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♥️✨ The 5 Most Overlooked Toxins in Your Home—and How to Ditch Them Naturally!

Did you know the average home contains over 500 chemicals? 😱

Many of these are invisible, unregulated, and often labeled as “safe”, but they can quietly affect our hormones, immune system, and even increase our long-term cancer risk.’Im going to give you some peace of min though- you don’t need to overhaul everything at once! I took one thing at a time.

Today, I’m sharing 5 sneaky sources of toxins and some simple swaps we’ve made in our own home that you can try too!

🧴 1. Drinking Water
What to do: Start filtering your water with a high-quality system. I break it down in this water guide! (I love Boroux the most! Use code ACM at checkout for a discount)
🛏 2. Mattress Off-Gassing
Hidden toxins: Flame retardants, formaldehyde, VOCs
What to do: Go organic when possible! Here’s what we decided on 16 years ago after hours of comparison research! My Savvy Rest mattress is HEAVENLY. It comes in customizable layers and has a 20 YEAR warranty! That is amazing and unlike any other mattress. Check in seasonally as they run their 20% off every few months. Also look into just getting one of their organic mattress toppers and wool pillows if a full mattress isn’t in the budget, although I think it’s a wise purchase that you can spread out over the course of several years. You spend ⅓ of your day on your mattress!
🕯 3. Scented Candles & Air Fresheners
Hidden toxins: Phthalates, artificial fragrance, benzene
What to do: Opt for essential oil diffusers or essential oil beeswax candles. You’ll still get the cozy vibe – without the toxic load.
🍱 4. Plastic Food Storage
Hidden toxins: BPA, BPS, microplastics (especially when heated)
What to do: Swap for glass or stainless steel. We slowly built our collection over time by watching for sales and secondhand finds, but these are a great set to start with and also are large enough for my anti-cancer salad.
🧼 5. Cleaning Products
Hidden toxins: Ammonia, bleach, sulfates, synthetic fragrances
What to do: I use Norwex cleaning cloths and sometimes a water/vinegar mix for cleaning my home! For laundry I use Truly Free laundry! This is a non-toxic laundry detergent that smells AMAZING and cleans great! You also mix the detergent at home in reusable jugs, saving SO MUCH plastic!)
💬 Final Thoughts:
You don’t have to be perfect. Just pick one area to start. One small swap can mean less exposure and more peace of mind for your family.
Let me know if one of these stood out in the comments!
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Worrying You Have Cancer? 5 Tips to Help You Stop (#2 is SUPER Easy!)

worrying I have cancer

Each time I have a baby I go through a season of worrying I have cancer again. Months of sleep deprivation, limited time to prepare healthy food, and kid-overload can make your body feel like something is really wrong. But I forget the power that I really have to prevent!

Cancer free now since 2008 after choosing a completely holistic approach, I can’t afford to abandon my anti-cancer diet and lifestyle, even if a new baby makes it super difficult.

So remembering some of these 5 easy strategies to stay cancer confident has me feeling more empowered about being perfectly fine!

Originally published: 10/1/2015, Updated 7/23/2025

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13 Year Update – NLPHL Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – Stage 2

This may be the shortest blog post I have ever written, but here’s an interview I did with Chris Wark at Chris Beat Cancer about three years ago. I was actually pregnant with our youngest daughter (and 6th baby) at the time of the interview and had TERRIBLE morning sickness. 😂 Life is so busy, I ignored my blog here! Oh, and despite what the title says, I was actually almost at my 13th year of remission when this was filmed. ♥ As I’m typing this, it has been 16 years.

As most of you know, I am busiest on social media, especially Instagram and Facebook, so you can chat with me there!

-Cortney

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10 Healthy Living Hacks For Traveling

I’m writing this post on a four hour Amtrak train ride from Boston to New York, wrapping up a nine day trip with my husband. 😊 Travel strategy is fresh in my head, and since it’s been a few months since my last post, I wanted to catch up with everyone here!

(Links updated, 2024. Originally written in 2017)

Today I’m sharing a bit of what worked and what didn’t along our travels these last seven days. To make this trip happen, we DROVE 🚗 from our home in Atlanta in our minivan to South Florida, dropped our three kids off with my parents there and took a PLANE ✈ to New York. Then we took the AMTRAK train 🚄 to Boston and then back to New York where we will catch a PLANE 🛬 back to South Florida and will drive back home to Atlanta. 🚗

Phew. And YES we are very grateful for my parents wanting to binge watch their grandchildren. 😜

 

PERFECT isn’t a thing….especially on vacation.

I am proud to say that we are not PERFECT people. I ate steak once on this trip. And had a bit of ice cream. And on the Amtrak I ate a microwaved sandwich. Oh Lordy Be I was starving. I even joked to my husband…”you know <insert any health blogger here> would say that they just FAST if there’s nothing healthy to eat”….as I bit into my rubbery sandwich. <sigh>

These are obviously not everyday healthy choices and definitely not anti-cancer. But it has been 9 years since my cancer diagnosis and more than 8 years since remission. It’s nice at this point to occasionally have a treat that I enjoy and loosen the obsessiveness and intensity this lifestyle can create.

