Why Healthy Skincare Matters to Overall Health

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Y’all, I can barely contain my excitement. Today’s such a big day: Whole Body Whole Mind Total Wellness Challenge officially launches!

About Whole Body Whole Mind

The great part about Whole Body Whole Mind is that you can do it anytime you need to reset and refocus on your own wellness, using a holistic and gentle approach.

You set your own goals, tend to every part of your own wellness, including clean eating, mindfulness, physical activity, and relationships. Then, you work up to your long-term, sustainable goals by adding to your frequency each week.

Whole Body Whole Mind Total Wellness Challenge

A Quick Example

If you want to do yoga three times a week, every week on a regular basis, you’ll start with doing yoga one time a week.

The next week, say Week 2 of the challenge, you’ll do yoga two times a week. We don’t force extremes on our bodies, nope. Instead, we work with them from a place of care and ambition to set real habits that we can manage for, well, forever.

Total Wellness Includes Your Eating Style

And so, over the last few months as I worked to develop and design Whole Body Whole Mind, I’ve thought a lot about what total wellness means to me.

Does it mean eating a Whole30-inspired or paleo diet 5 times a week? Honestly, no, it doesn’t.

To me, it means being smart about the foods I eat and the moderation I cultivate, eating tons of plants, reasonable portions of animal protein, cultured dairy, grass-fed butter, moderate amounts of grains, and high-quality breads with minimal ingredients and processing.

Essentially, when I spent the time thinking about how I wanted to eat in the long term, I realized that I had no problem eating foods that other cultures have been thriving on for centuries.

Total Wellness Includes Mindfulness

And when I turned my attention to my mind, I realized that there are so many opportunities to cultivate mindfulness and disconnect beyond a regular meditation routine.

During the challenge, I’ll begin working on my long-term goals to put the phone down, reconnect with my family, and stop treating my smartphone like an extra appendage.

Total Wellness Includes Skincare

This inspection of total wellness led me to something I’d previous missed: the health of the products I use on my skin.

Using healthy skincare products used to be extremely important to me, you know… before I had Leo.

I spent hours poring over studies and product descriptions, trying to figure out what wasn’t safe to put on my skin, which were the healthiest products that I could find, and which ones actually worked.

But as I got busier and my attentions turned towards Leo, the attention to my own safe skincare dissipated.

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Of course, we’ve only ever used safe products on Leo’s skin! We know how important it is to avoid slathering industrial chemicals on your largest organ (your skin!), and so we’ve prioritized healthy skincare products for Leo since the day he was born.

It wasn’t until I spent weeks thinking about my own wellness that I realized ignoring the safety of my skincare left a hole in my holistic health. A missing piece.

No matter how well I eat, move, meditate, and care for my relationships, if I’m coating my skin in parabens and carcinogens, I’m not cultivating true, total wellness.

Why Skincare Matters

Did you know that there are 1400 chemicals banned for cosmetic use in the European Union? Fourteen hundred. One thousand, four hundred.

Anyone want to guess how many are banned in the U.S.?

Yeah, 30. Including carcinogens, soooo. OK.

…by which I mean not even kind of OK. Take a look at these studies and findings.

Recent studies have found over 200 industrial chemicals in the cord blood of newborns.
Another study showed that teens who switched to safer beauty products reduced the chemicals in their blood by 20-40%!
Pregnant women are especially vulnerable; exposure to chemicals during fetal development can affect the child’s health outcomes later in life.
Another study showed that skincare products you use can affect the amount of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in one’s body. Um, hard pass.

Like I mentioned before, your skin is your largest organ. It also takes the most day-to-day damage and just general wear & tear. All the more reason to be as good to it as you possibly can!