beauty

There are a lot of things you can do for your hair and with your hair to make it more attractive, and more manageable, but it is important to realize from the beginning that you have to work with what you've got. There is no way to change your genetic inheritance, and it is fruitless to worry about it. No woman is ever satisfied with her hair. When it is straight, she wants it curly, and when it is wavy, she wants it straight. The color is either too light, too dark, or too drab, and she either has too much or too little of it. what type are you? Straight hair is often strong and beautiful hair. It can be lank, in which case you should work it with a `stripping' shampoo which will enlarge the shaft of each hair and make it look fuller. If it is lackluster, go for a conditioner to make the scales of the cuticle lie flat and enable hair shafts to reflect light better. Straight hair is often good blunt cut and worn not too long, or tied up in a twist, a braid, or a chignon. Curly hair needs to be carefully cut, for this can make all the difference between its looking fantastic and frizzy. It is best not to impose a particular style on your hair, but rather to go with the natural swing of things. If your hair tends to be wiry, you can correct this by using a softening conditioner. Thin hair must never be allowed to get greasy, for excess of oil on it will only make it look limp and lank. It is usually best to have it cut in a short style, and it is useful to shampoo it often using a shampoo that contains no conditioners, and then use a volumizer - a spray or gel containing polymers which you apply to wet hair before blow-drying. The heat from the dryer swells the polymers that cover the hair shaft, making it look thicker. This will give it bounce and fullness. Blowing it dry helps increase the fullness too. Fine hair is delicate hair, but it is usually beautiful hair, too, like a baby's. Unlike thin hair, which is caused by a paucity of hair shafts, fine hair is made up of hair shafts of small diameter. You have to be particularly careful about what you do to it, because fine hair is the easiest of all hair types to damage from chemical treatments such as coloring or by using shampoos that are too alkaline, or by exposing it to heat or even the sun. Fine hair does well on protein shampoos and needs to be cut superbly and worn short unless you have a great deal of it. Volumizers are useful here, too. Thick hair is a blessing, although few women who have it realize this - particularly if their hair is curly. In this case, you should probably not wear it too short, or it can be unmanageable. Thick hair is the easiest to handle and the toughest. It will withstand chemical treatments and coloring far better than any of the other hair types and may not even need a conditioner at all when it is washed. If it is straight and you decide to have it chemically curled then you should expect the waving process to take at least a third as long again as it usually does, because the hair shaft is big and tough to break down. But the effects can last you as much as a year, where anyone else's will have to be renewed in a few months. hair loss Each day, you can expect to lose between 100 and 200 hairs. So you shouldn't be discouraged when you look down at the pillow in the morning to see a few lying there. This only means that new hairs will quickly be growing. That is, provided your hair is not coming out by the handful. Sometimes, as a result of sudden shock, hormonal change, or illness, large numbers of hairs are lost all at once. Even this is nothing to worry about unduly, so long as whatever triggered the loss is either past (as in the case of childbirth) or being corrected with a relaxation technique and dietary supplements for undue stress or illness. the cut is the thing A good cut is more important than any other single factor when it comes to the way a head of hair looks. Everyone is an individual, and hairstyling that doesn't take this into account is worse than second-rate. Changing your cut or style every year or two keeps you from getting stuck in a time warp and can lift spirits like nothing else short of falling in love. hair cosmetics perms There are two types of perms: acid-based which are soft and used to give a subtle lift at the roots to create an illusion of fullness; and the conventional alkaline perms. Acid or `body' perms don't last as long as the rest and need to be redone every three or four months. They are more natural and soft-looking, adding fullness and swing to hair without heavy curls. caring for processed hair Provided your hair is healthy and you look after it well after a perm, there is no reason to worry about its condition being spoiled by the waving. A perm will add a lot of body to lank hair and can often improve an over-oily condition as well. Once your hair is waved, it is more vulnerable to damage than ever before, so there are a few special precautions you need to take in order to preserve its health and sheen. For instance only use acid-balanced shampoos when you wash your hair, and always apply an acid rinse such as lemon juice in water. Protein treatments are particularly good for permed and colored hair. Also, instead of brushing 50 strokes a day, cut it down to 20. If your hair has been bleached or tinted, it is a good idea only to have an acid wave especially designed for bleached or damaged hair. They don't last so long, but they do ensure that the hair remains in good condition. straightening hair Aside from chemical straightening, there are also some short-term but simple ways to straighten hair. It can be done by blow-drying with a brush to smooth it out or by washing your hair and then wrapping it wet around your head in a circle, like a cap, fastening it with clips and letting it dry. Then, when it is dry, you simply comb it out straighter. You can use hair straighteners, and you could always use the old-fashioned and very efficient method for long, curly hair -  simply ironing it with an electric iron. Spread the hair out on a board, keep the iron on the lowest setting, and go over it gently from roots to ends. But the same applies as for blow drying and using heated rollers - be careful not to put too much heat on your hair. Burnt hair is irretrievably lost. a change of color One of the simplest and most effective ways of changing your appearance is to change the color of your hair. As we get older, the color of hair tends to fade so that a once shimmery golden mane or deep mahogany tresses can become lackluster and dull. Hair coloring these days is effective and reasonably priced and can look even better than most natural hair - provided, of course, it is done correctly. There are two categories of hair colorants: permanent colorants, which cannot be washed out, and the temporary and semipermanent, which can be used to highlight and intensify your own hair color. temporary colorants These are the easiest to use. They coat the cuticle of the hair with color that washes away with the next shampoo. You can get temporary highlighting shampoos and color rinses in a great variety of colors and most of them have a shine-promoting pH, too. But what you can do with them is limited, for while they will darken the hair - say from blonde to red or to black - they are really designed for minor color changes only. If you try to go too many shades away from your natural color, they tend to streak and give uneven coverage and also they cannot make your hair lighter. semipermanents Like the temporaries, they, too, coat the outside of the hair shaft and so are not good for drastically changing hair color. Nor will they lighten. Some of the semi-permanents are `color baths' which penetrate the hair so that they last up to a dozen shampoos. What they are good for is touching up hair that has just started to go gray, highlighting your own natural coloring, and making gray hair look shinier and more attractive without really changing its shade. If you use one, be sure to use a pH-balanced shampoo and a lemon and water rinse afterwards. permanents There are three kinds of permanent hair colorants: vegetable dyes such as henna, metallic dyes such as those used to gradually cover gray hair, and the aniline dyes or oxidation tints, which include most of the colorants used professionally in salons. vegetable dyes Henna will give brunette and black hair a lovely reddish glow.  