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"Anti aging" is frequently associated with botox, face lifts and expensive treatments.
What if there are other less drastic and cheaper alternatives to looking younger for longer?
And the added bonus?
Possibly weight loss for a start!
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You look into the mirror and what do you see? Odds are, like most people, we tend to focus on the “flaws”, “pores” or “lines” on the face.
And for good reason, we’re getting less sleep, have late nights, have more stressful jobs, adopt unhealthy eating habits or lifestyles. Consequently, they end up playing a role in how we age and look.
No wonder cosmetic surgery and botox are so popular.
If you’re not into the high cost and high risk of complications and side effects of surgery or injecting purified toxins into your face muscles, then you may want to try natural alternatives: anti-aging foods.
Why use food?
It may sound crazy to some people, but your skin is made from within, not from the outside.
How you’ve aged corresponds to how you’ve looked after yourself (or not) from the inside out.
And where do the building blocks for skin come from? Where does the nourishment it needs come from? Food of course!
It is the vitamins, minerals, protein, fibre and good fats in food that provides the building blocks for good, youthful skin. You can imagine what kind of skin will form from a diet of pizza, coke and fries.
Although using anti aging food is a slower method of “repairing” the damage done to the skin, it has added benefits for your health and well being (even longevity!) provided you eat the right foods.
Remember, it could be the wrong foods that got you the wrinkles, pimples or flaky skin in the first place!
So your choice of food matters.
New skin takes thirty to forty days to push to the surface. What you ate a month ago may come back to haunt you. Some of you may be recounting those guilty memories of raiding the fridge late at night or stuffing your face with chocolates a month ago.
Hormones do have a big role in affecting the skin,
so if you’re not pregnant, menopausal or having your periods and your skin behaves like a nervous wreck, the culprit could be the type of food you’re eating.
Food could be your greatest enemy or your best friend, so choose your food wisely!
Some of you may already love the following listed foods, but some of you may have to acquire a taste for it. Example: Coffee drinkers might find it hard at first to trade their morning lattes with a cup of green tea. But the long term benefits are: better skin (less wrinkles), weight loss (due to less sugar intake), better health and less anxiety!
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Trade: Your morning cup of coffee for a cup of green tea or white tea (Chinese Silver Needle tea leaves - not tea with milk).
Why?
Choose green or white tea as they’re both known to have health benefits as well as being rich sources of antioxidants. Celebrities also swear by green tea for weight loss. Added benefits: Green or white tea doesn’t stain the teeth as much as coffee. Some of the longest living cultures in the world drink tea (without milk) everyday. White tea is believed to have higher levels of antioxidants than green tea because it is less processed.
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Trade: Sweet snacks, chocolates and candies for fresh, mixed berries (buy them or take them to work).
Why?
Berries (strawberries, mulberries, raspberries, blackberries, red currants, blueberries) are packed full of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals which are really good for slowing down the aging clock!
What are Antioxidants? Antioxidants are free radical scavengers. Think of free radicals as these crazy nuts that turn everything they touch into rust and havoc. An antioxidant is a stable molecule that donates an electron to a rampaging free radical and neutralizes it to reduce further cascading damage. Left unchecked, oxidative stress develops which may cause chronic damage (think wrinkles and saggy skin).
But where do "free radicals" come from? It can be formed by our normal cellular processes such as breathing but generally, our bodies produce enough antioxidants to protect us.
However, because most of us live in cities and eat bad foods, we overload our bodies with free radicals or do things that generate free radicals inside us and that's when we need to consume more antioxidants to protect ourselves.
Sources of free radicals include pollution, car fumes, cigarette smoke (and second-hand smoking), fried foods, sugar, UV rays and alcohol. All those sources of free radicals age us one day at a time. To combat that, antioxidants from food are a great way to slow down aging.
If oxidative stress from free radicals is left to their own devices, over time, that can lead to diseases such as Alzheimer's, MS, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune diseases or cancer.
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Trade: The usual slab of red meat for fish (not fried).
Why?
Red meat isn’t bad, but today’s factory farming methods doesn’t make good meat. Animals are fed grains rather than grass so their fats have high ratios of omega 6 (which promotes inflammation - bad for skin). Some animals are given antibiotics (as they’re indoors and sickly), injected with hormones to gain weight and some animals are not slaughtered hygienically - leaving high counts of fecal bacteria to breed on the meat. Wild fish (caught from oceans, not farmed), has high levels of omega 3 fatty acids - the fats that make your skin moisturised and supple. Omega 6 tends to promote inflammation and omega 3 does the opposite. So if you have rosacea, eczema, dry skin or sensitive skin, get more oily fish into your diet. Try salmon or sashimi. If you don’t like eating fish, grass fed, free-range organic or wild animal meat contains suitable levels of omega 3. Of course, you can try fish oil or salmon oil supplements too. Make sure you buy capsules that contain at least 1000mg of EPA & DHA. If you’re a vegetarian or vegan, try a tablespoon of flaxseed oil everyday.
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Trade: Fries, crackers, corn chips and other snacks for fresh fruit (cut and pack fruit salad for lunch or buy it ready made from supermarkets or fresh grocery stores).
Why?
Fruit - similar to berries - contains a myriad of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals as well as fibre (fiber). Why fibre? Well constipation is not sexy for skin. When someone’s constipated, they’re carrying around decaying fecal matter in their colons - sometimes 5 days worth of putrid, rotting food! Fibre helps cleanse and push out days old fecal matter. Wastes that hang around for too long in the bowels can have some of the toxins absorbed into the surrounding organs. Yikes!
So funnelling the wastes out of there is a good thing.
Whatever you do, DO NOT use laxatives. Frequent use of laxatives is not the same as taking fibre. Frequent use of laxatives can also lead to their dependence - side effects include excessive gas, bloating of the stomach, severe diarrhoea, dehydration, loss of minerals in the body, weakening of the bowels, constipation (laxative abuse leads to dependence on it to pass stools) and colon failure. Good sources of fibre can be found in wholegrain foods, psyllium husks (available at supermarkets & health food stores), oats and oatmeal, green leafy vegetables, rice bran and of course, fruit!
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Trade: Coke (and all types of soft drinks), energy drinks, fruit punches, cordials, milk shakes, sweet alcoholic drinks and hot chocolates for water, smoothies, tea or water with a squeeze of lemon.
Why?
Because one of the fastest ways to get sugar into the body (and put on the pounds) is by drinking your calories! Just by cutting back or switching the above drinks with the alternatives can help you lose weight fast and over time, reduce the appearance of new wrinkles.
How?
Excess sugar in the body can cause glycosylation. Think of it as having your body being pickled by the sugar you consume. Sugar or glucose in the body will harden capillaries as well as the skin. After all, your capillaries supply blood to your skin. If they’re stiff and leaky, you can’t get the nutrients across!
Sugar causes wrinkles by cross-linking the proteins. Skin is made from proteins and cross-linking them causes the skin to be stiff and rigid, aka wrinkles. Healthy skin should be firm, supple and bouncy. Excess sugar may also promote androgens in the body (male hormones) so this could be the reason why for some people, after snacking on chocolates, break out in pimples.
Hopefully by switching to better food choices, you’ll have healthier skin, look younger, feel better and have a trimmer waistline!
Copyright Cyren Organics
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Skin Foods, Recessionista Beauty
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