If you spent the night before slamming down daquaris or margaritas, the bad morning might not be such a surprise. We all know if we get a bit toasted, that is what our face is going to look like in the morning. Sometimes, though, why we look so awful some mornings just isn’t instantly apparent to us. We may wonder for a few minutes, do some sort of fix or make an attempt to hide the devastation, but in the long run how far do we go in examining why we look so much worse some days than on others?

The truth is that if you are experiencing bad mirror days fairly frequently, it is something you should be taking note of very closely. Your skin is an organ and when it is looking bad, it’s not going to be functioning all that well, either. If your skin is doing poorly, many other organs that you can’t see may be suffering just as badly. The bad mirror day is not something to just blow off and ignore.

When you find yourself frequently waking up badly, you need to start taking notes. There are many reasons that you might be looking worse than usual, or that it is becoming more usual to look pretty bad when you wake up. It’s time to start making a check list for yourself to get to the bottom of the situation. You will want to examine all the things that you can think of that might have a negative effect on your skin so you can see if there is some pattern so you can avoid irritants before the damage becomes permanent.

The first thing to ask yourself is if you drank enough water the day before. Dehydration will take an almost immediate toll on the body. Fortunately this one is easy to fix if you do it right away and don’t allow yourself to repeat the dehydration too often. If your checklist includes a lack of liquids as a usual item, start right there and make sure that you can write it off your list in the future. That may be all it takes to correct the bad mornings. If not, you need to look further.

Lack of sleep is another reason for looking run down that is pretty easy to figure out. Not getting enough sleep once in a while is pretty normal. If you are experiencing lack of sleep too often though, you are putting your whole body in jeopardy. You might need to make some life adjustments to ensure you are able to sleep a bit longer each night. Perhaps you have a job that is too demanding for you and need to find a different company to work for that is not hazardously demanding. Maybe you need to hire someone to take care of a few odds and ends for you that keep you running just a little longer than is healthy. Perhaps your spouse needs to be made to understand that you are having too many demands on your time and you need to have more help or to be left alone to sleep longer. Whatever adjustments would aid you in getting the extra sleep you need should be made. Lack of sleep can do more than make you look like a zombie. It can be deadly.

What did you eat the day before? Did you eat a lot of processed foods or drink soda pop? Write down everything you can remember. You might find a pattern in what you eat and how you look. Processed foods and beverages contain a myriad chemical additives and all forms of sugar and sugar substitutes. By writing down what foods you ate each time you wake up less than prime you may be able to narrow down exactly which foods you are having the worst reactions to and can get them out of your diet before they destroy your whole body’s health. The more of these chemicals and sugars you can cut out of your diet, the more generally healthy you will be and the better your skin will look.

Was your room too hot or too cold the night before your mirror screams at you? If your checklist shows that your room was either hotter or colder than normal when you wake up looking bad, you have an easy solution on hand. A room that is too hot can make eyes puffy and lined. A room that is too cold can just upset good sleep.

Are you exposing yourself to forms of pollution some days that you aren’t always exposed to? When you wake up looking bad, take a washcloth and pour some rubbing alcohol on it and wipe your face. If you are wiping off blackish dirt, think about where you were the day before. If you can avoid going somewhere that always results in black film on your skin, avoid going there any more often than you need to. If you have to go there, make sure to wear a non-toxic makeup foundation when you go. It’s much better to have toxic waste sitting on your makeup than absorbing into your body through your skin. Be sure to wash your makeup off thoroughly when you get home. If you remove brownish residue when you wipe your face, you aren’t getting your makeup off well enough before you go to bed and need to improve your cleansing routine. Even the best non-toxic makeup will still clog pores and keep your cells from breathing freely at night. After you wipe your skin clean with the alcohol, be sure and moisturize with a non-toxic moisturizer. Alcohol is a great cleanser, but it will dry your skin if you don’t moisturize after you clean with it.

Are you getting enough aerobic exercise? Your skin may suffer if you are not. Conversely, if you are exercising daily or most days and your skin is breaking out or otherwise looking bad, your body might be expelling toxins through your skin. Some of the previous points on the checklist will reveal if you are taking in too many chemical toxins. If you can’t correct the problem with better hydration and nutrition, you may have something more serious going on that you need to look into.

Illness can also show up on your skin and if all other points of your checklist don’t show up a problem and you are cleansing your skin thoroughly each night, you might need professional help to find out if you have a deficiency, imbalance, or even an illness you are not aware of in your body that you need to address.

No matter what you do, you will never be able to completely avoid an occasional bad mirror day. By keeping track of your activities though, you can reduce them to a minimum. . A little bit of applied vanity can go a long way in maintaining your body’s optimal health. It won’t hurt your self esteem to look better most days, either.

©2010: Sally Taylor

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If you are working at home on the Internet, or even if you just use the Internet frequently, chances are you move much less during the average day than you used to.  You now walk to your home office and sit down instead of getting ready for work and leaving the house.  You may shop for items at your computer that you used to go out to find.  You may have stepped up your exercise program, but studies now show that people who move more, generally -  not just exercise regularly but move more – during a day have higher metabolisms and control their weight more easily. While that new exercise program isn’t going to hurt you by a long shot, it will not be enough to replace movement lost during a day of working at home in front of the computer.

