5 Healthy Lifestyle Habits That Keep You Young and Attractive
Have you ever wondered why some people look younger than their age?
Did you know your genes do not determine how you age?
Your youthfulness depends on your lifestyle, how you live, and how you think.
Your habits form what you are today. Just imagine you can keep young and attractive always, wouldn't that be great?
Well, you can. In this blog, I've put together five healthy lifestyle habits that keep you young and attractive. And tips on how you can form them.
1. Sleep early and wake up early.
Go to bed early and wake up early; the morning hours are good ––– Jeff Bezos
Sleep is essential, but waking up early and sleeping early benefits us in many ways:
- It makes you healthy
People who wake up late don't have time to prepare breakfast or even eat breakfast, and they end up grabbing any junk food before lunchtime. The food you eat has a significant impact on your skin.
By waking up early, you can make an excellent healthy breakfast to start the day and fight daytime cravings.
- It helps you to look more attractive
You have more time to make yourself attractive as you can spend more time on your skincare routine – styling your hair, putting on your make-up, and finding the right outfit for the day.
- It helps you to relieve stress.
Stress has a significant impact on our appearance. When stressed, your skin becomes dull, and acne and other skin conditions appear on your face.
By waking up early, you can have more time to organise, prepare, meditate and exercise to help you reduce stress. (More on that later.)
2. Eat for youth
So I presume everybody knows that eating fruit and vegetables will give you good health, but did you know that certain foods can help maintain your youth for longer? Adding these foods to your diet will make you healthier and look younger.
So what exactly is the food to eat to look younger?
- Antioxidants. An antioxidant is a substance that helps protect and fights off the effect of free radicals in your body and prevents cell damage. (we need healthy cells to look younger and live longer.)
Food that contains a high level of antioxidants:
VITAMIN A: Carrots, peaches, Mangoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and dark green vegetables.
VITAMIN C: Blueberries, cabbages, broccoli, blackberries, cauliflower, orange.
VITAMIN E: Avocados, carrots, olive oil, shrimps, Salmon, spinach.
Carotenoids. Carotenoids are also antioxidants. They include substances like lutein, zeaxanthin, and lycopene.
A good source of lycopene, lutein and zeaxanthin includes:
Watermelon, tomatoes, tomato paste, egg yolk, grapes, kale, kiwi, spinach, and turnip greens.
- Omega -3 fatty acids and monounsaturated fats
Omega-3 fatty acids and monounsaturated fats help keep your skin moist and improve skin elasticity. It also helps to soothe and calm inflamed skin as it has anti-inflammatory effects.
Good source of monounsaturated and omega-3 fatty acids:
Olive oil, hazel nuts, Salmon, peanut butter, sesame oil, sesame seed olives, mackerel, cha seed, sardines, tofu, tuna (fresh).
3. Meditate
In today's busy world, stress is almost inevitable. You will encounter stress at some point in your life. Stress speeds up ageing by breaking down collagen and elastin ( proteins that keep us young). Once this happens, you will start to see changes in your appearance: wrinkles, dull skin, pimples, and acne will appear on your face.
Stress also affects telomeres too. As mentioned earlier, the shorter the telomeres, the faster we age.
So what we need to do is not stress or reduce it.
One of the best ways to reduce stress is to meditate.
Meditation helps to calm your mind and develop positive emotions.
Practising meditation helps to achieve inner peace and reduce stress.
Here is a simple method for meditation that you can do every day.
You will start to feel inner peace during the process.
1. Choose a quiet place and sit comfortably.
2. Take a few deep breaths, breathing in and out of your nose.
3. Focus on your breathing and follow the tempo of each breath.
4. If your mind starts to wander somewhere else, slowly bring your mind back to focus on your breathing.
5. Repeat the process.
4. Exercise
Exercise keeps your body weight under control and keeps you in shape, but more importantly, it slows down the ageing process of your cells. In most cells, we have chromosomes, and at the tip of the chromosomes, we have something called telomeres, which affect the ageing process.
Each time a cell divides, the telomeres become shorter, and over years of cell division, the telomeres become so short that they reach a point that they are unable to divide anymore.
