When warm summer days get too hot for comfort, try Nature's ways to cool down instead of reaching for the air conditioner.

How Hot Are You?

The first step is to simply assess how hot you are. If you're only a little warm, you might be able to cool down by drinking a glass of naturally-sweetened lemonade. I like to squeeze a quarter of a lemon and a quarter of a lime in a tall glass of ice water and add a little stevia powder. (For more cool drinks made with natural sweeteners see the Beverages page of sweetsavvy.com

If you live in a cold climate, reducing your home's energy use for heating can save more energy than anything else.

Without making an investment in a new heating system, here are some little things you can do that will give you big savings.

1. Warm your body instead of the air around you

It takes a lot more energy to warm the air in a room than it does to warm your body. There are many ways to warms your body that require no energy at all!

To warm your body:

Eco-friendly clothing is hard to come by in today's "mass consumption, cheap production" world; it's expensive for companies to ditch the easily accessible, low cost materials that are bad for the environment. Although many mainstream companies probably won't completely cross over any time soon, I did find a few lines with eco-friendly values... for the rest of us.

Here are a few of the top eco-friendly clothing companies I found:

Undesigned by Carol Young
Carol Young makes urban women's wear from all organic materials, even the bamboo denim used in the jeans!