Secrets about Serum No 1

Serum No 1 will leave your skin instantaneously plump with visible improvement in elasticity and reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles.

1. Light water technology to reduce the concentration of heavy isotopes in the skin, balancing skin metabolism and normalizing cell regeneration. 
2. Arabian cotton to protect the skin immune system and prevent UV skin damage.
3. Ginseng root to rid your skin of free radicals and increase the production of collagen.
4. Sea Snail peptides which act as a natural Botox and reduce both superficial and deep wrinkles.

#DrNigma #RadiantSkin #GlowingSkin #ReverseTheSignsOfAgeing #Beautiful

Tips for beauty sleep

Sleep face up if you can. Sleeping on your face or cheek can cause loss of collagen and elastin on that side, due to the amount of pressure placed on it for the entire night and the resultant moisture loss. For your duvet, I’d recommend sleeping on silk pillowcases as cotton sucks moisture out of the skin. Furthermore, it prevents skin from creasing - and the effects of ‘bedhead’ too from a hair perspective. Be sure to wash your pillowcases at least once or twice a week!
Don’t go to bed without a serum. The skin rejuvenates at night so opt for high tech reparative product. Oils and moisturisers can tend to be clogging or just sit on the skin, impeding skin turnover and increasing premature ageing.

Traditional Chinese Medicine: Dark Areas

This is a sign of stagnation or blockages in the organs represented by that part of the face- for example, dark circles under the eyes often mean the kidneys or bladder are under pressure; a darker patch of skin around the chin means your bowels need some stimulation.

Listen to your body

Embrace Eastern, Western and naturopathic medicine. Each of us is unique and how much we need of anything in life depends on our own personal constitution. Your body is like a fine-tuned machine and it will tell you when something is wrong or if you’re eating something that doesn’t agree with you if you just listen. Its displeasure might manifest in clear symptoms in the gut, signs upon the skin or other health issues appearing elsewhere in the body. Face-mapping can also help you pinpoint any changes before they actually develop into symptoms. I recommend doing a regular face-mapping once every few months just to see if there’s anything you need to pay attention to.

Follow this Kirtan Kriya meditation exercise for just 12 minutes a day for mindfulness

Kirtan Kriya meditation is a very effective and quick (just 12 minutes a day!) method of relaxing and strengthening the mind and staying young. Sit comfortably with your spine straight and your arms in front of you, palms upward. Repeat the following sounds out loud for two minutes in our normal voice. As you make each sound, touch your fingers in turn with the tip of your thumb, as in the images. When the first two minutes are over, repeat the exercise for two minutes but this time in a whisper, then for four minutes in silence, then two minutes in a whisper again, and finally two minutes out loud. To finish, inhale deeply as you stretch your arms over your head and shake your hands, then bring them down in a sweeping motion as you exhale.

Mimi ❤️

Hi everyone, thanks for your support. I've decided to be silent for a short while in honour of Mimi who was the love of my life. ❤️

Losing Mimi has been incredibly sad. The only thing that keeps me going is hearing her whisper this to me:

Paleness in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Paleness to the skin is often associated with problems in the lung or colon - asthmatics often have much paler faces than my other clients, as do those for whom dairy causes lung congestion. If lung problems get worse or someone develops a more serious condition, such as emphysema, the skin may take on a gray or ashy tone. Paleness is also associated with excessive stress as the blood diverts to the more important organs.

Smoking and Premature Aging

This is one of the primary ways to trigger premature aging in skin. In fact, it’s my experience that the average smoker can look up to 10 years older than a non-smoker, and studies have shown that if one twin smokes and the other doesn’t, the damage is so obvious that 57 percent of plastic surgeons can spot a smoking twin from a picture of their face. I can do exactly the same thing- smokers have more bags under their eyes, more wrinkles, particularly around their lips, and less firm skin, particularly around the jawline, than non-smokers. Smoking also causes free radical damage and triggers the release of a protein called MMP-1, both of which directly attack collagen and elastin levels- and it also directly triggers inflammation. Every time smoke enters your lungs, it irritates the delicate cells within them; those cells see this irritation as an attack and, as with so many other factors that I’ve talked about here, that irritation triggers an inflammatory response. If you do smoke, quitting is one of the most important things you can do for your health and looks.

Know your ABCs- Vitamin C

This significantly lowers levels of C-reactive protein in the body. It’s also an effective antioxidant and has anti-inflammatory benefits. It’s particularly effective when combined with vitamin E. Good sources of vitamin C include bell peppers, blueberries and kiwi fruit. Vitamin E can be found in nuts, seeds and avocados.

Know your ABCs- B Vitamins

I always give my patients B vitamins to help them with the “it is” conditions and to help fight gut-inflammation generally. The B vitamins also helps counteract an extremely inflammatory substance called homocysteine that can build up in the body. Particularly important are B6, B9 and B12. Whole grains are excellent sources of the B vitamins, except B12, which is found in meat and eggs, so vegans need to supplement with this. You need 1.5 mcg a day.

