5 Foods To Avoid If You Want Glowing Skin + What To Eat Instead

Before you reach for that coffee first thing in the morning when your eyes are still only half-open, consider this: Having hot water with lemon will give you the same hot mugful of comfort, but with loads of beauty benefits. Lemon provides vitamin C, a great radiant-skin enhancer, as well as enzymes shown to help regenerate liver tissue. Your liver is your main detoxifying organ, and the more detoxified your body is, the more beautiful your skin will become. Coffee, on the other hand, is dehydrating and overloads your liver with caffeine, which it has to process.

An egg white omelet isn’t even a whole food anymore—the whites of several eggs are concentrated into one serving. The water-soluble protein, known as albumin, gets hardened with heat (not unlike glue) and becomes an energy-intensive item for your body to break down and utilize.

Author Dr. John McDougall writes on his site that, “Eggs are too much of a good thing” and that, “A whole egg is 32% protein and the white of an egg is essentially 100% protein. Infants, growing children, and adults need, at most, 5% of their calories from protein.” There really is such a thing as too much protein, and an excess can acidify your body and put extra pressure on your kidneys and liver, which, again, is not helping our cause for glowing skin.

On the other hand, switching over to a Glowing Green Smoothie will actually give you energy in the morning. It is a whole food (it’s not a juice!), meaning that it contains all of the juice and the fiber of whole fruits and green veggies, which helps to keep you full and give you sustained energy.

The generic term “vegetable oil” includes everything from oils made from safflower, sunflower, grapeseed, canola, soy, and so forth. While some of these oils have higher smoke points than others (i.e., grapeseed oil), vegetable oils are largely composed of polyunsaturated fats, which get denatured not only by heat but also by light, exposure to air, and simply time. The breakdown of these oils can create free radicals and break down the beautiful skin you are working so hard to cultivate.

It always astounds me when my clients or readers tell me they are more comfortable eating a processed, packaged protein bar for which they can read the nutritional content on a printed label, yet are scared of eating a banana because they aren’t “sure of the calorie content.” Ever look at the ingredient list for some of those bars? Fractionated sugars, soy or whey protein isolates, oils, fillers…such things are not fuel for beautiful skin! Whole foods grown in nature win out every time. They digest cleanly and come in complete nutritional packages.

Instead, simply choose a handful of almonds or an easy-to-make energy bar. My newest iteration is my Poppy Seed & Date Energy Squares, which you can just nosh on after a yoga or Spin class or midafternoon at work. No more crap. Just pure beauty foods from nature!

Photos courtesy of the author