“The medical term for excessive sweating is hyperhidrosis, and while it’s not very common, it can be debilitating. If you have an inkling that you may be suffering from hyperhidrosis, start by looking at the circumstances under which it happens, says Dr. Alan Dattner, MD, a New York-based holistic dermatologist.” (from Schmidt’s Natural’s website)
Got a problem with sweat? Don’t want to get expensive Botox treatment to stop your sweat or use aluminum-based deodorants? I recently talked with Schmidt’s Naturals about sweat. Take a look at the article here.
The first thing you can do is make sure you don’t wash off the natural oils that are in your skin in the first place. You have to be really careful about bathing too much and using too much hot water and soap during the winter months when the humidity in the air is very low inside the house.
Second thing, make sure you’re getting enough moisture, enough water into your body.
Third thing you need to do is apply something to seal the moisture in your skin when your skin is wet. That can be an ointment or an oil if you’re willing or you prefer, a cream. Creams have the problem of containing many different components, some of which may make you allergic, cause inflammation, cause itching and cause more dry skin.
It’s important to try to do a number of different things to protect against dry skin. You can also get help from a holistic integrative physician, using various kinds of oils and the substances that go along with them to make sure that your body produces enough of its own anti-inflammatory oils. Holistic skincare can help.
I’ve got for you a few summer sun tips. On a lot of people’s minds is how to slow down the aging process. You’ll notice that they are some people who, as they reach say the age of a retirement look a lot younger than other people. So they must be something right.
Something beyond just having good genes, and I’d like to talk about some of those things.
I think the first most important thing that would hear emphasized by a lot of dermatologist is avoiding accelerating the aging process by getting too much sun.
Now, what’s too much sun? Too much sun depends upon the darkness of your skin, depends upon where your ancestors came from and what kind of mix there is that you derived genetically. So those people who have darker skin, living closer to the equator, can usually deal with a lot more sun than those people who have pale northern skin. So you want to watch very carefully how you expose yourself over your entire life and how you expose your children.
The ways to protect from the sun are stay out of the sun during the peak hours if you can. And if you are in the sun to use clothing and hats to protect yourself and of course also to use sun glasses if necessary so that you don’t squint. Squinting causes wrinkles because you repeat the same habit over and over again and eventually it developed muscles that give you that wrinkled look.
The second thing to use is sunscreens. Sunscreens are not in my book a good way for primary protection because they allow some rays through and often they dissolve in sweat and disappear with that and with swimming. So, I’d like sunscreens as a secondary protection in order to protect those areas that are hit by reflection from the light of what are sand and light colored sidewalks.
So clothing, hats and when necessary protects a lot and timing so that if necessary you can stay out of the sun during the peak hours.
I’d like to say a few things about skin aging and wrinkles. We’ve talked before, and I’m sure you’ve read around about the contribution of sun damage and ultraviolet light to wrinkling. The lighter your skin, the more damage is caused by sun. So you really want to protect yourself with hats and sunscreens and clothing so that you don’t get excessive amounts.
Certainly you want to avoid sunburns but for some people even reducing your exposure as much as possible can make a big difference. Squinting is also another problem or facial expressions that cause your skin to wrinkle up. You don’t want to do that repeatedly for 20 or 30 years because you’ll find those lines appeared.
Using various kinds of antioxidants can help over the long run slow down some of that damage. Using proper oils and… externally can help and internally anti-inflammatory oils can also make a difference in helping the barrier. Helping keep that drying from occurring. So it’s important to put all of those things together and do what you can to keep your skin from aging more rapidly as possible and stop wrinkles.
I want to talk a little bit more about anti-aging slowing the aging process and give you three anti-aging diet secrets.
Now you know we are all exposed to ultra violet light which causes aging of the skin. I’ve talked in a previous talk about how to protect yourself by external means and by timing, avoiding the harsh sun in order to keep from creating more damage.
And now I would like to talk about what you can do from the inside to protect yourself and from the inside they are various foods and food ingredients which are highly protective. Let me start with the carotenoids which are present in carrots and it’s interesting that the spectrum of products. It’s not just the isolated beta carotene is probably the best to take. So eating the whole carrot gives you spectrum of different carotenoids and eating other orange and red fruits and vegetables increases that spectrum of protectant antioxidants.
Let’s move on to the next category of bioflavonoid which are present in all kinds of leafy vegetables and fruits.
The bioflavonoid are also very prevalent in citrus fruits and especially in the pulp and in the white part inside the skin. So it’s not the juice so much but the entire fruit that contain those bioflavonoid. You should be sure to consume part of that.
Then, there is another class of antioxidants called proanthocyanidins and these are in the purple fruits and vegetables specially in the skin. And those are also present in certain other plants like ferns and concentrated these can be very powerful and very useful. But it’s also extremely important to have these in your foods where, they act naturally to protect you just as they protect the plants from the sunshine. Because, you know, you take a plant out in the sunshine before it’s fully developed the sun will kill it.
