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Real Beauty: Feeling Gorgeous, Inside & Out

The Sleep Club Editors

Welcome to 2023 and a chance to take your self-care to a whole new level. It’s a beautiful thing to give yourself the gift of yourself, to embrace a genuine love for this body, mind, and soul that makes you “you” and giving it some serious attention.


With that in mind, we have a few fun tips on how to help you feel beautiful, inside and out. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy a little “me time.”

 

Eat and drink well

We’re going to spend a bit of time here because too often we forget that true beauty starts on the inside and reflects on the outside. Eating right is perhaps the best first step to ensuring your general gorgeousness. Food is your friend and the wondrous quartet supporting your internal and external visage is water, protein, anti-oxidants, and good fats.


Drinking lots of water keeps you oxygenated, helps your circulation, and makes your skin supple. Hydrating is truly one of the best things you can do for your general wellbeing and support your inner and outer beauty.


Protein is not only great brain, muscle and bone food, but it has the necessary amino acids to build keratin and collagen, which are skin and anti-aging best buds. Sure, you can get spa treatments that amp up both of those, but ingesting actual protein is the best way to make sure you sustain your skin’s elasticity, healthy hair, nails and muscles, and that your brain keeps cranking out brilliance. 


Poultry, lean meats, fish, eggs, and dairy are the easiest ways to get the protein you need. If you’re vegan, you can go with the complete combo of legumes with grains or even soy and tofu — although you need to be careful with the hormonal issues that can arise with too much of the latter and you won’t get the same power punch of aminos as you will with animal protein, but you can work that out. 


Antioxidants are the things that protect your body from free radicals. Free radicals are unstable atoms that occur naturally in your body but if left without something to balance them out like antioxidants, they’ll cause a host of illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease as well as premature aging. Berries — especially blueberries and cranberries — are antioxidant dynamos. Green tea, pomegranates, carrots, and tomatoes also bear a good amount of this free radical combatant. 


Ingesting good fats like omega-3 and 6 — fish and seafood, olive oil, avocado, nuts, chia seeds, so on and so forth — soften your skin, help your hair grow, and even help balance out the oils in your body. 


If you really want to eat in a way that keeps you glowing and healthy, inside and out, try the rainbow diet. It is said this is probably the easiest and best way to ensure you’ll naturally get all the nutrients you need through food. The idea is to combine fruits and vegetables of five different colors — red, yellow and orange, white, green, blue and purple — and incorporate lean proteins. By having these together, you’re getting the minerals, vitamins, and more you need for gorgeous health. It’s also a great way to better enjoy your food because we eat with our eyes as well and the mixture of colors on the plate is more appetizing to us.

 

Rest and relax

Being stressed, overworked, tired, worried, and irritable reads all over us. It affects our mental and physical wellbeing and shows on the outside. Lines form on our face, ulcers build in our bellies, bags load up under our eyes, headaches throb against our temples — you name it, we’ll be hit with something that sets us back and changes our overall look and feel because of it.


Finding ways to relax and take the pressure off of yourself goes a long way towards creating a positive beauty routine. And not just every now and then. Truly giving in and setting up ways to get rest and relaxation on a regular basis, and making it something you do daily for yourself benefits your mental, emotional, and physical health tremendously.


Meditation, deep breaths, baths, reading, listening to music, lighting candles, whatever floats your relaxation boat are all ways to indulge in much deserved comfort and ease to lift those stressors in order to calm yourself. 


Getting a good night’s sleep also contributes to how you feel inside and look on the outside. That term “beauty sleep” didn’t come out of nowhere and allowing yourself to get the rest you need reflects in your overall being.

 

Get up and move

While exercising is important for your general health and to combat a variety of illnesses and diseases, this isn’t just hardcore gym time to sculpt yourself to magnificence or pushing yourself to the limit to get shredded. From an overall health, wellness, and beauty standpoint, simply getting the blood flowing, communing with nature, and getting some much needed oxygen filling your lungs and coursing through your body enhances your mental, physical, and emotional wellness.


Taking walks around your neighborhood or walking the dog, playing on the floor with your kids or pets, gardening, dancing, and any of the things you like to do to just move around contribute to your mental, emotional, and physical beauty. It feels good and when you feel good, it shows all over you. There’s that glow that comes from being out in the fresh air and ruddiness from moving around, that twinkle in your eyes from having fun and doing things that bring you joy. It highlights your loveliness and brings it from the outside in.

 

Treat yourself well

Spa treatments, massages, facials, getting your hair done, manicures — these are pampering treats that make us feel good, feel beautiful, feel taken care of. These little perks are the things we indulge in as a way of bringing joy to our lives and having that tangible sense of self-care.


Treating yourself well, however, is more than that. It’s being kind to yourself and giving yourself a break. It’s speaking your truth when you need to, standing up for yourself when you have to, being on your side and giving yourself grace. It’s loving yourself enough to care about what you put in your body, incorporating relaxation and calming techniques into your daily routine to help you manage the stressors that show up in every life at one time or another, getting up and moving around in ways you enjoy, and, yep, spoiling yourself when you get the chance. That love you give yourself reflects in how you look and feel, and it infuses every relationship and interaction you have.

 

Beautiful you

In our experience, it doesn’t matter how many beauty treatments you go through, layers of makeup you put on, or workouts you do to get the perfect figure. True, unequivocal, undeniable gorgeousness is an inside out journey and shows all over the place. It breaks free and loves to be enhanced.


Love you, enjoy you, and pamper yourself whenever you can. You are lovely. Embrace it.

Night Sky Night Sky