Ignoring This Is Ruining Your Glow Game

If you want to debloat, combat breakouts, banish inflammation and kick start your glow game, then you need to start thinking about your gut health. What a lot of people don’t realize is that your gut majorly impacts your skin as it helps remove pimple-triggering toxins while supplying your body with glow-enhancing vitamins. But how do you even go about improving your gut health? Yes, you’ll need to adjust your diet and way of life and even start taking supplements, but we promise it’ll be worth it when your skin is radiating and, most importantly, you feel better. So how do you get your gut in check and ready to get back out there? By following these tips straight from the pros.

1. Start Basic: Drink Celery Juice

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Whether you love it or hate it, try to find a way to work celery into your diet. We’re opting for celery juice, AKA the detox juice beauty babes are currently obsessed with. “It’s considered one of the greatest healing tonics of all time and has been shown to help lower blood pressure, improve gut health, and decrease inflammation,” explains Dr. Karin Hermoni, Ph.D. head of science and nutrition at Lycored. Celery juice also contains a ton of vitamins and minerals (like vitamins K, C, and A in the form of carotenoids). Plus, it helps balance your pH levels and flush out toxins, making it super important for skin health as well.

Hermoni is also quick to point out celery’s fibrous nature that “brings roughage to your gut and moisture, which is great for hydrating the body and skin.” So, get yourself a juicer and a couple of stalks of this trendy green veg and get to drinking. Although drinking pure celery juice (both the stalk and the leaves) is the most beneficial, if straight celery doesn’t appeal to you, Hermoni suggests making a virgin Mary by throwing in a little fresh lime and tomato juice. “These ingredients also contribute vitamin C, tomato lycopene, and beta carotene, all of which help bring you glowing skin and make us feel good from the inside out.”

2. The Easy Route: Take the Right Supplements

Detox and the gut go hand in hand, but no shame in your game if you don’t exactly know what that means. Sarah Greenfield, registered dietitian and director of education for HUM Nutrition is here to clear up the confusion. “The two powerhouse organs that participate in detox are the liver and the gut – the liver by converting toxins into compounds our body can more easily remove and dump into the gut, then our gut removes those through elimination,” she explains. And while that seems all good, things can get tricky if you have high levels of stress or are exposed to higher levels of toxins. “Your body will store them at a higher rate than can be eliminated, and this can lead to things like inflammation, breakouts, and decreased energy,” she adds.

No thanks. Luckily supplements like HUM Nutrition, Daily Cleanse, $26, can help restore balance and support detox pathways in the body since it includes chlorella, spirulina, and zinc (to bind heavy metals from the body into the gut), milk thistle (to detoxify the liver), and pre-biotic dandelion root (to help improve digestion and elimination). In other words: Pop two capsules daily.

3. Go Old School: Eat the Rainbow

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When your mamma told you to eat your greens, she really did know what she was talking about. We mentioned before how drinking celery juice can assist with gut health, but obviously, you can’t live off that alone. Therefore you’re going to need to edit your fridge. Greenfield recommends including foods rich in sulforaphane “to boost antioxidant levels and support detox.” Broccoli sprouts, broccoli, kale, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, cabbage, and bok choy are on the approved list, while processed, high-sugar, and high-fat foods are not. “Try to eat all colors of the rainbow on a daily basis and make sure to drink at least half your body weight in water daily, to support toxin removal,” she says.

4. Detox Like The Pros: Try the 4R Program

“The 4R program stands for remove, rekindle, repair, repopulate,” explains naturopathic practitioner Dr. Kerri Stasiak. “Remove is about eliminating any allergens (foods or environmental) and killing parasites, yeasts, and pathogenic bacteria. Rekindle is about increasing a person’s digestive process so bacteria doesn’t re-infect the gut. Repair is about repairing the integrity of the gut lining by bringing down inflammation and sealing the junctions, so allergens don’t reenter, and repopulate is about bringing in the balance of good bacteria for optimal health.”

No clue where to start with that one? Just adhere to Stasiak’s cheat sheet below, then hit your local natural foods store with a list of your faves from each of these categories:

Remove: Pumpkin seeds, wormwood, black walnut, olive leaf, tea tree, garlic, onions, and oil of oregano. These items help to kill off any inflammation triggering bacteria or yeast residing in the gut.

Rekindle: Bitter foods (chicory, endives, dandelion, arugula, artichokes), ginger, bitter orange peel, and digestive enzymes. These items help stimulate and strengthen digestive organs and increase the production of stomach acid and digestive enzymes.

Repair: Rosehips oil, aloe vera, and tannin-rich foods (grapes, rhubarb, pomegranate seeds, green tea, and black tea). These items heal intestinal permeability that triggers an allergic immune response in the body.

Repopulate: Fermented foods (probiotics), including sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, kombucha, and yogurt. These have good bacteria to balance your gut as the last step. Find out more about how to use probiotics in your diet for blindingly glowing skin here.

Are you guys going to try any of these tips? Tell us in the comments below!

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