Living Beauty: Banishing Blemishes and Abolishing Acne
Diet, Hormones and Acne! Oh my.
Acne. If you have it, you want it gone.
Hormones, digestion and modern skin care are the cause of most acne problems. Fortunately, there 5 easy steps that you can take to get your skin smooth and healthy again.
5 Steps to Banish Acne:
- Introduce fermented foods and probiotics into your diet. A healthy gut is lined with billions of beneficial bacteria that boost our immune system. The helpful bacteria found in fermented foods and probiotics keep your digestive system moving quickly and efficiently. Try kimchee! You may like it.
- Minimize inflammation. Optimize your insulin levels by eliminating gluten grains andprocessed-sugar from your diet. When insulin levels are normalized, the underlying inflammatory conditions that promote the unfriendly bacterial growth on your skin disappear. Minimize the dietary causes of inflammation and your skin will heal and glow.
- Keep a clean colon. Constipation is no fun, for many reasons. If your digestive system is backed up, hormones are not effectively processed by the liver, and this can cause hormonal acne around the jawline and chin. Also, proteins, pathogens and toxins that are not processed through the digestive system are often sent to the skin to be excreted, resulting in acne and blemishes. If you will remove from your diet glutens and foods with low nutritional value, and have a series of colonics, you can clear up constipation. This will free up your digestive system to do its job of eliminating waste so that you skin can do its job: protecting you and looking radiant.
- Balance your hormones. Women, have your 28 day cycle. Birth control pills wreak havoc with hormone levels! There are also few simple dietary changes that will help clear up excess estrogen that can lead to acne: eliminate soy from your diet and eat your broccoli! Soy stimulates estrogen production, which leads to hormone surplus. Cruciferous veggies, such as broccoli and cabbage, are high in Indol 3 carbonyl which helps the body excrete estrogen, so it is very important to fill your meals with these powerful veggies. Also, supplement your diet with herbs like partridge berry, vitex andpassion flower, which are powerful, and safe, hormone stabilizers.
- Rethink clean. Your skin does not need to be stripped squeaky clean with soaps, alcohols and chemicals to be clean! That beneficial top layer of skin that is so harshly stripped away is comprised of the Hydro-Lipid-Barrier and Acid Mantle. The lipid barrier is your skin’s water-proof seal, enabling the skin to retain water and shielding you from foreign substances trying to enter your body. The Acid Mantle is the natural layer of acidic-oils on the skin that fights acne causing bacteria. Healthy skin is home to friendly flora that are a vital part of the body’s immune system, which thrive only on skin with the top layer of lipids in place.
All modern skin care regimes break the skin’s water proof seal and obliterate the acid mantle, leaving the skin vulnerable to acne-causing bacteria and even inducing inflammatory acne in response to the toxins in harsh chemicals. Stripped of its natural lipids, the skin reacts by producing more oil to regulate its own moisture. When the bacterial balance is compromised, blemishes will occur until the Hydro-Lipid-Barrier is established.
Clean your skin gently and thoroughly, with oil like jojoba and without harming the acid mantle or lipid barrier. For specific care of blemishes, topical applications of essential oils like rosemary, immortelle, niaouli and carrot seed are helpful. They are astringent and anti-bacterial, and can be applied to acne and acne-prone skin with superior, glowing-skin results.
Is That a Cucumber in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
If you’ve ever speculated that there is a connection between your diet and libido, you’d be correct. Diet and lifestyle have all sorts of effects on our mood, our energy, how we feel about our bodies, the amount of sex hormones our bodies create, and yes, our libido. While whole books could be written on the topic (and have!), here are just a few points to get you started in thinking about what’s on your supper plate in a whole new way.
As Marrena Lindberg points out in her book, The Orgasmic Diet, there are basically three main ingredients to libido. The first is feeling good – if you feel depressed or stressed, you’re not likely to want to engage in sexual activity. The second is feelings of arousal – feeling good is the first step, but we also need to have exciting thoughts and desires for sex otherwise that sensation of feeling good might just result in lying in a bath with our favourite book. The third component is that we need to be able to actually experience sexual pleasure so that when we engage in sexual activity we’ll enjoy it and want to do it again. The good news is all three of these libido components – mood, arousal, and pleasure – are impacted by the food we eat.