Know your ABCs- Vitamin A

This helps my patients who have gut-inflammation the intestines, the lungs and the skin. Those with inflammatory bowel disease, acne and chronic asthma, and lung issues all improve if I spruce up their vitamin A levels for a short time. Good dietary sources include liver, but as you can consume too much of pure vitamin A, it’s better to get it from green, orange or yellow vegetables as these convert the betacarotene they contain to vitamin A. It’s particularly important not to supplement or consume too much pure vitamin A if you are pregnant or trying to conceive, and no one should exceed more than 1.5 mg daily via food, supplements or a combination of the two.

Your BMI

It’s not a perfect measure of you are an athlete or naturally carry a high muscle mass, but for the general population, Body Mass Index (BMI) does give a good basic idea of whether your weight is healthy or not, especially in conjunction with waits measurement. To find your BMI, divide your weight in kilograms by your height in meters squared. Now check your result against the below:

18.4 or under: you are underweight
18.5 - 24.9: you are a healthy weight
25 - 29.9: you are overweight
30 or over - you are obese

Cortisol - the stress hormone

Released when you are under stress, cortisol is another of the hormones produced by the adrenal glands. Its normal jobs include vital functions, such as shuttling sugar into the muscles during stress and shutting off the inflammatory response that occurs at this time. Released as and when we need it, cortisol is an extremely helpful hormone to the body- and actually fights aging because it switches off inflammation. The problem is that our stressful lifestyles mean our bodies are now often in a state of near cortisol production.
Cortisol is the Goldilocks of hormones- your levels have to be just right. Too low and you develop adrenal fatigue (which triggers aging), too high and you’ll also age faster as cortisol loves to damage skin, attacking it up to 10 times faster than any other tissue in the body.

Try my Sweet Potato Cakes Recipe

400g (14oz) sweet potato, peeled
1 egg
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp olive oil

1. Grate the sweet potato
2. Whisk the egg, then add the sweet potato, turmeric and salt, and a grinding of pepper
3. Split the mixture into 4 and form patties using your hands
4. Heat the oil in a frying pan over a medium heat and fry the patties for 2-3 minutes until they start to brown. Flip and fry for another 1-2 minutes.

Image: Jessica O'Dwyer

Analysing your food diary

After keeping a food diary for a while you’ll hopefully start to see patterns form. For example, you always get a headache around 3pm on a Wednesday following a work meeting on Tuesday lunchtime where sandwiches are served. If that’s the only day you eat bread, then perhaps something in bread is a trigger food for you. Similarly, you get a runny nose on a Sunday morning- and Friday night is always white wine night. Things can be a little harder when it’s foods you eat every day that are causing your problems as your symptoms are more or less constant. In that case it’s when the problems don’t appear that might give you a clue to their cause; what didn’t you eat in the preceding days? If you are getting stuck identifying any clear patterns, then seeking professional advice might help you spot things you can’t see. Or, you might want to try IgG testing to find your answer.

How to keep a good food diary

Trying to spot a food intolerance isn’t always easy. While some, such as lactose intolerance, make themselves known quite quickly (sufferers usually need to rush to the bathroom soon after eating dairy), most intolerances hide very well and you’ll need to tease out the signs that show you what’s behind them. Keeping a good food diary is therefore very important.

Remember to:

Fill it as you go so you don’t forget anything;
Write down everything you consume, including chewing gums, vitamins, bites of your partner’s food etc.
For processed food, write down the brand name & ingredients (or photograph the label and keep it on your phone). It might be a single preservative that causes problems, which you’ll only spot if you know exactly what is in each food.
Don’t forget drinks - you can be intolerant to them too.

Don’t tell your body it’s getting old

Sighing as you sit down, grunting as you stand up as if it’s a big effort, or blaming the fact that you can’t find your car keys on your age, rather than the fact that you were talking on the phone when you came home and threw them somewhere different, tells your body you are expecting it to underperform with age. Your brain likes to please you in life - if it thinks you’re expecting your body to slow down, the brain will make that happen. Again, our proof comes from Yale: in a trial published in the journal ‘Psychology and Aging’, seniors reading words such as “forgetful” responded worse on memory tests than those given more positive words to read, such as “wise”. Tell your body it’s aging well, and it will.

Is your face older than you are?

Some of you will have read my previous few blog posts and felt a little hopeless. We live in a society now where it’s being seen as normal to iron out every sign of aging and, as such, reading about the above might fill some of you with dread. But remember: all of us age and we can’t, and shouldn’t, erase every aspect of that; features such as laughter lines and smile lines are a sign that you’ve lived a little, and that your life was filled with love, fun and happiness - you should be proud to show them off. You shouldn’t want to fill or freeze every line on your face, but nor do you want your face filled with other lines not reflective of all those good times.
To know if you’re aging naturally or experiencing the accelerated aging we can’t to fight, you need to know what to expect as you age.

What to expect as you age: 55+

By now the bone structure of the face has also changed, which adds to all of the above problems. The brows droop and the lips start to thin. Pigmentation cells can also start to behave erratically, which can trigger blotchy skin and the appearance of age spots.

What to expect as you age: 45-55

Fat levels continue to fall, but as you approach and then pass menopause it’s the drop in hormone levels that cause the majority of changes. The skin becomes considerably drier, and this alone makes it more likely to crease and wrinkle. As collagen loss speeds up, this accentuates the laxity that begins in your early 40s and jowls can appear as the face starts to sag. You could also notice your skin start to look a little more sallow as circulation becomes less effective.