The darker your hair the more chestnut is the effect. Lighter hair goes Titian. Henna does not do well on mousy hair, as the resulting tone is usually an unattractive orange. It should never be used over a tint, is no good on gray hair, and can be very drying to any hair, so it is better to avoid it if your hair is already dry. The only color of henna you should use is red which in its natural, powder form, is a pale green. The standard way of using henna is to add hot water to make a creamy paste and then put this on the hair and leave it for up to one hour. Daniel Galvin, Britain's top colorist, who is an expert in the use of herbal hair colorings, uses a different method and gets beautiful results. He adds hot black coffee to the powder, mixes it into a paste, and then adds the juice of a fresh lemon and the yolk of an egg. The coffee brings out the depth and richness of the hair color, the acid in the lemon accelerates the reddening, and the egg yolk keeps the mixture moist and easy to maneuver through the hair. Sometimes he also adds some 10 per cent peroxide to lighten the whole effect. Chamomile, another herbal colorant, has a gentle lightening effect on hair and is wonderful for `sun-streaking' blonde and light brown hair. But you must be patient, for it takes several applications and plenty of time to work. It is not useful for brown hair or dark hair, but it will gently lighten red and works beautifully on all shades of natural blonde. The herb also adds shine to the hair. You can make a chamomile rinse to use after each shampoo (as the last rinse) by taking 2 tablespoons of dried chamomile flowers and tossing them into a pint of boiling water. Simmer for fifteen minutes, strain, cool and use as a final rinse (you can make enough for several rinses and refrigerate it for up to ten days). You leave the rinse in your hair and towel it dry. metallic dyes These are often called color restorers. They deposit metallic dyes and salts of various metals such as manganese, cobalt, silver, and copper on your hair shaft, which gradually darken the hair. But hair dyed this way does not perm well, nor is its condition very good, as this kind of dye tends to make the hair look a dull, flat color. Metallic dyes have to be removed completely, with the use of a special preparation, several days before waving or tinting with a permanent colorant. Because of their many disadvantages, I think they are best avoided. THE ANILINE OR OXIDATION COLORANTS The most permanent (and the most successful), these dyes are included in a number of products for coloring hair such as tinting shampoos, highlighting shampoos, and the single-step and double-step permanent colorants you can buy in packages at the chemist. They are permanent dyes, because the artificial pigment is made to penetrate into the cortex of the hair shaft. There it stays. How this happens is most interesting. Tiny molecules of colorless dye are mixed with a "developer" such as hydrogen peroxide and then put on the hair. The hydrogen peroxide opens up the imbrications of the cuticle, and the molecules enter through them into the cortex. Once inside, they react with the oxygen from the peroxide (a very unstable substance), which spurs the molecules of the dye to oxidize and combine, forming larger molecules. In the process, these new and larger molecules develop the desired color, but they have now become so large that they can no longer pass through the cuticle, so they get stuck on the inside. There are more than 50,000 aniline dyes, each different in shade, thanks to slight changes in arrangements of their molecules. They are potent and effective. They are also potential allergens, since about one woman in ten cannot tolerate an aniline dye without reacting adversely to it. This is why it is important, whenever using a permanent colorant on your hair either at home or at the hairdresser, that a patch test be done first. The anilines can even cause blindness, so they should never be used to tint eyelashes or eyebrows. If you have your hair dyed with an aniline dye, you must wait at least a week before having it permanent-waved or straightened, and you must use a pH-balanced shampoo and conditioner every time you wash it. One of the advantages of the anilines is that tinting limp, straight hair can often make it more manageable, since the peroxide in the dye disturbs the cuticle just enough to give the hair some body and eliminate its lankness. In this category of hair colorant you will find shampoo tints and highlight shampoos, which can be used at home to cover gray if there is too much of it, to lighten hair a couple of shades, to add depth, or to highlight hair that is drab and dull. You put the products on as you would an ordinary shampoo and then leave them in the hair for a few minutes while the peroxide and dye does its work, and then rinse off. They are simple to use. The single and double-step tints also fall into this category. They are the dyes most frequently used by hairdressers. If you want to change the color of your hair dramatically, you should have it done professionally. There is quite an art to color mixing and application (I know women who literally fly 5,000 miles to have their color done by someone who is a real master at it). Although there are some excellent products available for home use, if it were my hair, I would still shun them and head for a salon that specializes in color. The single-step tints are a mixture of aniline dyes, peroxide, and ammonia in an oil base. They are applied carefully to sectioned hair, starting an inch or so away from the roots to the end. The hair is left to sit for a few minutes and then the root area is done. The hair is rested for another half hour or so. These dyes can change the color of your hair to almost any other color, but they are not successful in changing very dark shades to blonde. For that, you need a two-step tint, which bleaches out the existing pigment in the hair shafts in the first step and then adds dye separately in the second. All aniline dyes and bleaching procedures have to be touched up often as the roots grow out, particularly if you change the color drastically from your normal hair shade. They also cause considerable damage to the hair shaft. If you have your hair tinted with them; you must look after it using a pH-balanced