your spring glow up — tips & tricks to refresh your looks, mindset, and wellbeing

Get ready to elevate your health, beauty, and mood with some fresh ideas and friendly reminders in this episode. As ladies, we're all about adding a bit of romance to our lives and routines, especially when spring rolls around. Stay tuned as I chat about simple, practical, healthy ways to boost your beauty and feminine vibes this season. I’m sharing tips to help you feel your best and embrace your beauty this springtime. 

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Chapters

• 1:00 updates
• 5:19 main topic
• 8:49 in the kitchen
• 12:56 lifestyle tips
• 20:00 self-care
• 24:56 beauty routines
• 30:50 healthy beauty habits
• 39:00 conclusion

Transcript

Alina: 0:08

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the stellar cycles podcast, your hot girl database for all things pertaining to your femininity, your cycle and wellness and your walk in life. As a woman. I'm your host Alina, and today we're talking about little ways to glow up this spring. The goal of today's episode is to give you either new ideas or reminders of things you could be doing that will directly contribute to your health, beauty and mood as girlies. We love finding ways to romanticize our lives and routines. And that's newly fresh and fun. When spring comes around. A lot of my girlfriend's talk about doing a whole spring makeover. So it's funny how that's a mood for so many of us, we kind of always want to refresh and renew ourselves during springtime. So keep listening, as we will discuss healthy ways that you can boost your beauty and other feminine qualities this spring. Few current updates, honestly, guys, home furnishing is not a joke. I almost long for the days when I would just buy everything from Target Amazon Facebook marketplace. Because things were easier than in a way now like actually sourcing nicer things and nicer furniture, you're just like, dang, if I want to switch this out, I'm not going to be able to sell it for this price that I'm buying it at. So that's kind of the issue with mid level furniture. But I'm still having a lot of fun with it. We had our interior decorator Adrian, come in over this past week and install some things in our entryway or hallway or kitchen or in our living room. And it's starting to look more put together and homey which I love. So big props to her for doing a lot of the design and a lot of the heavy work. And I think the finishing touches will be on me. But that's been really fun. Because I've been telling myself that I'm not good at this interior stuff. But I think that anybody can be good at it. It just takes some time, you can't expect to move in somewhere and just have your whole setup even within a month. That's too much to expect. You know, I think we kind of build our personal styles, especially if you don't want to have like a cookie cutter place that you see all over social media and kind of the same design features. It takes time to assimilate and acquire the things that you want to have in your home things that are meaningful things that speak to you. So this process, it's not a joke. It's not easy, but man, is it fun. It's so much fun to personalize your space. I've been having a lot of fun with that and just really looking forward to the finished product. Another update, I am gearing up to go to a live podcasting event this weekend with honestly our dream network deer media. The goal is for this show to become a deer media show. So I'm just so excited to be heading to Austin, Texas this weekend with my husband to attend to their three day live podcasting event. It's going to be amazing. I'm going to see some of my favorite podcasters and get to listen to them speak live. Hopefully people bring their products because this is a health and wellness network for the most part. And I just really hope that I can get my hands on some of the products that some of the podcasters put out. And yeah, I was talking a few weeks ago or last week, I believe that I've been wanting to fix my attention span and I do have some feedback for y'all and it's that reading has literally been fixing my attention span for real I do not spend nearly as much time anymore Mindlessly scrolling Instagram or tech talk if I go on I actually find that I'm going on intentionally I'm like okay, this is the reason why I want to go on this is what I need it for and then I get bored a bit much quicker to it's been really amazing and incredible to see what losing yourself in a book for a few hours will do. Number one, it motivates you. Number two, it focuses you and number three, I really do think it helps our attention spans because it just kind of puts your brain into more of a one track thinking those are my personal updates. I would also like to read a review about our podcast you guys have been so sweet leaving ratings and reviews for us that I just wanted to share one on the show. This one was left a couple of weeks ago and it says stellar cycles is a gem of a podcast that every woman should tune into the hosts passion for women's health and wellness shines through and each episode offering valuable insights and practical tips on topics like menstrual health, self care, holistic wellbeing, and even relationship advice. It's a refreshing and empowering listen that has truly made a positive impact on my wellness journey highly recommend And thank you so much for that review. Getting feedback from