So they developed also the green chlorophyll and the develop these various antioxidants in a whole spectrum in order to protect themselves, and you want to eat those to help protect you. These are some great anti-aging diet secrets.
The One Thing to Ditch to Keep Your Skin Young Naturally
All of us want to keep our skin looking young naturally.
Today, I want to speak about one of our sweetest poisons. I say sweet poison, it’s very attractive to all of us, including me, and that is: sugar.
You might not realize sugar has at least 3 different ways that it can aggravate disease, aging and acne.
First, it can lead to overgrowth of the wrong kinds of organisms in the intestinal tract and elsewhere the body. Those organisms include yeast and harmful bacteria.
Second, those organisms can lead to inflammation of the intestinal lining, causing a condition known as leaky gut and that leaky gut allows allergens to invade other parts of the body.
Third, eating sugar often causes tooth decay. If you eat sugar, you don’t brush your teeth right away, and it sits in your mouth, the bacteria are going party–they will chomp away at your teeth.
And chronic infection in the teeth can lead to infection in the bone in the jaw. Chronic infections in the jaw are often very hard to get rid of during your lifetime. And they can “weep” gram-negative bacteria and gram-negative toxins down into your lymphatic system, down to your heart, down to your breasts, and out also into various organs of the body, causing real damage.
The last way that sugar can cause problems is by elevating the insulin level. When you eat a lot of sugar, your sugar level spikes ways up and insulin is released in order to get that sugar into the cells. The more sugar you have and the more often you have it, the more you release insulin.
When you do this over and over again, you wind up causing high insulin levels, and the receptors for the insulin stop becoming so willing to hold the insulin. Then, the insulin has to go up higher and higher. You then get a molecule released called Insulin-Like Growth Factor. That Insulin-Like Growth Factor has a variety of actions, and one of them is to aggravate acne.
It’s so worthwhile to monitor your sugar usage and cut back however you can manage. It’s a challenge, but a very worthwhile one. You can keep your skin looking young naturally.
When your face ages, it’s often perceived by wrinkles and creases. Some of those wrinkles and creases come from having the same expression over and over again.
That expression is usually is one of squinting or anger or looking with interest listening to a friend speak. These are all expressions that cause a kind of additional wrinkling that you don’t need to have.
These are habits. If they occur over and over, year after year, decade after decade, you begin to get permanent creases in those areas. So you want to try to relax, and not have repeated wrinkling occurring from squinting or anger.
You can even try looking in the mirror and seeing what you are doing with your face on a repeated basis, and try to relax and let that go.
That can do a lot for reducing the creases and the wrinkles that often associated with aging of the skin. Collagen and elasticity are another matter, which we’ll discuss in a future post.
I’d like some thoughts on anti-aging of the skin. Aging skin needs a little bit of extra stimulation in order to be really as thick as possible to keep the collagen active. This keeps the lymphatics in the blood supply moving. Part of that is good old exercise and outdoor enjoyment, and hopefully protecting yourself from the sun.
Another part of it is stimulating your skin to kind of wake it up in the morning is by dry skin brushing. You take a soft brush, and you brush your skin. Brush it all towards the area right below your navel which is where all the lymphatic material collects. And you do that all over very lightly and gently. You shouldn’t do it with a brush that is stiff enough to hurt you or to mark your skin. If you have some kind of skin problem that doesn’t allow that, then that’s not the thing to do. But the dry skin brushing can be a very nice method for keeping your skin stimulated.
If you don’t have a brush you can use Turkish towel or a wash cloth. That little bit of stimulation moving towards the center of the body can be very helpful to get your skin woken up and keep it alive and invigorated.
I’d like to talk a little bit more about slowing aging. One of the things that happens in aging is that the collagen breaks down. Collagen is the part that gives skin its tough surface and lasting quality. It gives the skin the ability to come back to its original shape. Collagen breaks down with age. The collagen breaking down is often seen as cellulite or less elastic skin.
What breaks down the collagen? There are enzymes in the skin that break it down, and those enzymes get activated by a variety of things. One of those things is inflammation, and another one is by something called glycation which comes from an excess of sugar and fried foods.
So if you want to look old faster, eat a lot of sugar. Eat a lot of foods that are high in glycation, like fried foods. These will all help set those enzymes into action, chomping up your collagen. Now, it doesn’t happen overnight. But over a period of years, it makes a big difference. So a healthy diet really makes a big difference over time.
A diet that includes a lot of fresh vegetables, a lot of fresh fruits and foods that are cooked a lower temperature. Sometimes you want a treat of course, but let the cake be for a special occasion, rather than for a meal. If you live on chips, on junk foods, and fried foods, and things heated to high temperature, and lots of sugar, it takes its toll. And you have to decide. Is that fun worth more than looking great for a longer period of time?
“The medical term for excessive sweating is hyperhidrosis, and while it’s not very common, it can be debilitating. If you have an inkling that you may be suffering from hyperhidrosis, start by looking at the circumstances under which it happens, says Dr. Alan Dattner, MD, a New York-based holistic dermatologist.” (from Schmidt’s Natural’s website)
