Healthy Green Habits

Healthy green habits are the behavioral and lifestyle choices we make that enhance personal and planetary health and well-being.

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With regard to personal wellness, healthy green habits include eating a healthy diet and using healthy body care. Incorporating exercise into your life, getting healthy sleep, managing stress, and making time for relaxation and fun also fall into this category.

Your Carbon Footprint

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Your "carbon footpint" is an estimate of the CO2 produced to support the way you live. A good place to get an idea of your carbon output is the EarthLab website. After you register, you'll take the brief questionaire to get an idea of where you stand. You'll be asked about your commuting, home, energy, work, travel, and lifestyle habits that affect the environment.

After you take the questionnaire, figure out how you can improve on your healthy green habits and ditch some of your bad ones. A good place to start is with your driving habits.

Driving Green

Check out Greener Cars, a wonderful resource that provides scores for the eco-friendliness of each car on the market. According to David Bach, author of Go Green, Live Rich, getting rid of your car, or at least swapping a car with poor fuel economy for a more efficient one, has a hugely positive impact on the planet as well as your wallet. If you can get let go of your car, this is obviously the best option. If you drive a lot and that's not possible, though, do your research and decide whether you and the environment would be better off with a hybrid.

If getting a new (or how about used?) more fuel efficient car is simply not in the cards, make a committment to simply driving less. Can you reduce the amount of car trips you need to make? Can you use public transportation instead? Can you walk, bike, and carpool more often? At the very least, make sure to take a look at these green driving and maintenance tips.

Next, examine your behavioral patterns at home. See healthy green home for some of the best ways to bring healthy green habits into your home.

If you are overwhelmed and truly don't know where to start, why not commit to taking up just two new healthy green habits?

Bring your own bags when you shop. If everyone did just this one thing, it would be huge. Look at these scary facts about plastic bags and you will never want to use one again. It does take some getting used to always bringing your own bags. A few years ago, I purchased a whole bunch of these Eco-bags . I was so excited about this decision, yet for a few monthes after I had them, I would still sometimes find myself at the end of the check-out line without my bags. I'd left them at home. Not anymore, though. I now have a pretty sizable collection of reusable bags and I always keep them in my car. When I leave my car to go into any store, I always remember my bags because now it's a habit. I never take plastic or paper bags. Period. If I do for some reason find myself without my bags, I carry my items by hand, stuff them into my purse, or just wheel them to my car "unbagged" in the shopping cart.

Drink water out of an eco-friendly reusable bottle instead of buying plastic water bottles. This should be a pretty easy habit to adopt. We used to buy cases of water and of course I would recycle the bottles, but then I learned that not only is bottled water rarely better for you than tap water, the plastic bottles may leach toxic chemicals into your water. I decided we could definitely do without them (not to mention all the energy that is used in making and recycling those plastic bottles). It makes much more sense to drink the free water from your tap (a good filter will remove any "bad stuff") and to fill up water bottles with tap water for when you are "on the road". (learn more about problems with bottled water at All About Water). My favorite bottles are made by Sigg: they have tons of cool designs and every member of your family will want their own. The same goes for disposable coffee/tea cups. Make it a habit to bring your own mug, and just think of all the cups you'll keep out of the garbage.

Once you get started with healthy green habits, you will want to go further, I promise. These are habits that benefit your health, the planet, and quite often your wallet, so you really can't go wrong.

By the way, a good friend of mine recently started a blog devoted to the steps she is taking with her family to live in a more environmentally conscious way. It's called Retro-Domestic. Way to go Nellie!

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