listeners is really kind of like the best way for me to gauge if this is even helpful to you guys. So thank you so much for that sweet review. Dear listener, I appreciate you. And yeah, hoping to see some more feedback from you guys in the coming weeks. So let's get into today's episode, spring beauty spring glow up tips. While we all know that spring for many cultures throughout long periods of time has signified new beginnings and new beginnings are really exciting, really fresh because we get to start over we get to throw away the things that weren't working for us things that we weren't happy about and start off with a clean slate. And you guys know I always like to relate everything back to the cycle and the seasons. And we can think of the follicular phase when we think about spring right? That means lighter meals our body is naturally detoxing, we have nice high energy levels and winter tends to be kind of heavy. That's why spring it needs to be a bit more lighter to help us shed and throw off that winter stagnation that heaviness that we've just been really wanting to be done with for the past few months. Something that keeps coming up across my for you page is that spring is actually the season of the liver. So paying attention to our liver is going to be super important during springtime and that's where the whole conversation of detox comes in. Right because the liver is our body's big detoxify. There are things that we know to be livered betrayers, right alcohol is for sure one of those conventional meats and dairy, processed foods and sugars. Those types of foods are much harder for our liver to break down and process which then causes the liver to fall behind in processing out and flushing out heavy metals, toxins, anything harmful that's not supposed to be in our body. And when we burden our body with things that aren't good for it, the liver just can't do his job very well. So this episode is going to have a lot of tips as to how you guys can support your liver during springtime as it's naturally in its season. A flushing and detoxing. Like I said earlier, the winter was a stagnant, slow, heavy times. So spring is focused on moving things along. We know the liver betrayers, right, but what are some liver helpers just to give an overview, there's some really powerful herbs like dandelion root burdock root. Personally for me when my liver isn't doing well I can tell through my skin so my friend Alex, she was on this show and she is currently going to holistic medical school she put me on to deep liver cleanse which is a little drop like a little tincture that you can buy on Amazon and you just take one to two of the droplets a day. And that's really been helping me clear out my skin clear on my body helped my liver do its job better and helps me feel less sluggish. Honestly, activated charcoal is also going to be really good to help the liver because those toxins bind to the activated charcoal and then it's eliminated when you go to the bathroom and of course our liver loves crunchy veggies and foods that can bind to and also help flush out those excess toxins. So the liver the liver the liver the liver it's a very important organ to watch out for especially if you want radiant skin another component that's really important during the springtime is Sir routines and give him a little bit of a revival what can we switch up how can we make our routine more interesting more optimized to our lifestyle How can we meet more goals that we haven't been meeting in the past season the springtime it's an optimal time to take a look at your routine and spruce it up we're going to talk about things in the kitchen things in your lifestyle beauty foods self love and self care ideas, intentions and ways that you can be more intentional with mindset and things like that. And we're also going to talk about some science behind these beauty tips. So all of these little categories will have tips and tricks for you guys to glow up this spring. Starting off with in the kitchen there's going to be really simple easy ways that you can use your kitchen and what's already in there to increase your beauty your glow Enos and your health as a woman this spring first and foremost, this one you guys are gonna be like oh my god Alina. Seriously this one we've heard it all before. There's just no way it can be that useful. But this one's very simple and it's a morning beauty tonic room temperature or warm water, some citrus juice, some freshly grated ginger and cracked pepper. This is so good for you because it'll be gentler at waking you up than coffee rather than just like slamming your cortisol up first thing in the morning. It's going to gently wake you up, get your digestive system going and keep your hormones support it. The next thing that you can try doing in the kitchen as you're eating as you're cooking is to dress up your salad by experimenting with your own DIY dressings. All you need is some acid and oil and some seasonings that you like. So you could pick citrus juice for acid you could put balsamic vinegar for oils, olive oils really good grapeseed oil and just play around with the ratios usually like a one to three ratio of acid to oil is pretty good. And then seasonings, salt and pepper, oregano, paprika, like anything that you like the taste of you could just make it yourself. Salad dressings are super, super easy to make. And honestly, I feel like the ones that you make yourself, you can just