Part 2: Nourishing with Hydration

By Susan Ni Rahilly

November is Healthy Skin Awareness Month, read this three part series on ways to help you have beautiful, healthy skin.

Read Part 1: Skin Care – A Natural Way to Glowing Health Part 1 Elimination
Deep and regular, nurturing and nourishing self-care of the skin-body is one of the most powerful ways to increase your sense and feeling of wellbeing and vitality.  Caring for your skin is caring for the largest elimination organ of your body.

Before we get on to an understanding of body nurturing and its importance in nourishing the Mindbody and Spirit in the third part of this series, here’s a reminder in Part 2 about the importance of skin-care for the wellbeing of your Mindbody.

Nature loves balance. Your body always strives to be in balance, no matter what you do to it. If you work with it using some pretty simple natural techniques for care of your skin-body, you can improve skin health, help boost your circulation, rid your body of waste products and imbalance-forming toxins; and you might be surprised what you find out about your own body in the process.

Many of the needs of your skin-body are satisfied freely or at least very cheaply: your body’s needs for water, cleansing, movement and breath – all of which promote vitality and a glowing, healthy skin. Hydration

Our bodies are 62% water, (or up to 70% according to some health writers). Maintaining this balance is crucial to the optimum working of our bodies – after only 24 hours without it, our bodies would start to get into trouble, our systems could not cope.

Blood, sweat and tears (and urine) are water-based. Most of what makes up our bodies is water soluble. All the poisons and waste products of our bodies are got rid of (excreted) in solutions. And water is what is needed to extract the nutrition from many of our foods.

We, our bodies, work a bit like a toilet cistern. You need to put water in to be able to flush it out.

We can contain as much as 45 litres within our bodies, and we are constantly losing it. Just resting, on a normal mild day, we would lose 1 litre (and half of that would be excreted from your lungs just by breathing).

Dehydration (lack of sufficient water, a drying out of your body) is a common cause of headaches with dieters. It also makes your stomach rumble and leads you to believe you are hungrier than you are. If you are thirsty you may be interpreting the signals wrongly as thirst. Water aids digestion and speeds up the passage of food through the digestive system.

Water aids healthy cell renewal – which means for young, elastic looking skin, you have to drink water. My skin elasticity, which suffered drastically after a bad infection some years ago, recovered completely within 12 months of me stepping up my water drinking. It became a joke among my friends, me and my new ‘designer-accessory’ water bottle that I carried around everywhere with me (and still do).

Water is essential for protein conversion in the body and for carbohydrate uptake. The chemical conversion of carbohydrates to energy cannot take place efficiently without lots of water. Our muscle cells get delivered with glycogen and our muscle tissue are delivered amino acids only with adequate water. Your body will not break down fat effectively, most of which is stored directly underneath your skin, without water.

You get water into your body by drinking it and by being in it, ingesting it through your skin, and by eating foodstuffs which hold a lot of water.

How to drink water is important. Our stomachs literally get ‘pickled’ with too many hot drinks. Efficient metabolism needs cold water. And it must be still, plain, pure cold water. Not fizzy, carbonated water. Water is fizzed up with carbon, this carbon is a toxin to us, which passes into the bloodstream. Painful tight skin can be the result of drinking too many sodas and carbonated soft drinks.

How much water you need will depend on you individually and your physical build – but generally speaking we all need about 2.5 litres a day, or 5 small bottles. This is how you work out how much water you need to drink a day: Divide your current weight in kilos (one kilo=2.2046lbs) by 8. If you weigh 60 kilos, then 60 divided by 8 equals 7.5 glasses (and big glasses at that). Then round that figure upwards to the next glass up. You need 8 glasses of water per day on a cool day when you are not doing any hard exercise or manual work.

Basically though, if you are healthy, then drinking whenever you feel thirsty should be an adequate guide of how much water you need.

I’m aware that we know more about water requirements and hydration than we did even 15 years ago and the consensus of current opinion seems to be that our daily herbal teas and fruit juices, as well as plant-based diet can contribute to our overall needs.

The other things you need to know about water, detoxing your body and speeding up your metabolism are these. Water is important in the end product of metabolism, in kidney cleansing. And it is cold water which speeds up the body’s metabolism as body needs to warm the water up before it can properly absorb it, burning up more calories in the process.

If you do not enough plain cold water, the kidneys pass their job onto the liver – putting a strain on this organ when you are already making it work whilst you are detoxing, to cleanse out. And when the liver is under strain, one of the first signs is a skin rash.

So, temperature is important. My personal habit is to allow my Green Tea to cool before drinking, and I also brew Hibiscus, Pomegranate and Ginger tea overnight in the fridge, quite a strong brew, and use this as the fluid in my breakfast smoothie.

But back to the kidneys – this is where water plays its major role in detoxing the body. Your kidneys recycle all the water in your body and for filtering out waste products. The kidneys job is to remove the waste whilst pouring back into the bloodstream the minerals we do need to maintain the body’s acid alkaline balance. When the body’s water level gets too low, the kidneys cannot carry our cleansing efficiently and the liver has to take over detoxing, the apetite/thirst messages to the brain get confused and you also start retaining water, the end result being waterlogged thighs! There’s a direct and very evident effect on your skin.

Other ways to tell if you’re dehydrated and/or not drinking enough on a regular basis are quite easy: using your thirst and the color of your urine as guides. Your urine should be a very light-colored yellow. If it is a deep, dark yellow then you are probably not drinking enough water.

Skin-body wise, you need to hydrate your skin if your skin does not quickly flatten out when you pinch an inch of skin above your wrist.

My tip for promoting health with pure cold water drinking is to add a pinch of natural Sea Salt crystals to a pint of water – the salt helps the water to become a medium for healing with life force energy within our fluid-body. (Don’t use Himalayan Rock Salt as it seems it may contain Radon contamination) So, finally, the benefits of drinking lots of water: better sleep, so better cell renewal; more mental alertness, so more awareness; appetite regulation, so better diet and nutrition; more energy, and more vitality; and of course, a hydrated, smoother and healthier skin.

Epsom Salt Baths

These baths are an effective way of helping your body sweat out impurities through the pores of your skin.

Epsom Salts are Magnesium which has a drawing effect on the skin, encouraging perspiration and the leeching out of wastes and impurities. Epsom Salts baths are relaxing and help sleep, they are also a muscle relaxant which helps aches and pains as some Magnesium (which is needed for your cell activity) is absorbed directly into the skin.

You take Epsom Salts baths at night directly before going to bed, twice a week whilst you are cleansing or detoxing – after that include them as and when you can in your body-care. Wrap up very well in warm towels as soon as you get out of the bath, then get into bed. Women should not take Epsom Salt baths immediately before or during your periods (Magnesium is vital for the ‘period pain’ stomach cramps which show you are having contractions to get rid of the lining of the womb during a period, bathing in Magnesium would interfere with this process). If you have high blood pressure, psoriasis or eczema you will not be able to have these baths.

This is the method you use: as it may be a shock to your system to suddenly start plunging your body into Magnesium, start by building up the concentration. First bath, use a quarter pound of Epsom Salts in a hot bath and soak for 20 minutes. Second bath, add half a pound Epsom Salts to hot bathwater and soak for 20 minutes. Third bath, three quarter pounds Epsom Salts. Fourth bath and then on, use one pound of Epsom Salts in hot bathwater and soak 20 minutes. 20 minutes is the time it takes for your skin to absorb anything – I have stayed in an Epsom Salts bath for up to 30 minutes, but only because I like being in hot water, and I wouldn’t do any longer than this.

Relax for at least 2 hours, or overnight whilst you sleep is better, and allow your body to carry on eliminating – I keep wrapped up in the towels, it just feels very comforting. Practice: Yoga, Pranayama, Meditation

And finally, our Practice really benefits our skin. Our bodies need rest and relaxation for cell renewal: remember that your skin is the largest elimination organ in your body, and that’s a lot of requirement for cell renewal! Yoga Nidra and Savasana are essential to a healthy skin-body.

I did a quick check in Satyananda’s Asana, Pranayama, Mudra, Bandha for breathing practices which most promote healthy skin. I should have known what the answer would be: all Pranayamas! All Yogic breathing practices oxygenate the blood (especially to the brain), excrete from the lungs, regenerate our nervous systems, and of course direct Prana, life force healing energy to every cell of the Mindbody.

In our Yogic Meditation, we transcend our physical body, recreating it energetically at the level of pure and perfect energy: our Bliss. Every cell of our body is in constant Union with this Bliss and in Meditation, we are being “bathed”, absorbing the essence of this healing Bliss. More about this, the ritual “Bliss Bath” in Part 3 of this series.

And there are those who have little

and give it all

they are the believers in life

and their coffers are never empty.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Click HERE to Connect with your Daily Horoscope!

Susan’s Note: Making our mind/body a more comfortable place for the spirit to dwell. Read a little bit here on our website about Silence, nature’s gift to the Mindbody Spirit.

Susan Ni Rahilly is the Founder of www.suZenYoga.com: spirituality, understanding, Zen, energy and nutrition through dedication to Yoga practice.