Giving up Shampoo.

Over the years, I have washed my hair every day like every other red blooded American, but my head would often break out.  I would switch shampoo, switched to head and shoulders and it worked for a while, but after a month, my head would break out again.  Last summer, I resorted to shaving my head completely.

But I was reading on Treehugger about people who didn't use shampoo anymore.  They said that shampoo washes away your head's natural oils and so your head goes into overtime to produce more oil to replace that which is lost.  When you don't wash your hair for a few days, your hair then gets really oily and you need to wash it again.  And then you'd have to use conditioner to replace the lost oil so your hair would feel healthy.  They said that you could stop using shampoo, to scrub your head with just water, and your head would readjust its oil output and your hair would be just fine.

So I tried it.  And why not?  The phosphates in shampoo and other soaps are one of the major components that have to be treated out of waste water.  Plus by not using shampoo, I can save money and also save the embodied energy in it.

So sometime about last November, I stopped using shampoo altogether.  I'm not one who has really greasy hair anyway, but it was just a little more oily for a few weeks.  Since about Christmas or so, everything has leveled out.  I even had a girl at church feel my hair to prove that there's nothing wrong with it.  My wife has commented that it is soft and not at all oily.

So, my recommendation to you is to try it.  Remember though, it won't happen overnight.  You'll have to keep it up for a few weeks.  When you take a shower, simply scrub your head like you normally would with shampoo, only without.  You'll feel a little of your natural oil on your hands, this is okay.  Just scrub your head until you think you think you are done, and then continue on with your shower as usual.  That's all there is to it.  Keep up with it for about six weeks and if you don't like the results, you can go back to doing whatever you were doing before, nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

Come back and report your results.
WiredForStereo

Edible Bibles.

Treehugger (treehugger.com) just posted an article about a church that has sent 600 solar powered audio Bibles to Haiti.

You might think "Solar powered audio Bibles, great idea, and green too." But remember, Haiti just had a massive earthquake and what people need right now is food, shelter, and medical care.

This particular operation was done very poorly if the secular environmentalists are picking up on it. Ask a non-believer what they would expect of a true Christian and it'd be my bet that they'd expect us to help the poor and to shine in terrible situations like the one in Haiti. Ask a non-believer what they see in the Christians they see before them now and you'll get some variation of "self-righteous" which is what they see when they hear that six hundred solar powered audio Bibles are being sent to a country where 100,000 people are dead and more are dying every day due to injuries.

My friend Mark and I came up with a new take on an old proverb. Remember "Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime." Mark and I added this to that same proverb: "But while you're teaching him, give him some fish because he's hungry." Sure, this directly applies to food, but what about the spiritual applications? You cannot clearly communicate the gospel to someone who is dying of starvation or gangrene. You must bring a state of healing to the body before someone will accept healing of the mind, and more importantly, the two are not just sequential, but interconnected.

If you are going to send Bibles to a disaster area, send food FIRST! If people tear through a pallet of food and find a few Bibles in it, when they are done eating, they might listen to the Bibles. If they tear through a pallet of Bibles, and find no food, they're likely to be angry. The Bibles may go to waste.

How we interact with the world is almost as important as the message we bring to them. If we do not communicate the message in a way that people will be willing to listen to, the message will not be heard.

There's a reason non-believers think so poorly of us, it's because we're doing a poor job.
WiredForStereo