easily shake them up in a container, keep it in the fridge for the week. I think that's going to be much better for you than those processed, greasy and dressings that they sell at the grocery store. Another really interesting tip that I came across is letting garlic rest. What does that mean? So when you are cooking with garlic and you've minced crushed it graded at whatever anything that you do to activate the garlic you actually want to let the garlic sit for 10 to 15 minutes after you do that, because it's going to help its Allison come out more and Allison is a compound that's responsible for reducing inflammation and slowing the breakdown of her collagen. Collagen is what makes our skin plump it makes our hair lashes so anything that we can do to slow the natural breakdown and aging that happens when we lose our collagen is going to be helpful. Garlic apparently has things that will help us retain our collagen better. Have you guys heard of bitters? Yes, like bitters at the bar, they make your drinks well, you can actually buy bitters and take a few drops prior to a meal. Because what it's going to do is help jumpstart your digestion. So bitters are just made from herb combinations. And it's just a really easy way to get your herbs in and letting your body take the benefits. Have you guys heard of hair super foods, so foods that are going to be really really good for your hair, obviously any source of protein but wild salmon, especially hemp seeds, Keane was sardines and protein powders. So these foods are going to be really good at supporting beautiful, luscious hair, helping you grow your hair thick, because of the Omega threes, and iron and zinc minerals, all the things that does hold Yes, our hair is built inside the hair follicle not already outside after it's been damaged, and process and so something to keep in mind. And finally, for our kitchen category, something that you can do to glow up this spring is evaluate the items in your kitchen and eliminate anything that has BPA on it. A lot of plastic cutting boards, a lot of Tupperware, those things are gonna have BPA, which is a highly known endocrine disrupters is going to mess with your hormones. So just see which things you can swap out in your kitchen and make the healthier choice. That way, you will see absolutely much better results and how you feel and how your hormones are affected. Moving on to lifestyle. Here are a few lifestyle glow up hacks that you can implement that will definitely beautify you your life, your routines. The first one would be to wake up mindfully. And what does that mean? Listen, we all fall into the trap of not waking up mindfully, right, we hear our alarm go off, or we realize that we're awake, and we just reach for our phone and we open up our screensaver. And first thing we do is immediately go into the text messages that people have been sending us or responding to DMS or the worst thing that you could possibly do me included I do this sometimes is just immediately start scrolling on Instagram and Tiktok. So for me waking up mindfully looks like realizing that I'm awake, maybe like squirming around underneath the blankets just still take a moment to be grateful for how good my sheets feel and how grateful I am for how well I slept that night. If I do grab my phone, the first thing that I do is my Aura Update, I'll just kind of look at my aura score for the night and see if my rank gave me a good grade or not and the way that I slept, and sometimes we have beef, and sometimes we don't. But a lot of the times it's just good insight to like, Hey, how did my sleep did it was I rested, blah, blah, blah. So just anything that you can do to create some space in between being awake, and then you know your reaction that you kind of want to change. If you want to change the fact that you're instantly scrolling on your phone first thing in the morning then see what you can do to increase the time between waking up and reaching for your phone that could look like actually getting out of bed making the bed and raising up your blinds or sitting up and taking 10 deep breaths and activating yourself like that moving into another lifestyle thing to be aware of is breathing clean air. Obviously in the springtime, we're having better weather for many of us. It's a lot more possible to be outside more, take longer walks, be outside for longer now that the sun is going down later. One important thing is to be breathing a lot of clean air and airing out your place because studies have shown us that indoor air, especially inside high rise or inside an apartment building is literally worse for you than City Air like pollution city air. So do what you can breathe, breathe, breathe, get clean air, air out your home and air out your space, keep that fresh air moving. Another thing that you could do to glow up in your lifestyle is make space for what you want by getting rid of what you don't. And this could go either way this could be material things this could be maybe character traits that you want to acquire or maybe a job or money that you want to make anything that you want. Take a look at that thing and be like is there room in my life right now for that thing is there room in my closet right now for this brand new wardrobe that I want is there room in my vanity for this new makeup overhaul and all this new skincare that I want to get in order to appreciate and enjoy and correctly utilize the things that you want