Years ago, a doctor put me on the “Stone Age Diet.” It was a diet where I was to eat everything as close to its original form as possible. Of course it included lots of fresh fruits and vegetables – and when it came to cooked food I was to boil, bake and grill versus fry or cover with rich sauces. The idea behind the diet was to help my body heal by offering foods that were in their purest form. Feeding my body foods that were easy to digest would give the maximum nutrition possible, and stress my body the least.

There is a lot of information in the news daily about what emotional stress can do to your body as it relates to internal health. We also know what external environmental toxins can do to stress our bodies both internally and externally. Adding a disease such as breast cancer and treatment for this disease raises our stress levels immensely. Additionally, your skin may become overly dry, extremely oily or dull and lifeless – unable to function optimally to flush out toxins from treatment and environment. You may be adding to your skin’s stress unknowingly with what you are putting on your face and body. 

Reading the ingredient list on organic skin care products and cosmetics can be like selecting from a menu of wonderful, mouth watering fruits, vegetables and edible flowers at your local restaurant. White grapes, mangos, calendula (marigolds), cane sugar, coconut oil, red raspberries, fuchsia and apple blossoms are just a few of the ingredients often found in organic skin care products and cosmetics. Skin care products and cosmetics made of organic ingredients are easier for your skin to “digest.” When you use organic products, your skin is receiving essential oils, vitamins and minerals without having to work through added ingredients like artificial fragrances or colors and preservatives.

Conversely, reading a list of ingredients from non-organic products can be daunting. It reminds me of a comic I saw years ago. It was a picture of a woman standing in the grocery store holding a box of pre-prepared food as she read the ingredient list. The caption read, “Mmmm, just like mom used to make. She was a chemical engineer.”Talc, propylene glycol, methyl-paraben, propylparaben, urea and diazolidinyl urea, sodium lauryl sulfate and synthetic colors and/or fragrances are a few of the ingredients commonly found in skin care products, cosmetics and hair products. Over the past few years, there has been extensive research and testing done on these ingredients. The results to date are not very impressive from a health standpoint, to put it mildly.

There is no debate when it comes to the advantages these ingredients offer in respect to extended shelf life, ease of use and application. The debate begins when we examine the ingredients listed above, and others from a user-safety standpoint. Logically, it’s clear that if what we are using on our external bodies is in any way harmful to us, then this is also adding stress internally. Anytime your body has to deal with something that is not botanically based certain body systems have to work overtime to try to neutralize or eradicate the harm.

When considering chemotherapy as a cancer treatment – the chemo drugs used are supposed to be a stressor to our bodies. The purpose of the drugs is to kill off cancer cells. Unfortunately, in the process of killing those cells it attacks other fast-multiplying cells in our bodies including hair, mouth lining and stomach cells. Western medicine believes that the benefit from these drugs in terms of killing cancer cells and shrinking tumors outweighs the damage caused to the rest of the body by these drugs.

Let the record stand: I am NOT advocating giving up the cancer treatment regimen your doctors have put you on if you have cancer – nor trying to completely stay away from all stressors. That is not only absurd, it is impossible. However, when dealing with cancer it is important to protect your body from dealing with more stress than necessary. One of the ways to do that is by feeding your skin and your body with organic products that will nourish and strengthen you both internally and externally.

Adopting the following shopping and storing habits can greatly increase the amount of nutrition fed your skin and body.

• Learn to read the ingredient lists on ALL products you buy – not just food.Although some botanical names are hard to recognize, with some practice you should be able to decipher between those ingredients and additives that are chemically based, and those that are botanically based.
• Look for beauty products with short ingredient lists. This may sound too simplistic, but in reality, those products with long ingredient lists generally mean that there are more “things” in them than your body needs or can handle.
• Purchase food, skin care products and cosmetics that are preservative-free.Although this means the shelf-life of your products will be shorter – you should be applying the same reasoning to preservatives in your beauty products as you do with food. Food that has a long shelf life is never as nutritionally supportive as food that will spoil rather quickly.
• Protect your products. Once home, keep your preservative-free beauty products cool and dry and refrigerate them between uses if you live in a very hot and/or humid climate – or if you are not going to use the product up within a six-month period.

Begin thinking of your beauty products as nutrition for your skin. Each product you choose to put on your skin is either feeding it or smothering it with ingredients it cannot use. If you are smothering it, that, in essence, becomes starving it – which will add stress to your body. Put your skin on a healthy diet today!

Carin Hansen was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 40. After a long battle, she emerged victorious and began a one-on-one wardrobe and beauty consulting business for other women experiencing cancer. She has been a model, body and beauty coach, actor, benefit founder, certified acting/modeling instructor, writer, speaker, business owner and passionate cancer advocate. Currently, Carin is finishing a revised and expanded edition of her book, The Cancer Journey Bible: Sustaining health – maintaining beauty. She is also working on a manuscript for her next book, Divine Designer Labels. Her greatest passion and desire is to enable women to be all that God wants them to be physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Visit her website at www.bridges2beauty.net to subscribe to her monthly newsletter or request more information about her services.