As a health and lifestyle coach, it may seem counterintuitive for me to cheerlead a focus on outer beauty. It’s been proven that our health actually suffers when we focus on how others perceive us versus attending to our internal wellness and self love.
But, hear me out!
Right now, there’s a whole league of beauty products revolutionizing the personal care industry and making us feel truly beautiful. Case in point. Each day, I use products that support my soul, make me feel my most confident and vibrant self, and take my spirit to the next level. But it wasn’t always this way.
I got incredibly sick in my twenties with no clarity on what was making me feel so miserable. Doctors scratched their heads while I quickly slipped into a place of self-doubt and complete frustration. I tried diets, alternative therapies and read every article on “complex cases” that I could get my hands on. On top of it all, I tirelessly attempted to keep up with my fast-paced Fashion Merchandising job at a Fortune 500 company in San Francisco and pushed myself to maintain a busy, big-city social life.
The good news is, as I took my health into my own hands I found ways to fit healthy lifestyle shifts into my active life and started to see results, ultimately healing myself! (I built Good Life to support women be their healthiest despite the demands of life!) And this month, as I collaborated with the incredible Art of Organics for their October Clean Beauty box, I stopped to think about the role my beauty routine played in my healing process. And it was as profound and as simple as this: I started to feed my skin.
Here are three key ways using #beautyfood externally in my daily routine helped to improve my internal health and wellness.
- Shifting to clean beauty reduced the toxic load
on my body. As my body worked to fight off my illness,inflammation ran rampant and my body remained in a chronic state of defense. And guess what? Every morning when I slathered on my skincare and makeup, that inflammation rose even higher due to the harmful ingredients hiding in my beauty products. Once I removed these toxins and replaced my products with ‘clean’, my body could breathe a sigh of relief! - Plant-based ingredients acted as medicine for my body. There’s a reason why herbal supplements and plant botanics are an effective and alternative way to cure ailments in the body. Nature provides us with incredible remedies that are actually more powerful than your over-the-counter drugs. Science doesn’t lie: did you know that curcumin (derived from the turmeric root) is said to be just as effective as the antidepressant Prozac, without the side effects?! And as we Art of Organics fans know well, we absorb more than 60% of what we put on our body, AKA my plant-based face moisturizer acted as my morning supplement!
- The act of participating in luxurious self-care every morning allowed me to consciously honor my body. Compare two very different scenes in your AM routine. Mindlessly swiping on your department store lipstick and your drugstore body cream, as you rush out of the house with your mind running a mile a minute about what you have to get done that day. OR. Mindfully creating time and space in your morning routine for products that you have carefully selected with your health in mind, boosting your confidence with the knowledge you are ‘feeding’ your body. Filling my mornings with the latter example – energies of mindfulness and confidence — set the tone for an internal environment of wellness in my body.
So yes, while we love the effects clean beauty has on our exterior complexion and glow, these #beautyfood ingredients are so much more than an external solution. Clean beauty benefits us both from the outside-in and the inside-out. If we take a proactive approach to honor our bodies with nourishment from all angles, there’s no doubt we will be our most stunning selves yet!
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