Beauty, Makeup and Weight has a lot to do with Health

(Or at least, a major part of it!)

Often, our intentions of losing weight isn’t really to improve health, or thinking about how we’ll be when we’re 80, but it’s about fitting into a dress, or impressing someone, or even fitting in. The desire to be beautiful seems to have a lot to do with social pressure. One thing I feel that we’re often forgetting is: Beauty and weight should be focused more on health.

We don’t seem to think that far ahead into the future, but I believe it’s very important to think about, because it may just creep up on us one day.

Why do we perceive Beauty?

Let’s think about this for a moment. Why do we perceive that the older we get, the more we’ve lost our beauty? Why is it that we think being overweight isn’t considered “beautiful”? Let me just say this. Beauty, or the perception of beauty is really our perception of health. Often, we seem to have this inner desire to like people who look good to us, because that’s the way we were evolved, to “mate” with people that are the healthiest, so our babies can probably end up being the healthiest. (It’s all to do with survival!)

Notice that we see flawless, neat white teeth as beauty? That’s another sign of good health!

The older you get, the more your body is usually damaged. By the time we’re 80 (if we aren’t careful with our health), perhaps our blood is decreasing its functionality, various parts of our organs is wearing off and dying, and even our skin degenerates, and that’s the major cause of wrinkles. We may not perceive “old” as “beauty” because to us, being old means losing one’s health.

It seems that often, we forget to ask why, such as why we find people beautiful, or why we seem to be pressured into weight loss. Once you can see that all of this has to do with health, perhaps it will motivate you more!

The True Meaning of Weight Loss

Instead of thinking losing weight to fit inside your bridal dress, or looking sexy for that secret crush you’ve got, do your best to think about losing weight for the purpose of being healthy.

Once the true meaning of beauty and weight is understood (that it’s a sign of illness, and that we should do this to improve our health), I believe it will be easier for people to avoid issues like undereating and cutting calories, because let me tell you that calories are not created equal. What we need is nourishment for our body, what we eat needs to do good for it, so focusing on eating almost nothing, or eating things that give little nutrition is really doing us even more harm.

Let’s examine Beauty and Makeup, Shall We?

I want to take a good look at analysing beauty and makeup. Often, we perceive makeup as something that makes us more beautiful. Why? It does its best to make us look healthier.

We have foundation. What does that do? That covers us flaws in our skin, which I should say acne, marks, scars and such. Once again, things like acne and scars are indication of illness, and our brains know not to like the sight of that.

Lipstick makes our lips redder, which looks like blood is flowing. Have we ever seen people who are severely ill? They have yellow or white looks, probably because blood isn’t flowing there. We already can see that redder lips indicates better health, or better blood flow and pale lips looks as if it’s a sign of illness. (Of course, there are lighter, pink lipstick that also looks attractive, but there are certainly less white lipsticks!)

Now, let’s move onto blush. That makes your cheeks rosy, and works pretty much the same as redder lips. If we have rosier cheeks, it probably means we’re healthier and have better blood flow.

Mascara and fake eyelashes all do their job in making our eyelashes longer and thicker. Again, it can be a signal that a person is healthy, because when eyelashes stand out, it also makes the white of the eyes seem brighter.

(Please understand I’m not saying it’s bad to wear makeup, I am merely looking at why we find makeup attractive, or that many of us think we look better in makeup!)

Making us Look better through Health

I understand that it can take a long time to improve appearance by being healthy, but it works. I used to get giant acne that hurt like hell for two weeks in a row every single month. There was never a moment I actually “looked” good because my skin is covered in crates all the time. But ever since I began to eat healthy, waking up with a nice lemon water, followed by a nutrient dense smoothie, I seriously have noticed the changes. I only get small pimples during the week before that time of month (fluctuating hormones) but they go down quickly too.

So the place we should truly start is our diet, eat what nourishes us, not those useless foods that add nothing to our body but stress and work.

One of the biggest misconceptions about losing weight is that we should eat as little as possible, and that food (or even fat for that matter) is evil. Not true at all! There are foods that will make your skin glisten, and food that may damage it, so I feel it’s crucial to learn about the importance of eating healthy foods.

Health isn’t a Joking Matter

I’ve learned that you should never, ever take your health for granted, nor should you expect it to stay all the time. You may not be thinking about it, but from being able to do anything you like in a functional body, you could be lying in hospital with a drip, and unable to move. Would you seriously want to wait until then to make the change? What if it’s too late?

I believe that generally, people really need to question their beliefs. It seems that we know how we think, but we forget to think about why. All this social pressure about beauty and weight is caused by people not truly understanding why they feel the way they do. If so, it wouldn’t be “pressure to look beautiful”, it would be “pressure to stay healthy”. Just imagine if we live in a society where we aren’t pressured to be slim and pretty, but we’re actually encouraged all the time to look after our health?

Just think on this: Wouldn’t it be so much better in life if instead of mean people calling others ugly or fat, they could say something like, “you need to take care of your health”?