Before diving in to what can be done to nourish our libido, it is important to consider the things we are putting into our body that drain our libido. The quick list is caffeine, alcohol, sugar, smoking and stress. All of these things will interfere with neurotransmitter activity (the hormone-like substances in our brain that regulate mood) and/or with the availability of free testosterone in our body (yes, ladies, even we have testosterone in our bodies and we need it for feelings of arousal). Unfortunately, anti-depressants, hormonal birth control and many other prescription medications also have an inhibitory effect on libido. This is obviously a more tricky issue to address, and should be managed in consultation with your professional health care provider.
Next up, you want to increase the foods that promote a healthy sex drive. If you’re reading this blog and you’re a follower of Meghan, you’re probably already doing this – yay! Eat whole foods, and get plenty of intake of the nutrients that help to build your sex hormones. If you’re not a vegetarian, we strongly recommend a high quality fish oil supplement since the Omega 3 essential fatty acids in fish oil support libido in two of the three avenues – by improving mood (through increasing the neurotransmitter dopamine), and pleasure (through improving circulation to the whole body, including the sexual organs). Also… sunshine! Vitamin D is a pro-hormone (meaning it is used to build hormones in our body) and it is made from sun exposure. If you live in a cold, grey climate, you are probably vitamin D deficient so consider taking a supplement.
Last up – eat balanced meals that keep your blood sugar stable. When we eat too much sugaror refined foods that enter our blood stream quickly, our blood sugar yo-yos up and down, demanding help from the adrenal glands. When the adrenal glands step in they create a stress response which tells your body it’s not a good time for sex or making babies! So, aside from having good overall stress management techniques, you want to make sure that the meals you are eating have lots of protein, fibre, and good fats in them to slow digestion and maintain stable blood sugar levels. This will also help curb your cravings for caffeine and sugar, two of the libido-busters listed above.
Written by Amy Sedgwick
Lauren Gott makeup for Marshall’s Spring 2012!
My makeup for Sunglass Hut’s Mother’s Day Ad.
Wishing all Mothers a very Happy Mother’s Day!
Microwave test
Below is a Science project presented by a girl in a secondary school in Sussex , U.K. In it she took filtered water and divided it into two parts.
The first part she heated to boiling in a pan on the stove, and the second part she heated to boiling in a microwave.Then after cooling she used the water to water two identical plants to see if there would be any difference in the growth between the normal boiled water and the water boiled in a microwave.She was thinking that the structure or energy of the water may be compromised by microwave.
As it turned out, even she was amazed at the difference, after the experiment which was repeated by her class mates a number of times and had the same result.
It has been known for some years that the problem with microwaved anything is not the radiation people used to worry about, it’s how it corrupts the DNA in the food so the body can not recognize it.
Microwaves don’t work different ways on different substances. Whatever you put into the microwave suffers the same destructive process. Microwaves agitate the molecules to move faster and faster. This movement causes friction which denatures the original make-up of the substance. It results in destroyed vitamins, minerals, proteins and generates the new stuff called radiolytic compounds, things that are not found in nature.
So the body wraps it in fat cells to protect itself from the dead food or it eliminates it fast. Think of all the Mothers heating up milk in these ‘Safe’ appliances. What about the nurse in Canada that warmed up blood for a transfusion patient and accidentally killed him when the blood went in dead. But the makers say it’s safe. But proof is in the pictures of living plants dying!!!
Chanel Robot
Doll Face Video: Bizarre and Interesting
Vitamin Deficient? Your Skin will show it!
Scientists have proved that our skin is a kind of an indicator showing the condition of the entire organism. Skin can also tell us of the vitamins our body lacks. If you are the thorough person who washes face up each morning and evening and you still have some blemishes on the skin it means that you probably lack the vitamin C that is responsible for the immune system. When there is not enough of vitamin C the ability to resist decreases significantly and the first organ we can tell it by is the skin. So a special skin health diet based on vitamin C can improve the immune and thus raise the ability to resist infections.
If your skin is too sensitive and dry it most likely is trying to tell you of the lack of vitamin A. In such cases you should look up for a healthy skin diet or a dry skin diet that will enrich your organism with this vitamin and thus eliminate the reason for dry skin.
The biggest problem that most people face is that there are several problems to fight against. Thus it is not enough to apply a C vitamin or A vitamin diet only. You will have to think of some skin diet plan that will not overload your organism and at the same time will provide it with all necessary vitamins, elements and minerals.
