Wellness: Go on a healthy 'date' this Valentine's Day

Manage your sugar intake with alternatives like raw honey, organic jaggery and dates
Wellness: Go on a healthy 'date' this Valentine's Day

With cakes, candies and chocolates rolling out this Valentine’s Day — your sugar intake is bound to go up. Eating a reward meal once in a while is fine but overdoing white processed sugar and food loaded with sugar can cause more harm than good. Refined sugar isn’t good for our health and increases the risk of health problems. These include obesity, diabetes, acidic body, inflammation, heart conditions and even wrinkles. Yes, you read that right, more than health issues sugar can make our skin look dull and increase wrinkles.

When we try to look our best on the V-day we’ve got to place focus on keeping our skin healthy and clean internally. Collagen and elastin are the two most essential proteins required by our body to offer supple, smooth and youthful skin. Glycation may be a process wherein sugar molecules acts with the protein fibre making them malformed and stiff. Collagen and elastin are the foremost badly affected protein fibre by glycation, which makes them discolored, weak and less springy. All of these effects are seen on our skin’s surface as limpness, lines, wrinkles and loss of radiance.



Free radicals damage our skin, and the damage also increases in our body once we consume an excessive amount of sugar or sugar-laden products. This results in or accelerates the skin's ageing process. So, if you would like that youthful glow on V-Day, then keep a check on your daily processed sugar intake as much as possible.

So how does one do this? Opt for healthy alternatives to sugar like organic jaggery, raw unheated honey, raisins, dates and coconut sugar. Make a healthy homebaked cake with jaggery for your loved ones or bittersweet chocolate - nuts-seed rocks by melting dark chocolate, adding chopped nuts and seeds with jaggery, give it a nice stir and make rocks then refrigerate or maybe even make dark chocolate-coconut sugar fondue with fruits like grapes, banana and strawberries. Do make it a point, however, to consume these options carefully because anything in excess isn’t good for the body. Enjoy a mindful Valentine's Day!

Photos courtesy: Mona Mok and Art Rachen on Unsplash

Related Stories

No stories found.
Indulgexpress
www.indulgexpress.com