shampoo and conditioner and having a protein treatment every couple of weeks. HIGHLIGHTS One of the best and most easily manageable ways of changing your hair color is to have it highlighted or lowlighted. This involves the same procedures as the single-and double-step tinting, but instead of being done all over your head, they are done only on some strands or areas. Highlighting and lowlighting are particularly useful for older hair that has darkened or faded. Highlights can bring new life to a head of hair by lightening some of the strands, but they create no harsh lines between the tinted and natural hair at the scalp, as total dyeing does. Lowlights add a color slightly darker to some strands. They are done just as highlights are by wrapping strands of hair in foil-covered bunches, letting the color develop and then being washed out. Both highlights and lowlights look natural and as they leave no hard-edged margins at the roots so they only need to be redone three or four times a year. This means that you don't need touchups more frequently than every two or three months. There are an enormous number of techniques used in highlighting. Some of the most interesting involve three or more colors put into the hair to give a remarkably natural look. SPECIAL CARE FOR BLEACHED OR TINTED HAIR The golden rule for processed hair is to stay out of the sun. The sun does harm in two ways: It dries out the hair, and it alters the color. Keratin needs water to stay soft and flexible. When too much water is lost as a result of sun or of using heated rollers or of blow-drying too often, then its fibres crack and split and the hair becomes so dry and brittle that it breaks off. It also loses its shine. Sunlight does strange things to hair color by oxidising it. It can turn it greenish or very brassy, or simply make the tint go flat and gray. If you are going into the sun and your hair is bleached or tinted, wear a hat or a towel wrapped around it. Even virgin - that is, untreated - hair needs protection from sunlight. You can use one of the sunscreen products especially made for hair or simply rub in some of the high-protection suntan lotion you use on your body shampooing it out at the end of the day. WHAT ABOUT CANCER RISKS? There is some indication that about 1 percent of the chemical hair dyes used on hair will penetrate through the skin and be absorbed into the bloodstream. The question is, what damage will they do? Professor Bruce Ames, at the University of California, has tested 169 hair dyes on bacterial cells to find out if they cause mutations to the cells. Of these, 89 percent were found to be mutagenic. Although all carcinogens (cancer-causing substances) are mutagenic, not all mutagens are carcinogens, nor do we know if the same results will occur on human cells. The people most at risk from exposure to hair tints are those hair colorists in salons who use them daily without wearing gloves (something you should never do). It is unlikely that cancer risks are very great for the average woman who has her hair tinted. If you are uneasy about it, use one of the semipermanents or herbal dyes instead.

No matter how sparse and how good your diet or how many antioxidants you take, no matter how conscientiously you deal with stress and how enthusiastically you exercise - all of which are central to ageless aging - it can be helpful periodically to spring-clean your body from within. Controlled fasts are not the only way of doing this. In fact I have come to believe that they are not even the best way. The natural-law approach to age retardation and the long tradition on which it is based also offers a number of other simple methods. Some - such as a spring-clean semi-fast or the sauna - are helpful when used every few weeks, while others, such as techniques for improving lymphatic drainage, can be used to advantage every few days or even more often. The whole purpose of spring-cleaning is to stimulate your body's eliminative capabilities so that any sluggishness in the blood and lymph circulation and any stasis in the tissues is cleared away. Then whatever toxicity may be present - heavy metals and cross-linkers for instance - can be broken down and eliminated via the skin and lungs, bladder and colon before it can cause degenerative damage and premature aging to your body.

For generations European experts in natural medicine and top athletes have been masters at using hydrotherapy to vitalise, restore strength, regenerate and rejuvenate the body. Yet few of us anglo-saxons have been privy to their secrets. It’s time you learned about them. You’ll it once you do. Hydrotherapy is a powerful external tool for rejuvenation. The Germans are masters of it. Thanks to the electrical properties of water, using alternate hot and cold water on your body can alter the electrical charges of its molecules in the body—particularly the low-level voltages which regulate lymphatic drainage—by alternately increasing and decreasing them. In physiological terms this opens up your capillaries increasing blood flow and helping to stimulate the elimination of wastes through your blood and lymph systems. It also relaxes and tones muscles and heightens your overall vitality. Hydrotherapy - Blitz guss Hydrotherapy in one form or another is a must both for helping to prevent cellulite and for restoring cellulite-riddled tissues to normal. It enhances circulation, eliminates stored wastes, increases energy exchange on a cellular level and even heightens immunity. The best water treatment for cellulite is the traditional German Blitzguss. The classic Blitz Guss needs to be done by a professional but you can get much of the same effecta and benefits in the shower yourself at home—especially if you have a hand held shower which you can direct on different parts of your body. Here’s what to do Take a three minute hot shower so you skin is really glowing. Then turn off the hot and immediately turn on the cold water so it flows on you face and down your shoulders and arms, your chest and belly and back then down your legs but for no more than 30 seconds. Now go back to 2 to 3 minutes of hot shower followed by 30 seconds of a cold then back to hot again and so on. You repeat this process three times, always finishing off with 30 seconds of cold water. If 30 seconds seems a daunting length of time in cold water at the beginning only do 15 seconds of cold followed by 2 to 3 minutes of hot three times finishing off with cold. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you want to adapt to the full 30 seconds I suspect. When you get out of the shower, dry yourself briskly with a thick soft towel. The main reason you always finish your Blitz Guss with cold is that this stimulates warmth in your skin and whole body. It will surprise you just how warm and enlivening this experience can be. which leaves you glowing with life. How Good You Feel Once you get used to your Blitz Guss protocol you are you’re going to be surprised at how good you feel and how vital. Never do a Blitz Guss just before bed or you more likely to feel so energetic that you can’t sleep. And, of course, if you have a pacemaker or any sort of heart issue or other condition it is essential that you check with your health practitioner and get his or her OK before you try it. Be brave and give it a go. I thik you’re going to love the experience.

