourself!