What to Avoid and What to Eat for Beautiful Skin: The single most important thing to get a glowing, healthy, beautiful complexion is controlling what you eat—to a great extent, your skin reflect what you eat.
Choosing the best food to nourish your body will greatly affect your skin and looks. This together with natural skin care products and recipes is what determines if you have beautiful, supple skin or not.
What to Avoid and What to Eat for Beautiful Skin
A high carb diet is disastrous for your health and skin. A low carb diet will slow down aging, promote overall health and is the best food for glowing skin.
- As much as possible, exclude sugar, especially fructose from your diet.
Products with high sugar contents include soda, sweets, ice cream, cakes, buns. Fruit is of course healthy, but don’t eat too many because they also contain a great deal of sugar.
Why is fructose so bad?
All sugars are very damaging to the skin. One reason is that fructose, especially high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is metabolized to fat in your body far more rapidly than any other sugar.
Your liver has to carry heavy burden to metabolize fructose, and this promotes a particularly dangerous kind of body fat, namely the type of fat that collects in your abdominal region and is associated with a inflammation throughout your body, also in your skin.
And because most fructose is consumed in liquid form (i.e. sweetened beverages of all kinds), its negative effects are magnified.
Sugar cane consumption has been connected to acne and other inflammatory skin conditions. High sugar and insulin levels in your blood can create many imbalances.
Sugar speeds up the aging process of your body, also the aging of your skin!
Bad for Skin
Be aware, ordinary table sugar is very unhealthy blend of fructose plus glucose that increases the destructive effect. The main idea here is that ALL of these sugars contribute to decreased health.
Ideally, you should try to stay below 15 grams per day in fructose intake. This might not be easy as one banana contains about 7 grams, and one cup dried apricots contains 16 grams of fructose.
The idea here is to try to lower you present consumption to a minimum. You will not regret this later. These are the sugars to avoid:
- Sucrose (table sugar)
- Corn syrup
- High fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
- Crystalline fructose, and any other high-fructose sweetener
- Natural fructose in the form of fruits, fruit juices, and natural sweeteners such as honey and agave
- As much as possible, exclude products containing processed grains.
Donuts, white bread, pizza, croissants, muffins, crackers, cakes, pies all contain high amounts of refined flour, mostly wheat.
Today, low quality bread make up about 50% of the American diet, and other countries has a similar situation.
Why should you avoid processed grains?
Refined food is stripped of most of its beneficial nutrients like vitamins and minerals. Therefore, your body is getting starved on essential nutrients but overfed on useless carbs that turn to fat and can cause inflammations throughout your body.
Excess carbohydrates in your diet not only make you fat, they make sure you stay fat. Cravings, usually for sweets, are frequently part of this cycle, leading you to resort to snacking, often on more carbohydrates.
Consuming large amounts of processed grains causes similar problems as with sugar; inflammations, acne, pimples and other skin problems can all be linked to excess carbs in your diet.
- Eat more organic vegetables
Fresh vegetables, organic if possible, can make wonders for your skin and complexion. Vegetables contain lots of nutrients your body needs to stay healthy.
Juicing is particularity beneficial as it tends to promote a detox of your body. Detox has become very popular and if you do it right it’s can truly benefit your skin.
Many vegetables, berries and herbs are packed with nutrients, here are a few examples (you can add many more):
- Parsley (excellent for detox)
- Carrots (no too much as they contain a great deal of sugar)
- Kale
- Cucumber (peel the skin)
- Cilantro (excellent for detox)
- Spinach
- Celery
- Lettuce
- Collard greens
- Lemon, lime
- Ginger
What to Avoid and What to Eat for Healthy Skin
Juicing these ingredients is particularly good as you extract all the beneficial nutrients, thus making them much more easy for the body to assimilate.
Juicing allows you to consume larger amounts of nutrients in a very efficient way. It makes it easier to add a greater variety of vegetables to your diet.
And there are an infinite number of recipes to try. Therefore you’ll be able to drink juices that you like and that your body and skin craves.
- Drink 8 glasses of water daily
Read my post on water to appreciate this simple but effective way to promote beautiful skin.
- Add herbs and supplements to your diet
Many herbs are very beneficial for your skin and can have an amazing effect on your complexion. The following guidelines will give you an idea what could be of use.
Each individual is unique and therefore has unique needs so you may need to try a few and see how your body responds.
Be aware that some people are allergic, so be careful if you’re trying herbs for the first time.
Turmeric for Skin Benefits
Extremely health-promoting, powerful anti oxidant. Organic powder is excellent, but you can also get a supplement and take capsules. I mention this one first because I’ve very good experience with it.
Try using a teaspoon or two daily in your drink of your juicing. Turmeric is known to promote soft, supple skin as well as great overall health.
For people with an autoimmune disorder, it can be especially beneficial as it helps control the immune response.
Omega-3 for Skin Benefits
Go for krill oil, not fish oil. The reason is that krill oil contains high amounts of omega-3 that your body can assimilate many times easier and faster than fish oil.
Fish oil also go rancid very easy. I buy my krill oil from Mercola as it’s of very high quality.
Astaxanthin for Skin Benefits
One of the most powerful antioxidant known and it can have a very good effect on your skin.
I’ve taken this for a long time and as I have very dry skin, I’ve noticed that my skin got softer when taking astaxanthin. And during the summer my skin gets this really nice glowing tan.
Astaxanthin also protects your skin from getting damaged if you’re in the sun for too long. “What to Avoid and What to Eat for Beautiful Skin”