I’ve been in the maintenance mode lately and boy am I doing a good job at it! Within 10 days I’ll have gone to my first mole checkup at the dermatologist, the optometrist , dentist, massage therapist, and hairdresser. Yea, pretty much a full body once over! So tonight was my dentist checkup.
If you know me by now, I’m not the fondest of dentists and really never get too excited to go there. I mean why bother if nothing is hurting you right? Well it’s so hard to get into any office anymore after work so I decided I better just do go. I was hoping for a snow storm that would cause me not to be able to make my appointment, but no luck on that! So of course in the morning I grab my toothbrush and toothpaste and head to work. Now I was so careful on what I ate during the day and did bring along some mints for my breath, but forgot about any kind of flossing. I’m not the best at thinking about flossing anyway and am OK with that. But when it comes to a checkup, I think about it A LOT more than when I don’t have a dentist checkup 🙂
So when work was over I get in my car and started to head over to the dentist. On the way there I remember how it sure seems like they yank my lips around at the dentist office so I start digging in my purse for my new chapstick that I bought the other day. I knew that it was in there but had the worst time trying to find it. So I’m driving and still digging in my purse and I think I finally had found it. But when I take it out of my purse I see what I really found was a small container of dental floss. Totally weird! First of all I had no idea that it was in there and second of all it was like fate or something. Well now that I had it in my hand I thought it’s probably a good time to use it. OK, flossing your teeth while you’re driving isn’t the easiest or the smartest thing to do so I was just out of town and decided to pull into the grocery parking lot and floss. I was thinking to myself that I’m so smart! When I get asked if I have been flossing by the dental office I can honestly say back, ‘you bet’ And guess what? It wouldn’t even be a lie! So I head over to the dentist and while I was in the chair the dental hygienist said that my teeth and gums are looking so good and I must be taking good care of my teeth and flossing. Now I waited for right time to chime in and then it happened. She said have you been flossing lately?  Shazam!! I said back to her “You Bet!” I didn’t really tell her that I just did it maybe only when I was in the grocery store parking lot, but sometimes you don’t want to share too much information anyway. But when the dentist came in to do a once over look at my teeth he said how good everything was looking and again I was feeling pretty smug about the whole thing. Now I don’t know if my mouth looked that bad before – but I’m taking these comments only as positive ones. Finally I told them that I use coconut oil in the morning and do what is called pulling. This is a process that you put the coconut oil in your mouth and kind of pull it between your teeth to get rid of all the bad germs before you brush. And it must work for me because I’ve been doing this pretty faithfully for almost a year and from the sounds of my dental visit – it was a huge success.  Score!
Now I don’t recommend this process if you don’t like coconut because you’re putting straight coconut oil in your mouth to melt it. I use about a tsp. of it and it’s an organic food grade coconut oil that I get at the health store. You swish it around in your mouth for about 10 minutes or so and then spit it out in the garbage. Kinda gross, but your mouth an teeth really feel good after it’s done.