How often do you rejoice your body? How often do you feel absolutely at ease in your skin, at peace in yourself and in harmony with your world? For many the answer is seldom. Instead we tend to us put up with the body rather like some slightly cumbersome baggage we carry with us as we go about. Yet all thought, all feeling, every response to beauty and to horror is mediated through the body. In fact your body is the medium for experiencing everything in life. As any healthy two year old knows, when it is fully alive you are fully alive. This aliveness is something we often have to rediscover. Television, films and advertising are replete with photographs of long legged pencil-thin females who are meant to be paragons of womanhood against whom we measure ourselves. Magazines and newspapers spend a large part of their time giving us advice about diets, clothes, exercise which supposedly will help the bodies of their readers more closely approach whatever shape, size and texture body the general consensus at any moment in time considers ideal. Meanwhile millions of women who, because of the way they are built, their personalities, and their own values (whether or not these values operate consciously or unconsciously) have not a hope in hell of ever looking like that ideal. And they suffer. This suffering goes deep - far beyond the simple (yet often painful) feelings of inadequacy which come with having been built with broad shoulders, big feet or a flat chest when the world you live in tells you you are supposed to be different. (Some of us alas have the misfortune of being blessed with all three). For implicit in the whole way in which the body is presented in almost everything we do and think are two far more crippling assumptions: That the body is separate from the spirit or person and that it is ultimately inferior. These assumptions are anchored deep into the belief systems from the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions in which our society has developed. They have led us to view the body either as something not to be trusted - like a wild animal that needs taming lest it gets out of hand or like a physical object outside ourselves to be watched, studied and manipulated. For most Western women their bodies are things separate from themselves, either to be prodded, criticized, and hidden or narcissistically exposed as a sexual object - something useful in gaining attention or drawing to oneself what one needs (or think she needs). In either case there is a sense of estrangement not only from the body but at a deeper level from ones self. Out of this estrangement comes a sense of powerlessness so that one begins to think that what one needs to be happy, to be complete, to be fulfilled can only be found outside oneself - by accomplishment in the world, or wearing the right clothes, by earning the love of a man or by conforming to some abstract ideal. So long as one is driven by a sense of separateness from ones body whether you succeed or fail in getting what you want from the outside world is irrelevant. For neither success nor failure bring you any closer to living freely with real health and beauty. Rediscovering the aliveness of the child and the innocence of bodily freedom can. It helps heal the wounds of separation and free a woman to live in the fullness of her own being.

Cellulite makes everybody uneasy - from the woman who worries about her orange peel thighs to the British or American 'obesity expert' intent on proving that fat is fat, cellulite is nothing more than a figment of foolish women's imagination, and what any woman with lumpy thighs should do is get down to a good old calorie-controlled diet to shed it. Even staunch feminists who write hard-hitting polemics about the coercion of women by the beauty industry get het up about cellulite. It is, they insist, something invented by fashion magazines to make women feel bad about themselves. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of women with the problem bemoan their fate at having contracted a "nonexistent" condition and hope that if only they spend a little more money or endure a little more discomfort from one of the high-tech treatments - being pricked with multi-injector syringes or subjected to brutal pummeling for instance - it will make her legs smooth, sleek and svelte. banishing disbelief I've seen medical papers from all over Europe and America on cellulite, its cause and its development as well as proposed solutions to this lumpy bumpy flesh which can mar the thighs of even the leanest women. As of this moment literally hundreds of medical references to cellulite exist, some of them going back a hundred and fifty years. Next time someone tries to tell you you are imagining pea d'orange thighs smile knowingly and ignore them. None of the theories, analyses and descriptions of elaborate chemical treatments for cellulite have the full answer. In part this is because cellulite is a difficult condition to study in vivo - within the body of a woman who has it - since this means performing a biopsy of the tissue which is a painful medical process. In part it is because cellulite is a many-facetted syndrome with no single cause and no single effective treatment. what is cellulite? A misnomer catchall word used to describe the orange peel syndrome, cellulite is a cosmetic defect which results in jodhpur thighs and what is known as the 'mattress phenomenon' - that is pitting, bulging, and deformation of the skin on the thighs, hips, and abdomen (sometimes even arms and shoulders too) when subjected to a 'pinch test'. In the medical literature, cellulite has been called a variety of things from mesenchymal disease to cellulitic dermo-hypodermosis, edemato-fibrosclerotic panniculopathy and, most recently, panniculosis and liposclerosis. A condition which by any name smells as odious, cellulite is a syndrome with well defined clinical, histological and histochemical characteristics. What this means in ordinary language is that cellulite not only looks a certain way when you examine it objectively with your eyes and fingers. Where it is present in a body, you will also find that certain measurable biochemical and physical changes have taken place in skin, connective tissues and at the deeper layers of the body. By the way, one thing the disbelievers say is true: Cellulite does often occur in an overweight body. If you are overweight, shedding excess ordinary fat will be essential to shedding your cellulite. But cellulite occurs on the thighs and bottoms of very slim women as well. For it is quite different in many ways than ordinary fat. a checkered history Cellulite has a shady past full of contradiction and confusion. Far from being some newfangled notion created by glossy women's magazines, cellulite was first described in depth by European physicians at the beginning of the 19th Century. It is now believed to affect 80 out of every 100 women in Europe and America. In 1816, Balfour first commented on the cutaneous nodule