When you’re younger, you can play around a bit with your diet. You have a few days of no water, lots of salt and few fruits and vegetables and look as if nothing has changed. But as you age, your skin shows that kind of abuse. Over time, it will be hard to get your skin to age gracefully.
Following the right diet, then, is essential to a good anti aging regimen. Eating the right foods, in the right combination and at the right times, can do much for the quality and condition of your skin as it ages.
Let’s look at three diets that will help you get and maintain youthful looking skin: The low GI diet, the Perricone 3-day face lift diet, and the raw food diet.
Low GI diet
The low GI diet refers to a diet in which most of the foods eaten are low on the glycemic index. The glycemic index rates foods based on how quickly they are absorbed by the body. Those that are broken down quickly are high on the GI, while those that are processed slowly are rated low on the GI scale.
Why does it matter? When you eat foods that are low on the GI scale, you regulate your blood sugar level, which helps you to keep your appetite (and therefore your consumption) level as well. In addition, low GI foods are rarely highly processed foods, but rather they are foods that are usually close to their whole state.
Examples of foods low on the GI scale include oats, many fruits and vegetables (except those that are higher in sugar and starches) and lean proteins. An apple, for example, is at the low end of the GI scale. When you eat an apple, you likely find that it fills you up nicely, but after eating watermelon, you’re still hungry. Watermelon ranks quite high on the GI scale.
Putting the right foods in your mouth helps your skin to stay supple, moist and bright looking, even as you age.
Perricone 3-day face-lift diet
Dr. Nicholas Perricone is the name behind this diet, which he considers a jumpstart to his 28-day plan, but which many people follow without every doing the 28-day plan.
It’s called a 3-day face lift because he provides a solid meal plan for 3 days that you follow and at the end of that period, he nearly guarantees that your skin will look suppler, brighter and will have more moisture. In turn, you will look younger.
The diet relies heavily on the heavy consumption of salmon, which helps to provide the skin with the essential oils necessary to keep skin moist and healthy looking.
Raw food diet
Those who follow a raw food diet claim many health benefits – greater energy and vitality, a reduction in illness and the lack of any additional illness and easy weight management or weight loss.
A raw food diet is just what it sounds like – dieters eat a diet primarily full of raw foods. There is a bit of room (about 10%) for foods that aren’t completely raw, but even those foods can only be heated minimally so as to not destroy any of the beneficial elements of the raw food.
Because none of the food eaten is processed, and the diet is largely vegan, dieters report that their skin looks younger and more vital. They have fewer skin problems and notice healing of any skin ailments they might previously have had.
Any diet that provides significant benefit to the skin will require a little work on your part (finding and cooking all that salmon, managing all those fruits and vegetables, staying way from processed food), but experts and dieters report the benefits are well worth the effort. reusable cotton rounds