Beauty & vitality

“Beauty comes from within” – how to help your skin look good

• Only with an intact acid mantle can your skin fend off harmful external influences and protect itself against infections, allergies, irritation and dehydration – so please don’t clean your skin with water alone, because it temporarily dries out the horny layer and disturbs the barrier function. It’s better to add a fat-replenishing substance to the water.
• Mix yourself a cleansing emulsion. Add two tablespoons of olive oil or linseed oil to a cup of milk, then simply add the mixture to the water at body temperature. Carefully dab dry afterwards – do not rub!
• Moisturising your skin with cream is absolutely necessary. Make sure, however, that everything you apply has a neutral to slightly acid pH value of approx. 5.5 to 5.7 – this will keep the protective acid mantle intact. Good skin care doesn’t have to be expensive, but the ingredients should be age-appropriate.
• Avoid too much UV light and make sure you apply a day cream with sun protection. UV light stresses the skin and causes it to age prematurely – and it also increases the risk of skin cancer. Natural sun protection can also be eaten! This is where the secondary plant substances, such as those found in carrots and tomatoes, can help. Continuity is also important: For at least 14 days, eat two tablespoons of tomato paste with a few drops of olive oil on your bread – and that will provide your skin with a natural sun protection shield that has a factor of 3 to 4.

Healthy skin through healthy nutrition

• Healthy nutrition is beauty medicine for the skin. Eat fresh fruit and vegetables with strong colours: Blueberries, raspberries, elderberries, currants, aubergines, spinach and chard are particularly rich in plant antioxidants and protect the skin from free radicals. The right oils and fats, such as linseed oil, protect against your skin drying out thanks to their poly-unsaturated fatty acids. Food with a lot of vitamin A (including many types of fruit & vegetables, egg yolk and oily fish like mackerel and salmon), increases skin thickness and improves the skin structure. Vitamin E prevents age spots and reduces the loss of moisture in the skin. It is particularly found in grains, nuts and vegetable oils such as wheat germ oil, corn oil and sunflower seed oil. And, as always, this is very important – drink enough! Water is the thirst quencher of the skin.
• And enough sleep is the be-all and end-all. Sufficient rest and recovery supports all the regeneration processes in your body and skin.
• Treat yourself to an overall healthy lifestyle! Smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, overweight, lack of sleep, stress and wrong nutrition determine (up to 40 percent!) how quickly our skin ages.
• And don’t forget that your skin loves exercise in the fresh air and lots of deep breaths!

How to help your skin with healthy nutrition:

Coordinate your diet – in the case of psoriasis, a chronic inflammatory skin disease, the positive influence of a proper diet has been proven. The causes of psoriasis can be genetic or due to environmental factors, stress and medication. A diet matched to the illness can stabilise your body’s own defences, healing the skin and mucous membranes more efficiently. Therapeutic fasting can have anti-inflammatory effects and relieve itching and pain. One study showed that after a four-week calorie-reduced diet, the skin problems of the test subjects decreased significantly.

Eat healthily and drink enough: If you eat a balanced diet – with whole grain & dairy products and enough fruit and vegetables – and if you drink enough, you’re giving your skin the optimal supply base. Important: don’t avoid fat at all! Foods rich in poly-unsaturated fatty acids make the cell walls flexible and supple. They can then absorb nutrients more easily and also release metabolic end products. You should therefore make regular use of high-quality vegetable oils, nuts, seeds and high-fat fish. Bon appetit!

If possible, eat natural foods: Study subjects with chronic urticaria (“hives”), for example, underwent a diet without preservatives and dyes. They also avoided foods such as pineapple, strawberries and apricots, because their natural ingredients can cause seemingly allergic reactions. Within three weeks, 70 percent of patients were symptom-free.

Be patient and consistent. Whether it’s due to illness or for cosmetic reasons – if you want to do your skin some good by changing your diet, a change in your skin won’t happen overnight. It’s an ongoing project that is rewarded with patience. So stay tuned – it’s worth investing in a healthy diet.

Tips for an excellent sense of taste

• Avoid ready meals and fast food if possible.
• Be curious – how about trying something new and unknown more often?
• Make sure you have enough time to eat. Look forward to the culinary enjoyment!
• Be careful though – try to eat conscientiously, without letting yourself be distracted by television, radio, reading, work etc.
• Eat slowly and ‘feel’ the taste. Close your eyes from time to time and concentrate on the food in your mouth. How are you experiencing your meal now?

Feeling and touching belong to our primal experiences – as unborn babies, we oriented ourselves on these senses in the womb long before we could hear or see. When we were babies and toddlers, we used them to explore the world. Is something angular or round, smooth or rough, cold or warm, wet or dry, hard, fluffy or flabby? We learned to distinguish all this with these senses – and – in the truest sense of the word – to really start to understand our world.

Sensitise your sense of touch – go barefoot

One special way to intensify the sense of touch is a barefoot path, on which you walk on a specially-designed walking track. You will experience various materials under the soles of your feet as particularly intense sensations and this will relax you in a soothing way. Many health resorts and communities now offer footpaths and barefoot hiking trails. The barfusspark.info (German) presents detailed barefoot paths and parks at home and abroad.