Tag: Health

If you have a passion for skincare, it is no surprise that food is often incorporated into skincare products. However, food plays an integral part in the natural complexion of your skin. Similar to drinking water, various foods can target certain aspects of achieving healthy skin such as hydration, clarity and nourishment. Below we break down the 101 on incorporating foods into your skincare routine.

Add Avocado to Your Routine

If you’re as avocado obsessed with us, this is nothing but good news. Among its long list of benefits, avocado is great for keeping your skin moisturized and supple. Avocados have high levels of vitamin E and monounsaturated fats, which allows your skin to create a barrier and retain its natural moisture. The reason why avocados are important to healthy skin is due to the vitamin E. Essentially, vitamin E consists of antioxidants and has the ability to protect your body from oxidative stress. According to Healthline, oxidative stress occurs when there is an imbalance between the body’s antioxidants and oxygen molecules. A couple outcomes of oxidative stress include inflammation and aging. So, if keeping your skin full of life is a priority for you, load up on those avocados! By no means do you have to only eat avocado on its own. In fact, one of our favourite ways is to add it to a breakfast sandwich!

Oats to Help Your Skin

While there are many skincare products containing oats, they work wonders when you eat them too! Oatmeal naturally contains vitamin B-6, which in turn helps with the balance of stress and depression. It is no secret that stress, anxiety and depression can lead to impurities of your skin such as acne, wrinkles and rapid aging. Thankfully, the vitamin B-6 levels in oatmeal aid in the reduction of stress and increase of serotonin. If you do not typically start your day off with oats, they are super easy to implement into your daily diet. One of our new favourite ways to enjoy our steel cut oats is by adding savoury ingredients. Our savoury oat bowl is perfect because you can cut out all added sugar (which has been linked to negative impacts on your skin). Who knew oatmeal had a place in your skincare routine?

Red Bell Peppers and Skincare

When it comes to keeping your skin firm and strong, red bell peppers are probably the best food for the job. Red peppers are extremely high in vitamin C, which in turn creates collagen. Collagen is extremely important for your skin as it assists with keeping it firm, hydrated, and reduces fine lines. Keeping your skin bright and youthful is something we all aim for when forming a skincare routine. However, an effective collagen serum can range anywhere from $20 to over a couple hundred. While that might be affordable for some, we firmly believe a healthy skincare routine and feeling good should not cost a bundle! What better way to increase your collagen levels than to grab a bunch of red peppers for a few bucks? To make things even easier for you, we have a stuffed pepper recipe you are sure to love.

Save Your Skin with Tomatoes

If you enjoy spending time in the sun, we recommend introducing tomatoes into your weekly diet. Tomatoes contain a carotenoid called lycopene and can prevent anti-aging of your skin due to sun damage. While this does not mean you can stop wearing sunscreen, it does mean you can take extra precautions to protect yourself from sun damage. According to Women’s Health, lycopene levels in tomatoes increase when they are heated and cooked. Our Egg White Patty Pizza recipe is an easy way to use tomato sauce – eat some pizza and protect your skin at the same time!

Your Skincare Routine and Walnuts

If you don’t have a nut allergy, walnuts might become your new favourite snack. Walnuts are packed with various vitamins and minerals including Omega-6 and zinc. Omega-6 is a healthy fat that your body loves because it helps limit inflammation – bye bye puffiness! The zinc in walnuts does wonders as well. Zinc aids in forming your skin’s natural barrier to keep bacteria out. This is great if you have acne-prone or sensitive skin and want to keep your pores clear of unwanted bacteria. We recommend adding walnuts in their natural state to snack plates like these. Other ways you can introduce walnuts into your meals include adding them to your oat or yoghurt bowls.

Next time you’re thinking of adding a new product into your skincare routine, we suggest adding the above ingredients into your diet. There are so many benefits to adding whole foods into your diet and now you can focus on skincare through your meals! Focusing on what you eat can definitely help you avoid overspending on those pricey skincare products too. We hope you adopt this new approach and implement food into your skincare routine!

Most people know that what you eat will affect how you feel and look, which often translates to a certain number on the scale. However, it’s not just what we’re putting on our plates and into our mouths that counts. It turns out that when you consume food also plays a role in managing a healthy weight — which can either help or hinder your overall health.

More and more research is emerging that suggests timing your calorie consumption is something we should be paying way more attention to. Let’s learn more about what science is saying, and how you can optimize meal times in order to feel good, healthy, and confident in your body.