formations which were later named cellulite. In 1929, P. Lageze, a French physician, discovered that cellulite comes in stages: First tissues in thighs, buttocks, knees, abdomen and upper arms become traps for free serum outside the capillaries. Then fibrous formations develop, which in time turn into the retracted sclerotic connective fibers which create a dimpled orange peel effect. After Lageze, many researchers proposed numerous theories about the causes of cellulite but none of them could fully agree. Then in 1966, two Spanish dermatologists named Bassas-Grau confirmed that, while no inflammation of the tissues is present in cellulite, watery fluid does indeed accumulate in the tissue. They also reported that the molecules of subcutaneous connective tissue in cellulite seem to be larger than molecules in the normal connective tissue, for they undergo what is called a hyperpolymerization. In the 1970s, a few researchers such as Braun-Falco and Ribuffo came out in favor of the view that cellulite is simple fat. In later years they were to modify their beliefs considerably. Most European researchers grew increasingly convinced that cellulite is a well-defined clinical condition and a physiological entity. 'A defect of the mesenchyme' said Pisani. 'No, a disturbance in the vasomotor reflex and an irritation of the sympathetic nerve fibers leading to a disturbance of normal fat deposits and water logged tissues' argued Merlin. Binazzi insisted that 'cellulite' should rightly be renamed dermatpanniculopathy oedmato-fibro-sclerosis. In 1972, Muller and Nurnberger showed that where cellulite occurs, there is also a decrease in the quantity of elastin fibers in the dermis and a rearrangement of the collagen bundles. Then in 1977, Braun-Falco and Scherwitz demonstrated that a dilation of the lymph vessels takes place in cellulite, as well as an enlargement of the adipocytes or fat cells. But it was not until the well-respected Italian anatomo-pathologist and molecular biologist, Professor Sergio Curri, took up the study of cellulite tissue that the whole of the European medical world began to stand up and take notice. Now considered the leading scientific authority on cellulite in the world, Curri carried out in-depth studies comparing cellulite to normal fat, and established quite conclusively that cellulite is indeed a specific syndrome.

Your skin will not age by accident, or just because time goes by. Skin loses its tone and texture whenever the energy order—the psychological and biological integrity of the living matrix, that whole interconnectedness that is your body—is undermined. All sorts of stuff can cause this to happen. But nothing is more sinister and insidious than chronic high levels of blood sugar and insulin, which threaten most people over the age of 25 or 30. Stop them in your body, and you will not only slow skin aging. You can actually reverse its signs. THE GREAT DESTROYER Sugar actually destroys your skin. And I’m not just talking about the white stuff that sits in bowls. Most of the foods that people eat these days—from pasta and bread to packaged cereals and bagels—flood the bloodstream with glucose, within a very few minutes of entering the body. This carries serious consequences for the skin. CHECK OUT YOUR ANCESTORS The reasons for all of this are genetic, and very simple. Despite this fact, for the last 70 years, they have eluded most so-called scientists, nutritionists and medical doctors. Here’s the truth: Grain-based and sugary foods are recent interventions. For over a million years, humans never ate them. Because genetic adaptation is a slow process—it can take one hundred thousand years, believe it or not, for a significant alteration in a gene to take place—our bodies lack the ability to deal with these foods in large quantities. Yet grains and sugar-rich foods—many riddled with junk fats and chemicals to boot—make up the largest portion of most people’s diets these days. When our bodies are forced to handle them (and most governments, doctors and food-manufacturers are still trying to sell us the idea that low-fat, high-carb diets are good for our health), our skin—in fact our whole body—rebels. CUT THE CARBS What form this insurrection takes depends on just how vulnerable we are genetically. It can show up as adult-onset or type 2 diabetes; obesity; energy swings; raised HDL cholesterol; or chronic fatigue. Eating lots of these kinds of carbs and sugars can also cause—and few people or even doctors are as yet aware of this—all sorts of common degenerative diseases, from cancer to arthritis and coronary heart disease. When it comes to skin, the sugar monster gets busy fabricating wrinkles, sags, puffy faces, lackluster complexions. This creates a situation where, having learned all this, you wonder whether you have the energy to do anything about it. THE WRINKLE MONSTER Sugar—the wrinkle monster—has two faces. To escape his insidious attacks, you need to address both. First, there’s the all-encompassing glucose/insulin battle you need to win. After years of living the way most of us do—on convenience foods, fabricated from grains, cereals, and an infinite number of sugars and syrups—this undermines good genetic health. The other face of the sugar monster focuses on the damage that excess glucose does to the body’s proteins. It attacks skin cells and collagen fibers, producing what is known as advanced glycosylation end products. These nasties, conveniently known as AGEs, are like terrorists that wreak havoc within the living matrix, causing collagen fibers to lose their ability to maintain order. AGEs do this by making collagen fibers to cross link. This results in the formation of wrinkles, sags and bags on your face and elsewhere. WIN THE AGING WAR It’s not just one or two anti-aging battles you need to win to make a significant difference to your skin, regardless of your age. Cutting out the high-carb stuff from your diet needs to reduce your blood sugar and insulin levels. By doing so this counters the formation of AGEs—as well as detoxifying your skin and your body as a whole. Radical though it may sound doing this will set you on the right track both to skin rejuvenation and to whole body health and vitality. Of course, knowing this stuff is not enough. You have to take action. Every skin improvement and de-aging process is inexorably woven together with all of the other within your entire living matrix. If you want powerful anti aging skin care, you need to address the whole shebang. By altering the way you eat, live, and look after your body internally and externally, your skin not only looks younger and more beautiful. It will bring your whole being access to levels of energy, emotional balance and well-being that turn the dream of living a full and creative life into reality. This is how to create a revolution in the look and health of skin. And here’s the great news: This can also bring you beauty at the deepest level, transforming your whole experience of yourself in the process.