and strive to earn, you first have to make room for them. So this is a really good time to if you haven't done your spring cleaning clean out your closets see what you're not wearing, what you're constantly stepping over what shoes you keep looking at in that closet in your like, I will literally not where you get rid of those things. They're just holding up not only physical space in your home and your environment, but they're also holding up mental and emotional space in your brain. So and make it fun to when you're getting rid of stuff, think and plan for what you're going to replace it with and how much that new thing is going to make you happy or benefit your life or make things easier for you. Another cool lifestyle hack for the spring is to start a garden if you don't have space for a garden, which I don't think many of us do. My mom has a garden at home which is so boss of her because whenever I go home, I'm like wow, this is actually such a flex to have your food growing on your own land and just being like, Oh, you guys want a salad. Let me just go out and pick all of the veggies and greens and everything make this beautiful homemade homegrown salad. That's honestly goals. I think that's what I'm going to be working towards. I don't have property yet to do that. But I am going to be starting that with making an herb garden. I don't know if you guys fall into this pitfall. But I feel like whenever I buy herbs at the grocery store, I either don't have enough or they go bad. I just really want to get good at growing my own herbs and taking care of them and using them in my cooking. Let me know if anybody is on the same wavelength. Another lifestyle globe tip is to find your workout sweet spot with exercise you enjoy. So what that means is, if you're not a morning girly, trust me, you will not get any sort of benefit out of forcing yourself to go to a

6: 17:39

30am Spin cycling class, it's just not going to happen. And same thing if you are a morning girlie leaving the gym or your exercise routine to the very last thing in your day when you ideally want to be winding down getting ready for the next day is probably going to throw a wrench into your workout plans and make it extremely difficult for you to build a routine that you can adhere to stick to show up for and love. Just something to keep in mind as you're switching up your routines, maybe finding new exercises, new things to do in the gym, go at a time that works for you. That makes it easy for you to show up and stay consistent with what you're doing. Don't make it difficult on yourself. And finally, for lifestyle and home type things. I'm a huge believer in that you're getting ready space is your personal sanctuary. I have one my bathroom, my husband has his getting ready sanctuary, his bathroom. And the way that you maintain it and organize it is also a direct reflection and big emphasis on the results that you get when you're getting ready. So I used to be the type of person that would take a long time getting ready and put a lot of effort into my appearance and my looks. One thing that I never did though, is factor in cleanup time. So I would always leave a mess like literally my getting ready vanity will look like an actual warzone. So something that I'm picking up a little bit more from my husband is that he is always factored in cleanup time to his getting ready routine, which is honestly pretty impressive. He never leaves his bathroom messy or unorganized. He always leaves it pretty much like he did when he walked in. So that's very impressive of him as a man something for me to take note of and take example from and try to implement myself. So you're getting ready space as your sanctuary. Do whatever you need to do to make it feel more so that way you know you can put your vision board up in there you can have a candle that you like every time you do either your morning routine or your evening routine, just make it really special and make it very meaningful to you moving into beauty foods. I'm just gonna go over some foods that you may or may not be eating already. I just wanted to remind you what they're good for and what they help with in terms of beauty and health. First stop amaranth amaranth is a type of grain and it's going to be high in amino acids, which are really vital for our body's protein synthesis and for us to build any sort of tissue, so amaranth is good and amino acids calcium, iron, iron is very important for women. Remember, as women we're going to need twice as much iron than men and children. Amaranth is also going to have eight grams of protein and it's going to help support your hair, your skin and your bone. Next we have a pretty pairing so a pretty pairing is two foods that when taken together work bettered for stuff. We have pistachio and figs, the vitamin B six and pistachios activates the magnesium in foods that's going to help us have a healthier nervous system magnesium. It's like a de stressor. It's like a muscle relaxant. Next nettle nettle is an herb, I actually have some Nettle Leaf Tea sitting in my pantry. I don't drink it too often because it makes me pee a lot, but it is a powerhouse per detox and it's gonna contain silica silica is really really good for hair and nails and skin. Another thing that nettle is going to be really good at doing is reducing water retention. So if you find yourself to be someone who gets a little bit more bloated or holds on to water a little more than