Skin Health
How I Got Healthier and Smoother Skin Via 5 Lifestyle and Holistic Health Approach
Eliminating allergies and autoimmune conditions made the most significant impact.
Purpose of the Article
This article introduces the importance of skin health and documents five lifestyle changes via a holistic health approach that naturally improved my skin conditions.
I summarize critical points as practical takeaways.
This post is not health advice. Instead, it is for information, inspiration, and awareness purposes.
The Importance of Skin Health
Skin health is critical for life satisfaction. In addition to regulating internal temperature, the skin is the first defense system protecting the body from external threats.
If pathogens and toxins go through damaged skin might cause serious health issues, including infectious, inflammatory, degenerative, and even cancerous conditions. In addition, some conditions can be genetic.
Various skin conditions are widespread and a serious public health concern affecting millions globally.
As documented in this paper, “illness that directly affects the skin is the fourth most frequent cause of all human disease, affecting some 1.9 billion people at any time, almost one-third of the world’s population.
According to the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD), 84.5 million Americans — one in four — were impacted by skin disease.
AAD informs that “skin disease costs the US health care system $75 billion in medical, preventative, and prescription and non-prescription drug costs.”
NIH’s Complementary and Integrative Health Division informs that “common skin conditions include acne, contact dermatitis, benign tumors, cancers, atopic dermatitis (eczema), and psoriasis. Skin cancer is the most common cancer diagnosis in the United States.”
A Brief Introduction to My Skin Health History
To articulate the situation, I briefly share my experience so that the methods I used make sense. I took personal responsibility and obtained timely help from qualified healthcare professionals.
I had silky and bronze skin in my childhood but paid no attention to its importance in those days. After puberty, some icky changes happened, but then my skin turned normal.
However, in my early 20s, some undesirable and disturbing skin conditions appeared. I felt itchy and uncomfortable most of the time. My family doctor thought it was a seasonal allergy and prescribed some antihistamine and anti-inflammatory medication.
Nevertheless, after a while, antihistamines did not work. So my physician referred me to a dermatologist. Surprisingly, the root cause of skin problems was my diet.
Even though some creams prescribed by the dermatologist temporarily relieved the symptoms, the situation was corrected by a dietician, a naturopath, and a holistic medicine doctor I covered in the subsequent sections.
Here’s how five lifestyle and holistic health methods gave me healthier and smoother skin.
In this section, I briefly touch on the essential items that contributed to my skin health at a high level.
1 — Removing Offenders via an Elimination Diet
What we eat significantly affects our biology. We are unique as our genetic makeup, microbiome, and physical structure are different.
The primary cause of my skin conditions was dietary. There were two critical items. The first one was the food types causing intolerance and allergies. The second one was some of the effects of food feeding harmful bacteria and yeast.
A customized diet eliminating offensive food was the solution. A dietician who had access to my medical history helped me remove the offending food methodically. In my case, offenders were plant-based foods.
When I moved to an animal-based diet, most skin problems quickly disappeared, and they did not return.
2 — Healing Leaky Gut
With input from several specialists, an integrative medicine doctor contributed to solving my leaky gut problem. The physician believed that my skin issues indicated a leaky gut syndrome.
He was right. When my leaky gut was healed, I felt great relief. All itching and discomfort disappeared. One of the critical contributors was the protocol for removing yeast and fungi from my gut. The protocol also reduced my bloating and relieved the skin discomfort.
My customized diet contributed to healing the leaky gut and fixing my skin issues sustainably. I documented my experience of solving the leaky gut, which also solved my leaky brain.
3 — Activating Lymphatic System with Movement and Thermogenesis
After adjusting my diet, joyful exercises were the next best contributor to my skin health. The effects of exercise on the lymphatic system are well-documented.
The lymphatic system can be visualized as our body’s sewerage system. Extracellular fluids from our veins diffuse into lymphatic vessels. Then, they go into our lymph nodes.