Cellulite is a sign that internal pollution is present in parts of your body which can not only reduce your energy levels but mar physical beauty as well. Whether or not you care passionately about having smooth sleek thighs, if you see cellulite developing you can be sure your body is telling you that something within needs attention. I have little patience with nonsense written about cellulite. The silly debates about whether or not it exists and the trivial yet often painful treatments designed to banish it usually miss the point. Cellulite is no simple cosmetic problem of concern only to vain women who have been sold a bill of goods by the beauty industry. Just as the appearance of slime in a river bed indicates that the ecology of the earth is disturbed, a peau d'orange thigh tells a woman that the ecology of her body is out of whack and if you want to shed your cellulite nothing short of a revolution in body ecology is called for. meet the ecology of the planet Ecology is that branch of biology which deals with the relations of living organisms to other organisms and non living things. It deals with extremely complex interactions, relationships, rhythms, chemical alterations, seasons and processes. Scientists who study the ecology of our planet are also interested in energetics. They examine energy pathways and outputs. They explore how the presence of certain chemicals in the environment or alterations in temperature, or the proliferation of specific life forms either supports or interferes with the life processes of other organisms. What we have come to realize in the past twenty years is that the health - indeed the survival - of our planet depends very much on our doing everything we can to reestablish and maintain good ecology whether or not we are dealing in a small way with, say a farm, or woods, or in a large way with a whole continent. The destruction of the ozone layer in recent years, increasing pollution in the air and water, the depletion of organic matter in the soils and widespread deforestation have now disrupted planetary ecology to a degree that was once unthinkable. They have also set scientists frantically searching for keys for helping to reestablish ecological balance. The necessity of good planetary ecology has been further highlighted recently by a growing acceptance of scientist James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Lovelock suggests that the earth, far from being a mass of dead minerals hurling through space at great speed, appears to be an almost infinitely complex organic living system - a system of which we ourselves are a part. what is body ecology? Just as the planet has an ecology on which its health depends, so does your body. Its every cell, every vessel, every tissue interacts in highly complex ways either directly or obliquely with every other part. All of your organs and glands and systems not only speak to each other chemically via the metabolic processes which break down nutrients to make them available for cells to use, produce energy for movement and eliminate wastes. They also communicate via subtle energetic pathways. Some of these were long ago charted by Oriental medicine in the treatment of acupuncture and are still used in the application of pressure at specific areas which form the basis of oriental medicine as well as techniques like shiatsu and reflexology. The vastly complex living system which is your body has a magnificent ability to regulate itself taking into account the food you eat, the air you breathe, the stresses you are under, the physical demands made upon you, your age and all the other factors that come into play in your life - provided of course it is not overburdened by excess fatigue, stress or pollution and provided its metabolic processes have at their disposal a full complement of the essential nutrients on which they run. This ability of the living body to take in and break down nutrients, to channel them into the specific metabolic processes which maintain life and to eliminate wastes is all part of maintaining its ecology. The problem is that pollution in our air, water and food continues to increase placing real burdens on the immune system. At the same time the availability of a good balance of essential nutrients in our over-processed foods continues to decline. One of the many obvious consequences of this decline is the production of cellulite in women's flesh. When the body's ecology is good then your whole body works well and you have plenty of energy. You don't develop cellulite; neither do you show signs of premature aging. And, what is most frequently forgotten, you also experience a high level of awareness and autonomy - you find it easier to be your own person and to make your own decisions from a position of mental clarity and physical power. a 'living revolution' The name 'Cellulite Revolution' (title of one of my books) is no idle hyperbole. For if you are serious about ridding your body of cellulite and keeping it away nothing short of a revolution is called for - a revolution involving how you care for yourself, eat, deal with stress and move - a revolution which leads step by step to a whole new body ecology. When you support and rebalance your body's ecology at the most profound levels through diet, the use of specific complexes from nature, movement, massage and reestablishing connections with the deepest layers of sexuality you can not only banish cellulite. You also empower yourself and make it easier to maximize all your potentials and you will experience for yourself just how potent the life force working through your body is - you will really come to know it from within (something which I think women have a particular ability to do) and, most important, I hope you will come to trust it. You will discover for yourself that, used wisely, all of the techniques and tools for keeping your flesh cellulite free are nothing more than ways of aligning yourself to the deepest needs of your body and supporting its own ecology in the best possible way. The process of getting from here to there is rather like taking a journey - a journey that brings you deeper in touch with the miracle of your living body. It is a journey which offers greater physical beauty, more energy and the expanded awareness which leads to being able to make ever more effective use of your own quite individual brand of creativity. All of these things can be fruits of improved body ecology. In recent years I have come to believe that it is just this kind of energy and creativity that is needed if each of us as women is effectively to make our fullest contribution to the process of caring for the ecology of the living planet.