This shortening process is what makes us age. The length of the telomeres determines our life span; the longer it is, the longer we live.
Exercising will help lengthen the telomeres, so your cells can live longer. It will also help reduce stress as it releases endorphins (feel-good hormones.)
In short – daily exercise will help you stay young, live longer, and be happier.
5. Have a skin care routine
Having a skin care routine is essential. Why? Cause you want to have nice skin and look young for as long as possible.
A skincare routine doesn't need to be complicated; it can be as simple as cleansing, moisturise and protecting. These three steps are essential.
Why cleanse?
As mentioned earlier, your genes only play a minor role in how old you look. (3-15%.) The rest that causes skin ageing are environmental factors – and pollution is one of them.
Imagine all the air and pollution you attract daily onto your skin; if your skin is not cleaned properly with a cleanser, expect premature ageing, blackheads and pimples. If you don't have any, count yourself lucky, but don't expect to have a lovely glowing complexion the next day. While you sleep, skin cells renew, but if you leave any particles of make-up or pollution on your skin, you're not allowing your skin cells to regenerate at their best.
Why moisturise?
Moisturising your skin will keep your skin soft and supple and prevents your skin from going dry and dehydrated. When skin becomes dry, fine lines and wrinkles will appear. Think of it like a plant – when you water it – it is fully hydrated and looks green and healthy, but once you stop, the plant will start to wither; it's dry, wrinkly, and losses vitality. The same goes for your skin.
Like I was talking about adding antioxidants to your diet, you can also add antioxidants to your skin care routine. Products like 'The Eight Treasure Smoothing Cream' help fight free radicals on the skin's surface as they contain high levels of antioxidants, such as green tea, goji berries, ginseng, calendula, rose, osmanthus, pomegranate, and orange blossom.
Another reason is that it also adds extra protection to your skin from environmental aggressors such as pollution and UV rays which both cause premature ageing.
Why protect?
UV rays are present every day – no matter what season or weather. UVA are powerful rays penetrate your skin, causing premature ageing and pigmentations. They are so powerful that they even can penetrate through glass. So if you sit outside in your car or indoors near a window – UVA can still touch your skin. That's why protecting your skin with an SPF every day is crucial.
You can always add more to your skin care routine, such as exfoliation, which is ideal once a week to get rid of the surface of dead skin cells and having a mask once a week to add that extra radiant boost to your skin. But if you're the lazy or too busy type – just remember to do the basic cleanse, moisturise and protect.
How to form habits
Good habits don't form in a few days, so if you want to implement the 5 Healthy Lifestyle Habits That Keep You Young and Attractive today – you will need to start creating these habits for them to form by repeatedly doing them. And there are some effective ways to develop them.
According to the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, to create a good habit, you need to…
- Make it obvious.
- Make it attractive.
- Make it easy.
- Make it satisfying.
For example, if you want to carry out a skincare routine. Place your products in your bathroom, and make them obvious to see. When things are easy to grab and obvious to see, you are more likely to hold them.
If exercising is boring, add music to make it attractive and fun. Listen to your favourite podcast or radio station – it will make you look forward to exercising the next day again cause you want to listen to your favourite podcast or whatever you enjoy listening to.
If you dread meditation cause 10 minutes are too long for you, make it easy. For the first day, meditate for 2 minutes only and do that for a week, then 5 minutes on the second week and eight on the third week, and then carry on adding minutes to it as you start loving it. Slowing this habit will form over time.
People tend to give up on their goals because they don't receive immediate satisfaction. Moisturising your skin for two days isn't going to improve your skin immediately. Exercising for two days isn't going to make you tone up straight away.
The best way to keep up the habits you're trying to form is to give yourself immediate satisfaction.
For example, you can create a daily rather than a yearly goal. On your calendar, you can note down your daily exercise goal, and once you have achieved it, give yourself a tick; that way, you will feel you have accomplished today's goal and feel satisfied immediately.
Bonus Tip:
If you can't get up early, make it difficult. Put your phone or alarm clock far away from your bed – so far that you have to get out of bed to switch the alarm off. This tip will stop you from constantly snoozing your alarm and wake your body up.