One of the most effective ways to activate the flow of fluids in the lymph nodes is by moving the body. From my experience, the best method was using a trampoline giving the best movement to activate the lymphatic system.
The second effective way was alternating cold and heat exposure. I used two methods. The first was using a dry sauna and taking ice baths after heating the body. The second one was alternating cold and hot showers in 30 seconds intervals.
4 — Dry Brushing, Moisturizing, and Refraining from Toxins
Dry brushing was the most practical way to address itching problems without adverse effects on the skin. Scratching with nails can damage our skin. However, dry brushing addresses the itching problem without harming the skin.
In addition, dry brushing can stimulate the nervous system and help the skin detoxify by increasing blood circulation. It can unclog pores, remove dead skin, and improve skin respiration.
After using a dry brush, I use a natural moisturizing lotion called Sorbolene. It is a non-irritating and odorless cream containing glycerin.
I stopped using soap and shampoos. Instead, I use magnesium sulfate (Epsom Salts) water solution and exfoliate my skin with a soft fiber cloth in the shower. This simple hack helped me to improve my skin’s softness and clarity.
Some friends and relatives who gave up smoking significantly improved their skin health. Therefore, I’d like to highlight the importance of refraining from toxins to get healthier and smoother skin.
5 — Initiating Autophagy and Mitophagy
The previous items solved my immediate skin issues. However, creating the body’s self-healing capability produced a sustainable solution and prevented the occurrence of skin disorders.
As a catabolic process, our bodies use autophagy to clean damaged cells and generate newer and healthier ones. This process recycles intra-cellular damaged organelles, misfolded and mutant proteins, viruses, and bacteria to maintain cellular health.
We can initiate autophagy via healthy lifestyle choices such as exercise, time-restricted eating, and thermogenesis. The most effective way to initiate autophagy is fasting.
Intermittent fasting can mildly contribute to it. However, more extended fasting, like 24 hours or longer, can intensify it. I occasionally use two to seven days of fasting in addition to my one-meal-a-day plan.
After I started intermittent and prolonged fasting, I never experienced any skin issues. My skin got smoother. Nowadays, my skin feels like when I was a kid.
I documented my autophagy and mitophagy experiences in the stories that I linked below.
Here Is What Happened When I Experimentally Initiated Autophagy Decades Ago
Here’s How I Initiate Mitophagy and Make My Mitochondria Denser in 7 Steps
As a bonus, autophagy also helped me get rid of loose skin, as documented in an article titled Three Tips to Eliminate Loose Skin: Reducing wabbly skin had been much more challenging than receiving my doctorate, but I eventually succeeded over a decade ago.
Conclusions and Takeaways
As skin plays a critical role in protecting our body, skin health is essential to enjoying our lives. Unfortunately, skin conditions are widespread, affecting millions of people. Skin health also impacts our mental health.
However, there are viable solutions to improve skin health. From my experience, diet plays a critical role. Therefore, customizing our diet with help from certified dieticians might be helpful.
If conditions get severe, obtaining a referral to a dermatologist by our family doctors is necessary. There might be numerous root causes. The most common ones are toxins, pathogens, and allergens. Our gut health also affects our skin health.
Activating our lymphatic system is essential to maintaining our skin health. Therefore, regular exercise is valuable. Using an indoor trampoline has been an optimal solution to activate my lymphatic system.
Rather than scratching the skin with nails for itching, a better alternative is using a dry brush and moisturizing the skin with pure lotion. Refraining from toxins and pathogens is critical. Quitting cigarette smoking might improve skin health.
Sunlight is helpful to get vitamin D and infrared light to improve skin conditions. However, excessive sunlight might damage the skin, so we need to be careful not to overexpose our skin to the sun. In addition, some skin types are extra sensitive to sunlight.
My most sustainable solution was initiating and maintaining the body’s self-healing mechanism called autophagy. Here are the Three Tips to Initiate Autophagy.
