Prevention
The Top Ten Ways to Avoid Needing Cosmetic Medical Care
It seems strange to have to say this, but aging is a natural human pro cess. We are finite beings. What is even stranger is that despite the inevitability of growing older, our culture has managed to persuade us that it is a sign of personal weakness if we allow the signs of aging to encroach upon us without a fight. If one wishes to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the spouse of a publicityprone real estate mogul, then the pressure to look “better than good” undoubtedly reflects the reality of a job requirement. For the other almost 300 million people in the United States, however, the message has become quite insistent. One is not normal if not narcissistic.
You must look great and feel great about it. If you don’t, it is your own fault if your life doesn’t work out the way you hoped. But you can’t look great without help from cosmetic medicine. In order to emphasis this imperative about actively altering your appearance, you are reminded of the “sad truth . . . that no matter how we wish it weren’t so, each day brings tiny, frustrating changes, constantly chipping away at youth and beauty.” This happy message is from a doctor in the beginning of his book about “preemptive” cosmetic procedures. So the ball is in your court. “Why sit idly by, spending the best years of one’s life waiting to look bad enough to warrant a facelift?” And if that isn’t brutal enough for you, remember that it’s your fault. You are told to “stop making things worse.” You can feel lucky that there are options because in the past all you could do was sit “helplessly watching the changes add up . . . and grind [your] teeth and wait for things to get worse.”
At any age, Americans are addicted to the quick fi x. We like ready access, rapid turnover, and immediate results. We are not very good at patience, deference, and delayed or, worse yet, uncertain satisfactions. On top of this, we can’t convince our teenagers to adopt these latter characteristics in order to ease their transition into the adult world. This chapter cannot cure you of a desire to look younger, and if you are over fifty, it will have less to offer you than if you are under thirty. Even so, we all know perfectly well that we can do more to improve our health, and by doing so we will definitely improve our looks. Nothing on the list below will be news to you, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Best of all, most of these tips cost you nothing to implement.
THE TOP TEN WAYS TO AVOID NEEDING A COSMETIC SURGEON
1. Get New Genes
Of course, you can’t do this; we know that skin type is inherited, but that does not mean that you are doomed to look like your mother or father. Upper-class women in the 1800s went to great lengths to protect their skin from the elements, but every generation since then has spent more time outdoors and has received exponentially increasing levels of ultraviolet radiation. We now have much more knowledge and better products to help us avoid skin damage. You can control the quality of your inherited skin.
2. Avoid Ultraviolet Exposure
It bears repeating. There is no single thing that you can do to keep your skin looking young that is more effective than protecting it from the sun, tanning booths, and other forms of ultraviolet exposure. There is even a scary term for this: photoaging. Worse, we physicians are now seeing patients in their twenties and thirties with basal cell carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas—those sun-related skin cancers that we used to see only in people in their sixties and seventies—and more teenagers with potentially lethal malignant moles (melanomas).
3. Stop Smoking
Smokers always advertise their habit on their skin. Even young people who smoke have a characteristic gray skin color that is a direct result of the reduction of blood supply that ordinarily gives a young person’s skin a healthy glow. Eventually, all smokers look old before their time, and their skin, chronically starved for oxygen, develops a dull, prematurely wrinkled appearance.
4. Get More Exercise
Extreme exercise habits can actually lead to a gaunt appearance, but this applies to very few people. Most people need more physical activity, and moderate exercise has innumerable health benefi ts, including improving one’s appearance and sense of well-being.
5. Practice Good Nutritional habits
Eat a balanced diet and stay away from high-fat foods, sugar, and refined, high-carbohydrate foods that have been stripped of their natural nutrients. Consider taking a multivitamin if you do not eat a good variety of fruits and vegetables.
6. Limit Alcohol Consumption
Excess alcohol intake contributes to many problems, including weight gain. 7. Control Your Weight
We all know how much harder it is to lose weight as we get older, so it is better not to put it on. As we age our skin gradually loses its ability to “spring back” after weight loss. On the other hand, excessive thinness makes anyone look unwell or malnourished, and this effect becomes more pronounced with age.
8. Get Enough Sleep
Studies have shown that large numbers of Americans are sleep deprived. Adequate sleep is essential for good physical and psychological health.
9. Reduce Stress
Stress, whether it be job related, relationship based, or physical, can cause round-the-clock facial muscle hyperactivity that leads to increased facial wrinkling, not to mention loss of sleep, loss of appetite, high blood pressure, and other bodily effects that eventually cause premature evidence of aging and increase the risk of more serious health problems. If you feel that you are under severe stress but cannot identify and/or reduce the causes, you may need to seek outside help.
10. Stay Mentally Stimulated
This is the key to vitality. Vitality is an incredibly attractive human characteristic. People who are not physically beautiful in the classical sense can be desirable to be around simply because they project warmth, charisma, and other hard-to-define qualities that attract others to them. Stay engaged with the world of ideas. Find something that you care about, other than your appearance, on which you can focus your creative energies. Soon you will find that people care less about the way you look than they do about who you are. The purpose of this book is not to tell you whether cosmetic medicine is a good thing or a bad thing, or whether it is appropriate for you or your family or your friends. The message is that cosmetic interventions have risks and don’t make everyone who undergoes them happy that they did. If you are a princess and live in a castle with your prince who used to be frog, then by all means believe everything you see on TV. If not, research your options. See a reputable doctor. Seek a second opinion if you need to. Be a truly informed patient. If you do these things, your dreams may not all come true, but at least you will be less likely to fall down the rabbit hole.
Tags: Control Your Weight, cosmetic medical care, Get Enough Sleep, high-carbohydrate foods, high-fat foods, Limit Alcohol Consumption, Practice Good Nutritional habits, Reduce Stress, Ultraviolet Exposure