The Right Diet For Beautiful Skin: Part 2

While weight cycling can cost skin its firmness, crash diets can literally starve skin. When you crash diet, you're depriving your skin, hair and nails of the nutrients they need to live. Crash diets can also strip skin of vitamin C, which helps form collagen, and vitamin E, which helps keep cells healthy.

Not surprisingly, crash diets tend to make skin look lousy. Cell turnover decreases, so skin begins to get coarse and dry. It won't retain moisture as well because skin cells will be less plump and less healthy. Skin may even begin to form fine lines because it can't save water as it should.

The emotional tension that often accompanies deprivation diets can cause skin to flare, too. The stress of struggling through a crash diet is likely to aggravate skin conditions known to be affected by stress, like acne, eczema and psoriasis.

To benefit your health and your skin, you need to avoid unhealthy weight-loss traps like weight cycling and crash diets and adopt healthier eating habits. The biggest mistake yo-yo dieters make is paying too little attention to their eating and exercise habits most of the time and then making too many radical changes at once when they get fed up with their weight.

The key, then, is to make such changes gradually. The following three-point plan is not a diet. (Consult your doctor before you begin any weight-loss diet.) But it may help you diet more healthfully - a change that could be reflected in the quality of your skin.

Plan every meal. Design your own eating schedule. Plan your meals and snacks. Eat anything you like, but stay within your schedule. This tactic can help you set food limits even before you cut back on calories.

Get moving. People who stick to a regular exercise program have the best chance of keeping the pounds off permanently, which would end the yo-yo syndrome for good.

Lose the fat and load up on carbohydrates. The American Heart Association recommends keeping fat intake to less than 30 percent of daily calories. Eat more grains, whole-grain bread, potatoes and pasta. You won't have much room left for fat. You can cut even more fat by switching from while to 1 percent or skim milk and from butter to fat-free margarine.

Eating more fresh fruits and vegetables and grains - without fatty sauces, dressings or butter - may help you reduce your fat intake automatically. You should follow the U.S. Department of Agriculture's nutritional guidelines, which recommend 3 to 5 servings of vegetables, 2 to 4 servings of fruit and 6 to 11 servings of bread, cereal, rice and pasta a day.