A Year of Natural Health and Beauty: 52 Easy, Frugal, Natural Ideas to Enhance Your Mind, Body, and Spirit

By Andrea Drugay

Natural health and beauty can be yours easily, without putting a dent in your wallet! This easy-to-read guide offers a new tip every week for a year. Topics include DIY skin care, face masks, hair treatments, homemade hair color sprays, meditation and relaxation techniques, revitalizing yoga poses, simple and effective body treatments, tips for reducing stress, recipes for green juice and smoothies, and much more!

Using ingredients found at most grocery stores, farmers markets, and natural food stores, you can nurture your skin, hair, nails, and body with pure fruits, vegetables, and oils. Mind-body techniques for reducing stress will enhance your spirit, and will bring peace and joy to your everyday life. All of the recipes and techniques are green and Earth-friendly.

This simple guide will become your go-to resource for all things healthy in your day-to-day existence, bringing you a new awareness to the ingredients you use and the way you treat your body and mind. Healthy living will become a habit! You will feel transformed after a year of taking such good care of yourself, and your radiant beauty and natural vitality will be apparent to everyone you meet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrea Drugay
• Release date: Jul 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781500658717

Book preview

Welcome to A Year of Natural Health and Beauty: 52 Easy, Frugal, Natural Ideas to Enhance Your Mind, Body, and Spirit!

This book evolved out of a yearlong project on my blog. It is designed to introduce you to one simple, inexpensive, and all-natural tip each week for one year, to help guide you along a path of inner and outer beauty and health.

These will include recipes for homemade beauty items plus tips on nutrition, exercise, and stress relief. I wanted to make sure the tips included in this project are:

Simple: All tips, especially those requiring steps, should be straightforward, clear, and easy enough for a 10-year-old to follow.

Frugal: Many of the beauty ideas require only ingredients that you very likely already have in your kitchen or pantry! If you need to buy new ingredients, they are probably things you would buy anyway (salt, sugar, oils). Containers can be anything you might normally recycle: used yogurt tubs, jam jars, and empty travel-size shampoo bottles work great.

All natural: I know that’s a vague term these days and I’m not going to get into details here about the FDA and cosmetics un/regulation in the U.S. Suffice it to say, for this book, all-natural means the following: for beauty tips, if I can’t eat it, it doesn’t go on my skin (except for essential oils, which you should never consume orally); for health tips, the go-to methods are food, exercise, rest, and spirituality, not pharmaceuticals.

Always remember that natural health and beauty need a solid foundation of wellness and self-care. Before covering the first week’s tip, I want to review a few very basic actions that set the foundation for health and beauty. You can plant seeds in a dry, overgrown yard but they won’t thrive, if they even sprout. It’s much better to clear away the weeds, freshen up the soil with worms and loam builder, and then plant your seeds with love and care.

Same concept here.

Of course, smoking, drugs, and self-harm are detrimental, but here I’m talking about common-sense steps that make everything you do in addition to them even better.

The Basics: 8 Tips

1. Get plenty of sleep

2. Exercise regularly

3. Eat right

4. Drink plenty of water

5. Use sunscreen daily

6. Brush AND floss twice a day

7. Exfoliate all over

8. Smile :-)

For more in-depth analysis of The Basics, keep reading!

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1. Get plenty of sleep.

Lack of sleep contributes to everything from stress to weight gain to loss of brain function and memory and decreased sex drive. Getting your beauty sleep really does count, as lack of sleep also results in sallow skin, dark shadows, and puffy, bloodshot eyes due to excess cortisol, which breaks down the skin’s collagen and inhibits its ability to repair itself.

2. Exercise regularly.

Get at least 30 minutes a day of walking, running, dancing, biking, swimming, yoga, Pilates — whatever floats your boat, just do it! Break it up into 10-minute segments if you have to. Shopping counts, if that’s all you have time for. So does gardening, cleaning, and having sex. Not only will it help your weight and metabolism, it will help to improve your mood, brain function and memory, and will increase cellular turnover, keeping your skin looking fresh and young!

3. Eat right.

Of course, it’s not up to me to say what’s right for you. But one thing that’s right for everyone is whole foods! Nobody has summed it up better than Michael Pollan: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (Note: he didn’t say only plants.) Vegetables and fruit provide vital nutrients that help to increase cellular turnover, which is basically your body’s natural fountain of youth. Eat the rainbow every day! Stay away from refined and processed foods, fake foods, additives, and added sugar — choose whole, organic, wild, unrefined, unprocessed foods, instead. Your natural health and beauty will thank you.

4. Drink plenty of water.

You’ve had this drummed into your head but I’m saying it again. Dehydration shrinks your brain, dries out your skin, contributes to wrinkles and splotches, and can make you depressed and irritable. Hydrate up!

5. Use sunscreen daily.

With all the super-sheer, toxin-free, and fragrance-free options available today, you really have no excuse. I love a tan as much as anyone, but I love my body’s largest organ even more.

6. Brush AND floss twice a day.

Another one that’s been drummed into your head, but sometimes you just need to hear it again. Both, twice, every day. Not just for your gorgeous pearly whites but for your overall health.

7. Exfoliate all over.

Skin covers everything! Even if you’re eating right and getting plenty of antioxidants and vital nutrients, your skin could use some extra help on the outside. Be gentle but be consistent. Your skin will glow from a daily scrub!

8. Smile :-)

It improves your mood, boosts your immune system, attracts friendly people, and makes you look beautiful no matter what your skin, hair, nails, and outfit have to say.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s move forward to the easy, frugal, all-natural tips. You can read all the tips at once or just read one per week for the next year — there aren’t any rules! Whatever you do, be safe, use common sense, and if something doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Check the expiration date on your products before you mix them, leave chemically treated hair alone, and be gentle with your skin, body, and brain.

But overall, have fun! If you make changes to any of the tips that worked well for you, I’d love to hear your adaptations! I always love hearing from readers and would be thrilled to hear from YOU! My contact information is at the end of the book.

May you have a great year filled with vibrant health, beauty, and peace. I hope you enjoy my tips, and I hope you learn a lot about yourself in the process of following them.

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Tip #1: Drink Lemon Water

If nothing else, simply adding lemon to your water makes it more flavorful! But the benefits of lemon water are so bountiful that this is indisputably my number one health and beauty tip.

It helps to alkalize the body, balancing the body’s pH level and reducing the acidifying effects of meat, alcohol, dairy, and stress.

Its antibacterial properties help to control unhealthy bacteria in the body. Balancing bacteria, particularly in the gut, can help keep you healthy all year long.

When taken with warm water, it aids digestion while calming heartburn, bloating, and belching. It cleans your liver, your body’s most important internal waste-removal organ, and helps to reduce constipation.

It decreases phlegm and mucus and loosens congestion.

It helps to cleanse and purify the blood.

It works as a diuretic, helping the body to flush excess fluid. This can be useful for women who are premenstrual and feeling bloated. It also helps the body to remove waste and keeps the kidneys and urinary systems clean.

It contains large amounts of Vitamin C and trace amounts of Vitamin A, magnesium, and potassium.

For a fantastic sports drink to replace your lost electrolytes, add a sprinkle of sea salt and a smidgen of agave nectar!

For those who dislike drinking plain water, adding flavor makes it more appealing. Hydrate up!

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Stuff to Know:

Drinking too much lemon water can cause your tooth enamel to become fragile. After drinking it, swish your mouth with plain water. Don’t