For most people, the face is the focus of attention and the most immediate expression of a woman's beauty. It is certainly the area of the body women most worry about. They spend a great deal of money looking after it with creams and lotions, cleansers and toners and masks, and of course the traditional facials, special treatments, and face-lifts. Everything seems to depend on the face. And all of this is done in an attempt to make sure skin stays smooth and young-looking, well colored, and free from blemishes. Skin is one of the most important criteria for sexual attraction between men and women. Perhaps this is the main reason the face seems so important. the craft of skin care A living, breathing thing, skin is far more than just a superficial covering for your body. It is your largest organ. It covers a surface area of about 17 square feet and weighs between six and eight pounds. So complex is this stuff called skin that a piece of it with the surface area of your thumbnail boasts a yard of blood vessels, twenty-five nerve endings, one hundred sweat glands, and over three million cells. Lasting skin beauty is a question of lasting care, just not spending lavishly on fancy creams and treatments. It is the everyday way you treat skin that matters year after year. But to know how to look after your skin you must first know something about it - what it is and isn't, what it's meant to do, and the many things that affect it for better or worse. For then you can see that its needs are met from day to day. In return it will give you what you desire: beauty that at the very least is skin deep. how your skin works Your skin is a world all its own: living tissue composed of billions of cells bathed in a lake of liquid with the same salt content as seawater. Each skin cell is separated from its neighbor by a membrane through which nutrients and respiratory gases pass, and all skin tissue is nourished by the myriad of tiny capillaries which bring fresh oxygen and nutrients to the cell. Cell growth and reproduction go on unceasingly in each of these microcosms. Life is sustained, wastes eliminated to be carried away via the lymph and blood, so that all of these cells can work together to perform the many vital functions that your skin carries out: It protects your body from invasion by bacteria, virus, or fungus. It helps eliminate the waste products of the metabolism directly through its surface. It conveys information about the outside world by way of a vast network of complex sensory nerve endings. It helps guard the inside of your body from the destructive ultraviolet rays of the sun. And it registers pleasure and pain from your environment. Your skin both depends on the rest of your body for its healthy existence and also offers help to it. And like all live things, in order to function well and look beautiful, it has to be free to carry out all its duties unimpaired by lack of proper nutrients or oxygen, poor circulation, illness, internal pollution, or prolonged stress, all of which threaten its integrity. Real skin care is not just skin deep. skin comes in layers Skin is made up of three layers: the stratified cellular epidermis (the part you see when you look into the mirror); an underlying dermis, made up of connective tissue, nerves, blood, and lymph systems, which also contain the sebaceous, or oil, glands, and sweat glands with ducts leading to its surface; and finally a fatty layer of subcutaneous tissue. The outermost layer, the epidermis, consists of two parts: an inner part of living cells called the stratum Malpighii, and an outer part of anucleated (meaning they have lost their nucleus) horny cells, the stratum corneum. The inner part is in direct contact with the dermis, beneath it. the outer skin Here, at the base of the epidermis, is the stratum Malpighii.  A single layer of cells known as the basal layer forms new cells for the rest of the epidermis by continuous cell reproduction. As they are formed, these new cells constantly push outward and upward towards its surface. In the process, they synthesize an insoluble protein called keratin, lose their cell nuclei, die, and dry out, becoming mere shells on the skin's surface. Once there, they are forever being sloughed off and replaced by new arrivals from below. Most skin care products concern themselves only with the treatment of this stratum corneum, making sure it does not dry out excessively (moisturizer); that the dead cells are periodically sloughed off (exfoliater, which stimulates the basal layer to produce more fresh cells and leaves the skin looking more translucent); and finally, that it is covered with a chemical or physical sunscreen to guard the deeper layers of the skin from damage as a result of exposure to sunlight. When the layers of dead cells in the stratum corneum lie flat and smooth against each other, the skin refracts light well, making your skin look beautifully smooth and silky. If, instead, they are turned up at the edges, then the skin looks dry and lacks smoothness. For they are the outermost manifestation of skin beauty and health. On the stratum corneum, that is on the surface of your skin, there is also a hydrolipidic film composed of water from the sweat glands and oil from the sebaceous glands in a kind of oil-in-water emulsion. This film acts as a natural moisturizer, maintaining acidity (referred to as the pH of skin) to help guard the body against invasion of any kind, and to protect it from chemical onslaught. The natural pH of your skin is between 4.5 and 5.5, which means that it is slightly acid. It is important to maintain this acid mantle. It can be disturbed by the use of soaps, most of which are strongly alkaline, and cosmetics which are not acid-balanced. This is particularly true if your skin is sensitive by nature, tends to be either excessively dry or excessively oily, or if it often breaks out in acne. the living skin Beneath the epidermis, in the dermis, or true skin (which unlike the epidermis is entirely a living thing), are found the nerves. They register pleasure, pain, touch, heat and cold. Here, too, is a rich supply of blood vessels and lymphatics plus all the various skin appendages: the hair follicles, with their sebaceous glands, and the sweat glands. Also important in the dermis is an elaborate network of fibers, made by special cells called fibroblasts. These fibers look like the warp and weft of fine cloth. They are collectively known as connective tissues, and are made up mostly of protein called collagen together with about 2 percent elastin. This network gives your skin its form and resilience. So long