This is what you do: Lie on your bed with the head over the edge. Then slowly lift the head up until it is even with your torso. Hold it there, and count for 60 seconds (if you can). Then rest for 15 seconds, and hold again, this time for 30 seconds. Rest 15 seconds, and the third time, hold for 15 seconds.

Don’t be surprised if you can’t hold it this long the first time you try it, or even the first week! It takes a while to get in shape. This exercise. which only takes about 2 minutes daily, will tighten both the muscles and the skin of your neck.

Cheap, easy and effective. No cutting or snipping involved. I like it!
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We are a culture of youth worshippers and we haven’t yet discovered any kind of beauty that is deeper than skin-deep. Whatever happened to worshipping your elders for their wisdom? Perhaps the wisdom is all gone, and now, only stupidity remains?

Anyway, I can understand that women want smooth skin – and I am no different. Inside, I’m as young as I always was, and outside, the skin shows that I have been around the block quite a few times…

So, what can we do about this? Are those anti-aging creams any good? When I took out my reading glasses and started looking at the label ingredients, here is what I found in the best selling brands:

Olay Regenerist @ $27.99/1.7oz
Contains glycerin, panthenol, hyoluronate, green tea, aloe vera, collagen, elastin, allantoin, B3, propyl and methyl parabens (high hazard) and phenoxyethanol. At least it contains not only chemicals, but also a few vitamins, humectants, anti-oxidants and even collagen for anyone who thinks it will make a difference. If you don’t mind carcinogenic parabens, it is not a bad product.

Loreal Revitalift @ $19.99/17oz
Contains algae extract, shea butter, sunflower seed oil, chemicals and methylparaben (high hazard preservative). I don’t see a lot of goodness in this one – and personally, I wouldn’t bother buying it. I’ll rather wait until they come up with a more natural alternative…

Garnier Nutritionist Regenerating Moisturizer
This cream contains only a handful of recognizable substances, like mica, glycerin and tomato extract. The rest are just chemicals. 12 of those are rated moderate hazard in the cosmetic database, and three of them are rated high hazard. I didn’t see anything in the ingredients that indicate any regenerating or anti-aging ingredients, so in my opinion, this one is just a waste of money.

In addition to these best sellers, I also found a brand that, based on the ingredients, seems to be a better product than all of the ones mentioned above. It is called:

ProVectin Plus by Skin Essentials, advanced wrinkle remover @ $29.99/6oz (great value).
It contains 3 different peptides for the people who believe in those –
Palmitoyl oligopeptide
palmitoyl tetra peptide
acetyl hexa peptide
In addition, it also contains hyaluronic acid, which is a humectant that can hold its own weight in water 1000 times and is supposed to help stimulate collagen production. Although it does contain carcinogenic parabens, propylene glycol (anti-freeze) and a long list of other unpronounceable chemicals, it also contains cocoa butter, mango butter, aloe, vitamin E/A/C (anti-oxidants), cucumber extract, green tea, grapeseed, peach, seaweed, lemon, calendula and gingko. So, if I were to buy one of these three, the ProVectin Plus offers more in terms of anti-aging ingredients, hydration, natural ingredients as well as value (amount of cream for the money), so this would be my number one anti-aging semi-natural product.
They also offer an eye cream for @ $19.99/1.3 oz – again good value for the money, since that is the price that is normally charged for ½ oz of eye cream.

I also found a paraben free anti-aging skincare line by Keri Glassman called Skin Appetit, nutria-collagen daily moisturizer. It is a skincare line made by a nutritionist who claims to use superfood nutrients in her products. And, yes, it is true, her products contain things like chamomile, comfrey, honey, blueberry extract, aloe vera, cocoa extract and walnut seed extract, but on the first half of her label there are only chemicals listed, like alkyl benzoate, ethyl hexyl palmitate, propylene glycol, PEG 100 stearate, dimethicone etc. Because these ingredients are at the beginning of the label, the cream base is obviously made from these components, and then the superfoods and herbs are added in small amounts to the end product. Although this is a common thing to do, it is not very nice to the consumer! It also contains acrylates, crosspolymers, phenoxyethanol and fragrance. Even though some of these chemicals are rated green by the cosmetic database, they are still chemicals that shouldn’t be in a so called natural skin cream made by a nutritionist. She is using her title as a nutritionist to give people the impression that her products are basically edible, which is an extremely misleading perception! According to the cosmetic database, this particular skin cream contains 4 high hazard ingredients, seven moderate hazard ones, and the rest green. For a skincare line that is made by a nutritionist, I am certainly not impressed! I expect more from someone who knows better!!!
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The question is, why do women allow this to happen to themselves? Is it fear of getting old? Fear of losing their husbands? Fear of losing their jobs? What husband worth having would leave you just because he saw a younger woman with less wrinkles on her face? If your husband is that shallow, it is better to simply let him go! Have we really become so shallow that we can’t see past the wrinkles to the person within? Does who you are no longer matter?

