What You Should Know About The Science of Beauty

What are the common elements of health and beauty? How can you recognize your own strengths and weaknesses?

The first principle to grasp is that life is change. We see this in the life cycles of all animals and plants. We can measure the rates of change of chemical reactions which fuel them. No one can have the same beauty at 16, 20 and 36. No woman of 40 can have the body of an 18-year-old, but her body may well be more fit and healthier.

Time can be a sculptor leaving the marks of developing life, or a demolition worker spreading havoc, but once you recognize the active force of time you can use it to your advantage.

In the teens there is an apparently inexhaustible source of energy, but there is no great fund of energy unless it is renewed. Teenagers seem to eat what they like without putting on weight. What one does in youth, however, remains with one, in a deep molecular sense, in memories and tissue. Apparently youth does not need to bother about body maintenance, but youth is the time when a moment’s consideration will pay dividends decade after decade.

So this is the structure of health and beauty:

Nutrition

The atoms and molecules which form the material of beauty can come only from food. We are circadian creatures, so our eating must be circadian too. This means that we must eat well everyday, not once every three days. We can help our skins by external application of nutrients, and enrich our hair, but these are extra methods, not primary ones.

Exercise

Not mere physical activity but advanced exercise can help maintain shape, increase endurance and flexibility, encourage the hormonal system and maintain the general turnover of chemical reaction at a brisk pace. Exercise is not the same as sport, where the demands are usually made upon the body, not for the body.

Each structure of our health and beauty is constantly being renewed, and the source of renewal is food, which reaches every cell via the blood after digestion. The separate functions are cohered by the relationship of brain and nervous tissue with the endocrine system. If the brain is stressed by worry, the effects must show up in the body.