Layering on lotions, creams, serums and the like can help make your skin look better, but poor lifestyle choices can undermine even your best efforts. If you incorporate the right habits into your daily living, you can achieve both a healthier body and more youthful looking skin naturally.

Don’t Smoke

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the more unhealthy habits, smoking, leads to premature aging of the skin. In one study, the effects of smoking were evaluated on identical twins. They found a number of premature signs of aging on the skin. Notably, the skin around the lips looked older faster. Bags formed under the eyes sooner. Plus jowls formed along with more wrinkles around the lips.

Exercise

It’s hardly news that exercise promotes a healthy cardiovascular system and mental function. But dermatologists highlight that the extra circulation helps with your skin’s natural glow and brightness. The increasing blood flow from exercise feeds skin cells and keeps them healthy. Say dermatologist Ellen Marmur, MD, associate professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, “Blood carries oxygen and nutrients to working cells throughout the body, including the skin.”

Eat Your Veggies

Probably something you’ve heard since childhood, but eating those fresh greens and colorful vegetables encourages the body maintain its current inventory of cells plus provides the building blocks to regenerate your body’s microscopic structures. You may not realize it, but your body’s tissues are under constant renewal. In fact, Dr. Jonas Frisen, a stem cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, estimates that the average age of all the cells in an adult’s body may be as young as 7 to 10 years. And incredibly, the surface layer of the skin is recycled every two weeks or so. So eat up your broccoli, carrots, red peppers and kale!

Stay Hydrated

The intuitive thought that drinking water hydrates your skin and makes it look better is right, but the reasons why may not be so obvious. It turns out water provides the body with the means to clean itself out, which mean flushing waste products and toxins out of your system, including your skin structures. Water is also the highway upon which travels the nutrients that feed your body. So by staying hydrated, you make your body more efficient at keeping healthy. And while drinking water, perhaps infused with some lemon, offers the immediate answer, many fruits and veggies are more than 75 percent water by weight so they provide the aqueous benefits as well.

Cut Down On Sugar

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet. Not only does it show up in fountain drinks and desserts, buts its hidden in salad dressing, breakfast cereal, granola bars, and ketchup to name a few. And natural sugars found concentrated in fruit juices are not excluded. It turns out that there is a blood sugar connection to healthy skin. When you’re grabbing high glycemic foods all day long “eating a cookie, you’re eating a granola bar, and you’re drinking a sweetened beverage, you’re pushing your blood sugar up high and fast, and you’re going to have more insulin circulating in your bloodstream, ” says Valori Treloar, MD, co-author of The Clear Skin Diet. And sugar plays a role in inflammation and oxidative damage showing up in the health of your skin. Fix your diet by eating foods that have a low glycemic index and don’t spike your insulin. The foods to limit are carbohydrates like refined sugars and refined flour like those in breads and pastas. And get your carbs from more slowly digested edibles like vegetables and whole grains.

And if these lifestyle choices aren’t enough, here’s a little video about Anavita's simple skin cream that will help you achieve smoother, younger-looking skin: anti aging cream video.