By incorporating more movement into your day you can avoid the pitfall of Internet “spread” and keep yourself more product while online, too.  School systems have long understood that the average attention span is 50 minutes.  By planning a ten minute break every 50 minutes, you can not only aid in boosting your metabolism back into normal condition, but will probably find your work time more productive as well.  By taking ten minutes every hour to go outside and walk you will solve many problems exacurbated by long intervals of sitting.  First,  the movement will boost your fat burning processes.  Walking will also help to tone and stretch  your muscular structure.  Being in sunlight for ten minutes at a time will also give you exposure you need to keep your vitamin D3 levels at their optimum without giving you time to burn.  Without vitamin D3, you are not going to control your weight or any other system or organ in your body.

Walking outside every hour also gives your mind the break it needs to assimilate information and formulate new ideas.  Just one more benefit is that getting out and away from a planted position will make you less likely to snack haphazardly.  If you find the walking does not curb your desire to snack while working, keeping a plate of sliced vegetables such as celery, carrot sticks, and cucumber slices nearby will allow you to snack in a method that will not encourage weight gain or other forms of ill health.  The vitamins and minerals provided by the vegetables will work with the increased movement to allow you to achieve maximum levels of benefits  frequent movement will provide.

While working at home can entice you to move much less frequently it is important not to think just about an exercise program, but rather to think about avoiding a sedentary lifestyle.  If you are used to jobs outside of the house that kept you sitting for long periods, working at home can allow you to make very positive strides toward optimal health and fat burning in ways you could have never achieved while being tied to a desk at the office.  Isn’t it time that you focused your freedom to choose your work and lifestyle toward the choice of optimal health and weight control?

©2010 Sally Taylor

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You can run to plastic surgeons and have your face lifted until your feet don’t touch the floor, suck enough fat out of your thighs to roast a whole pig in, or tuck that tummy until it hits your backbone. You can use every form of skin mask and wrinkle cream on the market. If you don’t have a handle on the most important aspect of beauty and health control, anything you do will just fall right back apart again. Are you one of those who spent five or ten grand this year at a plastic surgeon or esthetician to look awesome? Did the work come with a life time guarantee? Of course, it didn’t. In that you can find your first clue.

The deep dirty truth about beautiful skin is that it can not be fully healthy unless all the components of the skin system are healthy. That means capillaries, connective tissue, muscle, skin layers, and the skin cells themselves. Of course, this means the right nutrients, that’s a given. But all the vitamins in the world aren’t going to do you much good without the most essential element. That element is aerobic exercise. Now that you want to shoot me where I stand, I will explain that statement.

Your skin, your largest organ, is an intricate system with many elements working to support it. If any of these elements break down, your skin will lose its integrity. If the elements under the skin, muscle and connective tissue, break down your skin will wrinkle and sag. If the capillaries fail, or blood cells can’t get nutrients to the skin cells, they will starve or suffocate. When blood cell don’t remove wastes quickly and efficiently cells become diseased. You can not correct one of these elements and expect to maintain beauty. They must all be functioning correctly. That is where aerobic exercise comes in.

In today’s world we are continually bombarded with toxins. These toxins are more or less waste material. When you carry enough waste material your body can become toxic itself and cause you disease and illness. Aerobic exercise allows blood to pump through more efficiently to places where toxins are accumulating and carry them out of your system through the lungs or kidneys away from the cells where they cause disease.

Through aerobic exercise the blood cells can also more quickly deliver the most important nutrient to your cells. Oxygen. If you do not agree that oxygen is the body’s most important nutrient, try to hold your breath for about five minutes. You will notice the effects long before you pass out, which will be only a few minutes. You can live days without water, and weeks without food, but you won’t survive more than a few minutes without oxygen. Needless to say, skin cells that aren’t well oxygenated don’t stand a chance of looking healthy and vibrant.

To get all of this oxygen to your skin cells your blood needs a good clean highway. That means your capillaries have to be kept in top working order, too. By exercising religiously, these highways are kept elastic and nutritious oxygen can be pumped to those cells and any damaging toxins or proteins that are threatening to them can be pumped away before it can become a problem.

Muscles and connective tissues, too, need to be kept elastic and well toned if they are to support the skin organ which covers them. When the muscles and connective tissues lose tone, the skin is allowed to sag and wrinkle. Not only is wrinkling a poor beauty statement, it is a very strong indication of the shape of the interior portions of your body as well.

There is no way to replace what aerobic exercise will do for your skin. There are other elements your skin needs as well, but if it is not getting the waste removal and oxygenation that aerobic exercise provides, there is only so much else you can do for it. So put away all of your cremes, lotions, and plastic surgeons phone numbers and go take a walk, ride a bike, or crank up the radio and dance. You might find some incredible ways to get that exercise that will cause you to smile and add just a bit more radiance to that wonderful complexion.

2007-2008 © Sals Secrets Revealed

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