I still struggle with guilt sometimes about eating food I typically don’t eat (especially sugar when I rarely do,) but I’ve learned over the years that if I choose to do it, I’m going to let it go and enjoy the moment.

I’ve also learned that I don’t eat a lot of it. With sugar in particular too much of it makes me feels sick. Even if I order the kid-sized portions I usually don’t even finish that.

It’s nice to open up a bit to you all today. Sometimes it is easier to keep the stuff I eat that I’m not so proud of to myself, but I’m a real person and “Mom!” to three kids. It’s nice to RELAX the rules and rigidity sometimes.

Click “Continue Reading” for those 10 tips and hacks 👇

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6 Salad Bar Ideas for the Whole Family (Healthy, Fun, Stay-at-Home)

SIX salad bar ideas

Looking for at-home salad bar ideas? Have a big family or having friends over? Here are a few set-ups that will make your gathering a lot easier and more fun!

Have you ever thought it was funny how blog posts nowadays seem like they are written by a computer? Well, it’s because they probably are! This is really me though, Cortney, the author of this blog since 2011. 😀 But lately bloggers are using AI to write their blogs because it can create perfectly formulaic posts that grab the search engine’s attention.

Anyways, enough of that. I just though it was interesting (and scary?) to share. Since this is the first brand new blog post I’ve written in a while, it’s just what is on my mind while I am writing. Algorithms and AI is also why you may see the key word “salad bar ideas” all over this post. The more I say it, the more Google picks up on this post and bumps it up in the search results! Did you learn something other than salad bar ideas? HAHA, mentioned it again. 😉

I think ya’ll will find this blog post (on salad bar ideas😁)  so helpful. Having a family salad bar night is truly an excellent way to make everyone happy and meet everyone’s different dietary needs and preferences.

And if you want more content like this SUBSCRIBE to my weekly, sometimes monthly email list so you won’t miss it!

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Easy and Tasty Kale Chips

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I know that many of you may already be making kale chips, but this is the recipe that I have found easiest and most delicious. In fact, last week my daughter ate that entire tray you see her holding….by HERSELF. I actually had to bribe her with the kale chips to take bites of the other part of her dinner.

They are crunchy, have a tiny buttery factor from the olive oil, and are topped off with salty deliciousness. And this is without mentioning their amazing cancer-fighting abilities. Read on for the recipe!

Updated: May 17, 2023, originally published 2012

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How to Clean Your House With Norwex (non-toxic cleaning)

When it comes to cleaning, I’ve noticed people tend to settle into two different camps. They love it or they hate it. They let it build up until they can’t stand it anymore (or they have guests over), OR they have a militant cleaning schedule and can’t do anything for the day until the cleaning is done. Learning how to clean your house with Norwex products brings a joy and simplicity to cleaning that I’ll talk about in this post. 🙂

Since we were both raised in a stricter cleaning environment, my husband and I tend to lean the other way- towards TIDY but “oh, there’s a pink mold ring in the toilet? Ok, I’ll get the toilet brush…” mentality.

We have always struggled with maintaining a cleaning schedule because with the little amount of downtime we have, we don’t want to spend it cleaning!

Until now. Cleaning is SO MUCH EASIER and FASTER and I love Norwex. 🙂

**GO STRAIGHT TO NORWEX CATALOG HERE**

Post updated November, 2022. Originally published March, 2017.

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Taking Beta Glucan for Cancer | My 15+ Year Experience

As cancer researcher and author of Cancer-Free: Your Guide to Gentle, Non-Toxic Healing, Bill Henderson once said, “No cancer either begins or thrives if the patient’s immune system is strong.” So, a first priority for either prevention or healing is to prioritize equipping your immune system. We can learn about one of the fundamental ways to do this through the research of pharmacologist and immune system expert, AJ Lanigan and his product, Beta 1, 3-D Glucan for cancer.

This post includes an interview with AJ I did in 2022 and answers many great questions I have been asked about Beta Glucan since I started taking it in 2008. I really think you’ll enjoy it! (If you are short on time, there are timestamps in the video description so you can skip between questions.)

***For the lowest price on Beta Glucan visit this link —> HERE! 

(Updated: November, 2023. Originally published January, 2011)

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Samaritan Ministries Review 2023: Our 10 Year Experience

2023 marks TEN YEARS of being Samaritan Ministries members for our family. And we have definitely had some experience with health care sharing since we’ve joined! Lots of variety of injuries, birth stories (several home births), and other recoveries and testing. I can’t wait to share our very honest and detailed Samaritan Ministries review with you. 🙂

For those of you hearing about healthcare sharing for the first time, it is an alternative to health insurance that satisfies insurance requirements and functions similarly to insurance without being (or costing as much) as insurance.

In this post I talk about what it means to “share” with other members each month, what it is like to submit a medical need, the various needs we have experienced, and using alternative medicine doctors as your primary provider. We also had several emergency hospital stays that we paid with 50% discounts. It’s all in this post. 🙂

(Originally published in 2015. Revised 2018, 2022)