It is time that we stand up to all the nonsense and refuse to participate any more. We must take back our power as women and embrace all the stages of our lives, not just the stage of the maiden! We must stop the madness, and refuse to live up to an ideal of perfection that is not realistic at all. We must trust in our inner beauty and start honoring ourselves and each other. We must say NO to any more surgical abuse of women!
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What madness! What beauty can be there, if you can’t even smile? Who is this inner judge of lack of perfection, always telling you how you don’t measure up? How can you possibly feel beautiful when you carry around an inner voice that always tells you how ugly you are?

The culprit is called the mind. Mind is another name for madness. Mind is never happy with anything. Watch it, and you’ll see. Mind judges, criticizes, dissects, cuts apart, and when it has destroyed everything, it becomes unhappy, dissatisfied, miserable, looking outside for some kind of fulfillment. If you can’t be perfect, maybe botox is the answer? You are so ugly, you just need a new face! That’s it!!! A new face will make you happy! NOT….

Ekhart Tolle says that mind is completely incapable of seeing or creating beauty, and that true beauty can only be created from a space beyond mind. Mind also makes it impossible to love. How can you love yourself, or anybody else for that matter, when mind is always in the way, nagging, judging and criticising?

The only way to experience beauty and love is by going to a place that is beyond mind. Go inside, become silent, listen to the wind and the birds, feel the sun or the rain on your face and let the silence of nature go deep into you. Do you feel beautiful when you close your eyes? When you don’t wear makeup and don’t have anyone to compare yourself with? Can you feel the beauty of existence flowing through your form? Beauty is so much more than physical form! Too bad we are so attached to the physical, when the physical is only temporary.

The other day, I was rushing through the supermarket with a shopping list in my hand. As I walked passed the flower section, there was a huge section of just easter lillies. I caught a whiff of their scent as I rushed by, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. I forgot both the shopping and the list, and had to go back just to smell them. As their fragrance filled me with gratefulness for their generosity, I realized what incredible beauty there is everywhere we look!

The flowers didn’t care if anyone bent down to smell them – they were still pouring their fragrance out, sharing with anyone who had enough awareness to notice it! It totally blew my mind! This is real beauty! Beauty beyond mind! I’m grateful to the easter lillies for teaching me another lesson of truth! We still have so much to learn…
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Are these our ideals? I don’t think they should be! Women are supposed to be round and soft. We are supposed to have babies and nurture those babies. Tight, skinny bodies with no curves aren’t as soft and nurturing as someone with a few extra pounds here and there. We have to create our own ideas of what is beautiful – and it should be based on how nature has made us. We need to celebrate our differences, rather than trying to fit into a standard of beauty that doesn’t fit any of us.

So, we need a new approach. We need to start defining our own standards of beauty by discovering and celebrating each individual’s own beauty! We have to stop comparing ourselves to anyone else, and we have to stop criticizing ourselves. We are all different from each other, we are all beautiful in our own ways, so let’s celebrate our differences instead of trying to be all the same.

First of all, we need to work with the bodies that we have. We shouldn’t have to cut and suck, stitch and tuck so that we can all have the same bodies in the end. All we have to do is think how we can balance out what we have been given. This can easily happen with clothing. Because we all have different body shapes, each of us have to also develop our own individual clothing style.

Both the shape and the color of the clothes we choose can make a huge difference when it comes to balancing out the features we have been given. In the next week or so, I am going to write a series of posts about how we can create our own individually flattering clothing style.
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I first experienced, second hand, the curse of plastic surgery when one of my girl friends decided to get breast implants. She had a beautiful, petite body, but after she nursed a baby, her breasts were never quite the same, and she wasn’t happy. She told me that men like big breasts, so she was getting implants.

