
Strategies for Keeping Your Skin Healthy
Some parts of aging are within your control whereas others are determined by genetics and basically out of your control. Your skin is no different from the rest of your body in that there are strategies you can adapt to slow or reverse the aging process. Other factors lie outside of your control. Eating healthier foods and avoiding the midday sun, for instance, are skin-protecting factors within your control.
Look Into Diet
Research shows a diet centered around antioxidant-rich foods like blueberries, kale, and oats can significantly reduce the signs of aging at a cellular level. Conversely, research also indicates that eating a lot of sugar and refined carbohydrates could accelerate aging in the body.
So, you should definitely think twice about doubling down on the donuts and sugary drinks and really consider getting more vitamin C foods into your regimen. Vitamin C is essential for building new collagen and helping skin cells repair themselves. Foods high in vitamin C include kale, broccoli, and goji berries.
Ditch Damaging Habits
Smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and spending time in tanning beds can damage your skin over time. Both smoking and drinking alcohol can dehydrate your skin.
Smoking might be worse than alcohol in the sense that smoking hurts in two ways. Simply the act of scrunching up your mouth to smoke can cause wrinkles over time. Secondly, you will take on a wrinkled, and dull look overall if you develop a smoking habit.
Tanning beds are another thing that makes dermatologists wince. Tanning beds are hugely popular with young women, but that doesn’t mean that these same women aren’t suffering skin damage due to the ultraviolet radiation released by these tanning beds. The FDA has recently issued warnings about tanning beds, and tanning beds have recently been shown to hurt both elastic and collagen.
You shouldn’t panic if you’ve already been exposed or gotten a bad sunburn recently. Just up your dosage of vitamin C to ensure that your body can rebuild collagen.
Get Moving!
Exercising a few times a week helps to improve circulation and the functioning of the immune system. Your body also releases toxins through your sweat, especially toxins right on the surface. Exercise also has mood-boosting benefits, which will make you want to keep moving.