as it remains smooth and ordered, your skin stays young-looking and firm. When its fibers start to bunch up and harden or to cross-link and become disorganized, your skin rapidly begins to sag, to wrinkle, and to age. This aging process has many causes. It can occur as a result of exposure to the sun, internal wear and tear from illness, or an insufficiency of certain vitamins and minerals (particularly vitamin C and the trace element zinc), or exposure to cigarette smoke and pollution. It also appears to be part of your genetic programming. Much of the beauty and health of your skin depends on the dermal layer. The things it needs to stay strong and healthy come as much - if not more - from the inside than from what you apply to skin. This internal aspect of skin care is what is most ignored. Few women even consider it, and yet without ensuring that the dermis gets all it needs through optimum nutrition and regular exercise (not only for the face but also for the body as a whole), there is no way you can prevent or correct the disorganization of connective tissue, its consequent loss of tone, and the resulting deep line formation on the face. the subskin Underneath the dermis, in the subcutaneous tissue, are layers of muscle and fatty tissue which act as insulation to the body and which also give young female skin its characteristic (and very attractive) padding. When this padding starts to go, either because of hormonal changes that come with age or because of simple neglect, your skin loses tone and firmness. Looking after this layer of skin is a whole body challenge. Particularly important to it is the health of your endocrine system, in which constant regular exercise plays a vital part. Truly effective skin care has to ensure the continuous health and proper functioning of all three layers, to preserve beauty. This means treatment and protection from the outside of the epidermis. It also means treatment of the dermis through first-rate nutrition, vitamins and minerals, rest and exercise, and perhaps, too, the application of specific essential oils, fatty acids such as gamma linolenic acid (GLA), certain vitamins such as vitamin E, and/or other active substances which can be absorbed through the skin's outer layers into the dermis to stimulate cell metabolism, encourage waste elimination from cells, and help protect and preserve the collagen and elastin fibers. Finally, the subcutaneous layer has to be kept intact by maintaining a firm and well-used, healthy body. In other words, really good skin care for lasting beauty has to tackle the challenge simultaneously from within and without. And there are no shortcuts.

Our energy is balanced between dynamic, outpouring energy—which is exciting, creative, fun and challenging—and inner, moving energy, which is receptive. It’s a kind of quiet expectance that allows the universe to give you the gifts that it has to give. And of course, we can’t receive those gifts unless we know how to move from the dynamic state into the real receptive one. One of the things that’s important in helping us learn to do this—and almost everybody I know needs to learn to do it in our hectic, overstressed, dynamic world—is using water. Water itself is a powerful energy balancer. For instance, when you apply hot and cold water alternately to the surface of your skin, this stimulates circulation through the cardiovascular system, and it also spurs really good lymphatic drainage. From an electromagnetic point of view, by stimulating these systems you are increasing electricity at the heart of your cells, heightening your body's ability to produce energy at a cellular level and to produce vitality in your life. Hydrotherapy works in other ways too. Like a really good way of eating, high in fresh green vegetables and low or no processed and convenience foods, water helps detoxify acid wastes which are interfering with normal energetic processes. An excellent technique that works fantastically well is Epsom salts baths. They are magical in the way they can help you to balance your energies, not only on a physical level, but emotionally. Epsom salts are magnesium sulphate. Both magnesium and sulphate molecules have an ability to leach excess sodium, phosphorous and nitrogenous wastes from the body. By reducing toxicity, your body's energy becomes freed up for more efficient use. Magnesium and sulphur are also some of the most alkalinizing earth minerals. In practical terms, what this means is that they have the ability to create more physical space between the atoms and the molecules of your body. The greater the acidity in the body, and the more compressed the molecular space becomes, the greater the physical and emotional pressure you feel. When you get into an Epsom salts bath, the magnesium sulphate disturbs the pressure in your body, dispersing it and helping to restore balance. Magnesium sulphate dissolved in a body of water creates an electrical unified field. When you put your body into this field, it removes any excess electrical discharge from one area of the body and sends it to areas which are undercharged, creating a magnetic balance. There is nothing quite as good as an Epsom salts bath when you have been on a long flight or if you are suffering from jetlag, emotional tension, great fatigue or upset. Here’s How [video src=http://d1vg7rm5xhtxe9.cloudfront.net/video/sd/epsom-salts.mp4 poster=http://d3oy45cyct8ffi.cloudfront.net/health/video/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2013/08/epsom-salts-baths.jpg ] Take two cups of industrial grade Epsom salts. These are available from the chemist and sometimes from supermarkets. Pour it into a bath with a tiny, tiny bit of household bleach—the bleach is optional, but strangely enough it is another helper which, in minute quantities (and I’m talking less than a teaspoonful in a whole bath) ionizes wastes that are stored in the body. Fill the bath with tepid water, just above body temperature. Then immerse yourself in it for at least 20 minutes. If you begin to feel cool, add some more hot water. If you feel too warm, add a little bit of cold water, so that you are able to sustain being in this bath in a very relaxed state for 20 to 30 minutes. Get out of the bath, wrap yourself in a towel and rub yourself vigorously. This is lovely last thing at night and brings blissful sleep. You can also take an Epsom salts bath during the day, or before going out for the evening after a stressful day. When you get out of the bath, wrap yourself up in a towel and lie down for 10 minutes then get up, get dressed and go about whatever you are intending to do.