[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e all love to feel beautiful. We all love to feel the gift of self confidence and self-assurance. Whether we’re setting out for a night on the tiles or getting ready to wow the boardroom, we all deserve to feel the empowerment and self-belief that comes from looking good and feeling good inside and outside. But here’s the problem. We’ve been told for generations that beauty is only skin deep… and that’s a fundamental fallacy that can cause us to look in all the wrong places when we don’t look or feel our best.
Beauty is not only skin deep. Nor is it something we can buy in a bottle and apply before bedtime.
Beauty is a condition that’s partly our genetics, partly our lifestyle and partly our psychological and personal wellbeing. Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. You can never be too big or too small to be beautiful just as you can never be the wrong shape or colour. Nonetheless, if we expect to look and feel beautiful we need to address what’s going on beneath the surface as well as knowing the best anti-ageing treatments on the department store shelves.
It’s a simple fact. If you smoke heavily, drink heavily, spend your days ambling from espresso shot to espresso shot and haven’t seen a fresh vegetable in 6 weeks beauty is going to be an uphill struggle for you. Sure, you can try and hide it with makeup. Yes, you can apply every skincare treatment and serum under the sun. But you’ll always be two steps behind unless you correct your diet.
A diet rich in vitamins, minerals and essential antioxidants (not to mention drinking lots of water) is absolutely essential for the kind of beauty that radiates outwards and shows real health and wellbeing. That means you should be eating a diet that is mostly (or entirely) whole, plant based foods. These are loaded with the nutrients and phytochemicals that keep the whole body healthy and keep skin and hair looking gorgeous and lustrous. Essential foods for natural beauty include;
Nuts and seeds- Rich in Omega 3 fatty acids, nuts and seeds help your skin to retain moisture to stay full, firm and youthful. Pumpkin seeds especially are high in zinc to boost immune function and prevent outbreaks of spots or acne.
Leafy greens- Kale, bok choy and spinach are nutritional powerhouses so make sure they’re always in your daily smoothie. These plants are rich in chlorophyll to help improve circulation to get more water and nutrients to your skin and give it a gorgeous healthy glow.
Berries- Essential for snacking on busy work days, these tasty morsels are low in sugar but packed with antioxidants which can protect against the aging effects of the sun’s rays.
Beauty on a bad diet… You’re fighting an uphill struggle
There’s nothing more beautiful than happiness
Have you ever walked past someone on the street who is objectively beautiful but they look so angry or sad or frustrated that it masks the gifts that nature gave them and dulls their natural shine? There’s nothing more beautiful than a sincere smile or a happy face. And while none of us can be happy all the time, addressing the reasons why our lives are less than we had hoped or expected can unlock our inner beauty (not to mention improving our health and wellbeing). Check out this post called Personal Development Perfection: 10 Ways To Improve Your Life. It identifies some ways in which all of us can get more satisfaction from our lives and improve our quality of living. SPOILER ALERT- None of it involves buying more clothes and accumulating more personal possessions. Rather than bringing us joy, material possessions can become distractions which actually keep us from true happiness.
Make your personal happiness and fulfilment a priority and watch as your beauty shines through.
They say that when you have a crush on someone that you can’t get over, one way to reign in your raw attraction to them is to visualise them picking their nose. While that may or may not work for you, it raises an interesting point about how our actions can either enhance or diminish our beauty.
Selfishness, cruelty, vanity (not the same as self-love), malice and dismissiveness can make even the most objectively gorgeous person seem ugly. Beauty is in what we do as much as how we look. We’ve all had a raging crush on someone who, while not necessarily conventionally beautiful, made us laugh or helped us to feel good about ourselves in ways that made their beauty shine through.
Beauty is on what you do as much as how you look
Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, but good health is plain to see
Beauty is all inclusive. It’s not confined to a particular body shape or size. But we human beings are hardwired to see beauty in good health. And that means that looking and feeling beautiful requires an investment in our own wellbeing. We’ve already talked about how it’s much harder to maintain beauty on a bad diet. But while diet is a key component of our health there’s much more to it.
Many of us lead a fairly sedentary lifestyle which can impede our overall health. Our bodies are not designed to stay perched behind desks for 8-10 hours a day which is why it’s so important to get out from behind yours for at least a few minutes every hour or risk damaging your posture, wreaking havoc with your digestive health and even increasing your risk of chronic diseases.
Exercise is pretty much non-negotiable if we expect to stay healthy. While cardiovascular training is important don’t neglect strength training. Not only does it help to improve metabolism and keep your body lean and toned, lifting weights also helps to keep your bones and joints healthy and prevent osteoporosis later in life.
What’s more, being strong on the outside helps you to feel strong on the inside, and that can imbue you with the most attractive quality there is… confidence!