In addition to skin health, I wrote about numerous other organs, such as the liver, heart, lungs, pancreas, kidneys, brain, and digestive system, including the stomach and gut. The functions of these organs might affect our skin health.
Some vitamins and minerals might also contribute to skin health. For me, activated charcoal, n-acetyl-cysteine, magnesium, and choline played cleansing molecules with different roles. Here are the links to my reviews of micronutrients:
Boron, Urolithin, taurine, citrulline malate, biotin, lithium orotate, alpha-lipoic acid, n-acetyl-cysteine, acetyl-l-carnitine, CoQ10, PQQ, NADH, TMG, creatine, choline, digestive enzymes, magnesium, hydrolyzed collagen, nootropics, pure nicotine, activated charcoal, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B1, Vitamin D, Vitamin K2, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, N-Acetyl K-Tyrosine, and other nutrients that might help to improve metabolism and mental health.
I am pleased that a community member, top writer Indra Raj Pathak, converted this article to a YouTube video using an AI tool. I hope you enjoy this video and share the video as a free source who don’t have access to Medium.
I aim to increase the hormonal intelligence of my readers and write about neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, glutamate, and histamine.
One of my goals as a writer is to raise awareness about the causes and risk factors of prevalent diseases that can lead to suffering and death for a large portion of the population.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
As a new reader, please check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and decades of experiments optimizing my hormones and neurotransmitters. I write about health as it matters. I believe health is all about homeostasis.
ALS, Metabolic Syndrome, Type II Diabetes, Fatty Liver Disease, Heart Disease, Strokes, Obesity, Liver Cancer, Autoimmune Disorders, Homocysteine, Lungs Health, Pancreas Health, Kidneys Health, NCDs, Infectious Diseases, Brain Health, Dementia, Depression, Brain Atrophy, Neonatal Disorders, Skin Health, Dental Health, Bone Health, Leaky Gut, Leaky Brain, Brain Fog, Chronic Inflammation, Insulin Resistance, Elevated Cortisol, Leptin Resistance, Anabolic Resistance, Cholesterol, High Triglycerides, Metabolic Disorders, Gastrointestinal Disorders, Thyroid Disorders, Anemia, Dysautonomia, cardiac output, and urinary track disorders.
I also wrote about valuable nutrients. Here are the links for easy access:
Lutein/Zeaxanthin, Phosphatidylserine, Boron, Urolithin, taurine, citrulline malate, biotin, lithium orotate, alpha-lipoic acid, n-acetyl-cysteine, acetyl-l-carnitine, CoQ10, PQQ, NADH, TMG, creatine, choline, digestive enzymes, magnesium, zinc, hydrolyzed collagen, nootropics, pure nicotine, activated charcoal, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B1, Vitamin D, Vitamin K2, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine, and other nutrients.
Disclaimer: My posts do not include professional or health advice. I only document my reviews, observations, experience, and perspectives to provide information and create awareness.
As part of my creative non-fiction writing goals, I’d like to share a few stories that might warm our hearts with a bit of humor into weighty topics.
Sample Humorous Stories
Finally, After Burning Her House, Georgia Found Enlightenment
Hilarious Tips to Prevent Brain Atrophy and Keep the Gray Matter Giggling
8 Psychological Points I Had to Unlearn and Relearn the Opposite
Based on my writing experience and observations, I documented findings and strategies that might help you amplify your voice, engage your audience, and achieve your desired outcomes in your writing journey.
I publish my lifestyle, health, and well-being stories on EUPHORIA. My focus is on cellular, mitochondrial, metabolic, and mental health. Here is my collection of Insightful Life Lessons from Personal Stories.
You might join my six publications on Medium as a writer by sending a request via this link. 22K writers contribute to my publications. You might find more information about my professional background.
As a writer, blogger, content developer, and reader, you might join Medium, Vocal Media, NewsBreak, Medium Writing Superstars, Writing Paychecks, WordPress, and Thinkers360 with my referral links. These affiliate links will not cost you extra to join the services.