The surgery was extremely painful, with big scars under each breast, but she was so excited about her beautiful round new breasts that she showed them to anyone who wanted to see them. A year or two went by, and somehow, she started having a reaction to the implants. Her breasts turned as hard as stones and became extremely uncomfortable.

She went back to the doc, who suggested to have them removed. So, again she had to have surgery, and after taking the implants out, the doc had to try to reshape her old breasts by doing a bit of tucking and stitching. Poor girly – she really went through a lot.

Another example I remember was when I took all the clothes I had designed to a photographer to get my portfolio done. She had picked a model who was so pretty that I felt like Cinderella next to her. She was the most perfect person I had ever seen – absolutely gorgeous -until she did something that I’ll never forget!

All of a sudden, the photographer asked her to lift her breasts a little, so the dress would hang better. The model lifted her breasts, and they stayed in that new place!!! I couldn’t believe my eyes and said “How is that possible???” Silicone implants! I should have guessed. Hers were starting to get hard, as well, so she was actually able to position her breasts up/down/right/left so the pictures would come out better.

Oh, my God! I can’t believe that someone so pretty could even consider improving her looks! But it only shows one thing – nobody is happy with the way they look – it doesn’t matter how gorgeous they are!

The time has finally come to question all this nonsense and draw the line. It is time we start celebrating who we are. It is time we learn how to appreciate our own, unique beauty. It is time we get together with our girlfriends, not to criticize, but to encourage and help each other find our best assets. We must learn to enhance these, and stop obsessing about what we don’t have, or what we have, but don’t want. Enough is enough!
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Victorian Ball Gown

And, to make the tiny waistlines even more pronounced, they made skirts so big that they had to wear them over some kind of stiff cage made from whalebones or some such thing. The poor girls had to learn how to sit in such a way that their walebone cage wouldn’t spring up and hit them in the face (and expose their underwear, god forbid!) Legs had to be hidden at all costs, while breasts would be squeezed and pushed together until it looked like they were going to burst over the top of the dress. Talk about cleavage! But, no, bare legs were more indecent than bulging breasts!

This, of course, sounds like another idea created by men. By making women focus on hiding their legs and not their breasts, they got to enjoy their breasts in public!

My mother just told me that one of the Danish queens at the beginning of the last century actually had two of her ribs removed on each side so that she could make her waist line even smaller. Ribs removed??? It seems that fashion and insanity always go hand in hand!

Again, we see the patterns. Small waistlines are beautiful. Then, the tendency became to make them smaller and smaller with the use of killer corsets. In the end, the obsession with tiny waistlines became so extreme that they started using surgery to create the impossible. Then someone started realizing how ridiculous it was, the fad died and fashions went in the opposite direction. By 1920, the women wore shapeless tube dresses which flattened their chests and didn’t show any waistlines whatsoever. Again, it went from one extreme to another…
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If you follow this super simple rule of only eating when you are actually hungry, and never stuffing yourself to your limit, the excess weight will fall away and your body will stabilize itself at a level that is natural for you. Who knows if you are supposed to have curves? You’ll know when the weight stabilizes itself. Whatever that place is, that is your ideal weigth.

If your goal is to achieve a weight that is right for you, you don’t have to compare yourself to others. You don’t have to go on a diet. You don’t even have to step on a scale, because it is all about finding YOUR ideal weight, which is basically the weight that is natural for you.

Diets don’t work anyway, because they are simply suppressing your habits. The weight may come off, but when you quit your diet, how long do you keep it off? You can only keep your weight off if you actually change the way you eat!

Being overweight or obese is not natural. You never see an obese deer or an obese bobcat. Obese animals only exist in domesticated animals, and it only happens because we feed them regular meals, instead of letting them eat the way they do in nature.

Eating regular meals is a very un-natural way to eat. In nature, the animals only eat when food is available, and they don’t go looking for food until they are hungry again. If they are not hungry, they don’t even think about food. There is no breakfast, dinner and evening meal! There is no automatic, unconscious nibbling when they watch TV. They just look for food when they are hungry, and they eat until they are satisfied and leave the rest for someone else – no need to be greedy, or finish everything on the plate – that is just conditioned nonsense. Animals don’t operate under this kind of nonsense. The way they eat is the NATURAL way to eat! We have so much to learn from the animals!

Unfortunately, we have forgotten how to be natural. It is time we remember it again…
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