Science Says: Eat Early

We’re about to give you the best reason to eat cookies for breakfast. For starters, eating first-thing will kick-start your metabolism and ensure your body knows to turn your caloric intake into fuel. If you skip breakfast, your body will think it needs to conserve what you consume — versus burn it off — meaning you might be holding onto extra sugars and fats your body would normally metabolize. Science backs this up, too; while there’s a chance you’ll eat fewer calories if you skip breakfast, those people still typically have higher BMI’s (body mass index), a measure of body fat based on your weight in relation to your height.

When it comes to actually timing, aligning your meals with your natural circadian rhythm is also important. As inhabitants of the earth that rotates around the sun in 24-hour stints, we too experience 24-hour day-night cycle that brings certain changes to our daily lives, such as producing melatonin before falling asleep, boosting immunity during the day, and controlling our appetites at various times so we don’t wake up in the middle of the night starving.

Within our internal clocks, our bodies do a better job at metabolizing food when we eat in the morning versus the evenings, which may lead to a healthier body weight. A large study that came out this year backs this up. Scientists discovered that eating more in the morning is a beneficial strategy for weight control. In one experiment, they found that late lunch eaters lost significantly less weight than early lunch eaters over a 20‐week period; another experiment revealed that eating a bigger breakfast led to greater improvements in fasting glucose, insulin, and triglycerides, along with the ability to control hunger throughout the day.

Other studies have continuously found that eating bigger breakfasts led to consuming small dinners and losing more weight over time, too.

On the flip side, studies have shown that folks who eat at night consume more calories than if they were to eat a meal during the day, and there’s evidence that an increased risk of obesity and related health conditions has been associated with breakfast skipping and late night snacking. Additional research has found larger meals at night is connected to an increase in triglyceride levels, which is associated with diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and an overall increase in weight.

Meal Timing — Your Action Plan

All of these studies might make you think: should I just eat breakfast? Will eating later in the day cause doom? The point is not to make you believe eating dinner will cause direct weight gain. Instead, it’s about ensuring you optimize breakfast as a way to eat healthfully in order to regulate your appetite throughout the rest of the day and resist cravings right before hitting the hay.

Some science says that eating late at night — two hours before going to bed — will increase your risk of gaining unwanted pounds. We recommendation to eat like a king at breakfast, chow down like a queen at lunch, and chew away like a pauper at dinner. A good way to look at it is to fit all your meals and snacks within 10-12 hours, such as between 7 am and 7 pm.

Here are some actions items you can take to help get the timing just right.

Stop eating after dinner. As hard as this one may be, it might be the most beneficial to maintaining or losing a little weight. Cut the cravings once the dinner table is cleared away. Enjoy a cup of tea as a way to satiate your pallet instead.

Make breakfast your biggest meal. If we didn’t make this clear enough, we have one more chance: take advantage of breakfast. Don’t be worried about a three-egg omelet or a big bowl of oats. It’s proven to satisfy your hunger, jumpstart your metabolism, and control your appetite throughout the rest of the day.

Use a smaller plate for your evening meal. Other interesting research has shown that eating on a smaller plate actually leads to eating less. Give that a whirl. You can still prepare a good amount of food for dinner; simply package the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Think of snacks like mini-meals. In order to optimize snacking throughout the day, think of them as smaller-sized meals then a quick way to satisfy a hunger pang or sweet tooth. So, instead of grabbing a granola bar, eat a handful of raw nuts with mixed fruit. And instead of chomping away on potato chips, go for popcorn, which is made from whole grains and packs a good bout of fiber.

Stay hydrated! No matter what time of the day it is, staying hydrated throughout will help control your appetite and ensure you don’t get a wave of hunger when it’s close to shuteye. Drinking enough H20 comes with some great benefits, including preventing overeating and maintaining a normal bowel function. As far as how much to drink down, experts recommend 3,000 milliliters for men and 2,200 milliliters for women.. That comes out to 9 to 12 cups of water, a little more than the recommended eight glasses we often hear.

Try this little eating habit shift and see if you feel a difference! You might really find that changing up when you eat has way more of an effect than focusing so closely on what you’re eating. Avoid chowing down close to bedtime, make breakfast count, and stay mindful of snacks and hydrating throughout the day. Before you know it, you might be feeling better than you ever have before.