usual drink nettle tea, or just take natural supplements, you can really take this any which way. Next, we're moving on to raw honey, this is a huge favorite and has been kind of like a magic substance solution for 1000s of years. Raw honey has both internal and external benefits. I mean, where do you even start, it's really good for you when you're sick, it will soothe your throw. It is also really good when you buy let's say local honey because local honey isn't as processed as other honey, it's going to contain enzymes and pollen from the local plants and flowers and trees. That's going to be really good for your state system and will hopefully reduce allergies. So if you have seasonal allergies, try to get some raw honey from your area and take about a spoonful up every day and tell me if that doesn't help you with your allergies. Next preparing matcha and grapefruit Green tea contains a component or a compound called EGCG. And what EGCG does is it interrupts the skin's wrinkling process who wouldn't want that right. I definitely want my skin wrinkling process interrupted so watch is gonna have that and then the citrus and the grapefruit helps us absorb Green Tea Benefits that much more. It's like an activator for green tea. I talk a lot about flax seed in cycle health seed cycling flax seed is really important because it's gonna give us those omega threes that help us have gorgeous youthful skin. It helps us regulate estrogen levels. So just in general, flax seed is really, really good for women. Next we have spirulina, spirulina also will have iron protein and chlorophyll and sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is going to be our last food in this category. And it's kind of like nature's probiotic, it keeps gut bacteria healthy. And digestion running helps with mental health, too. So a little serving of sauerkraut daily will do the trick. And yeah, as you guys can tell a lot of these foods that I just went over, they're packed. It's not just one little benefit that they have. They're packed full with multiple benefits that are very beautifying, and help us by aging and fight inflammation, bloating, all the things that we really just don't like as girls some ways that you can boost your self love and self care this spring. The first one is also kind of a mindset based one and that one is to be flexible. When we are flexible and not too rigid. We actually built our resilience. So learn how to build flexibility, you should be able to bend right but not to break like let's say a wrench bots thrown into your plans. Ask yourself, am I going to let one bad moment give me an entire bad day? Am I going to lose this entire bad day? Am I going to lose this entire day just because I'm going to decide that it was bad? Or am I going to lose an entire week of action just because of whatever putting things into perspective like that for yourself will help you deal with stressful things better and build your personal resilience. Another reminder for this self love category is that self love and self care is not selfish. Don't let other people just because they're not taking care of themselves. Don't let them guilt you and lead you into thinking that you are being bad in any way by taking care of yourself because self love isn't selfish. It's essential. It's actually self preservation. You show yourself self respect when you do the things for yourself that you need to get done that nobody else is going to do for you. And that's honestly the truth. The next thing that you can implement more of in the springtime to glow up is scalp health. I think so many of US are focused on what we can see. And that's a lot of our exposed hair and the hair that's been grown out and damaged and dry. That's what we want to fix. And because of that, we're not really thinking preventative, for example, you want to be putting a serum on your scalp every time you wash it, because when you wash your hair, you're removing the oil from your scalp and it's drying it and like we don't really think about the fact that we're doing our facial skincare, we're putting on moisturizer almost every day, if not every day, hopefully. But we're not doing anything for the skin on our scalp. So just something to think about. My life has literally changed so much since I've started scalp, oiling and scalp massage and just really working with my scalp. I have so many new hairs that I just there's always sticking out through my existing hair. I don't know what to do with it. So yeah, scalpels and other really important thing to implement to and your glow up routine this spring is literally think about glowing up all the time. And you will like that's just gonna become your focus, and it will manifest because you're always thinking about how to become prettier, healthy, you're better at what you do smarter, more capable, more resilient, your brain is going to find things and ideas and people that will help corroborate that goal. So as long as you keep thinking about what you want to achieve and taking the actions to do it, it'll happen for you, you'll see those results, you can try dry brushing as well dry brushing is going to be really good at moving the lens through your body. So limp. It's the type of fluid that's almost like, like a garbage collection system in our bodies, it moves kind of alongside our our bloodstream. So we have our blood vessels, our veins in our arteries, but then we also have our lymph that travels alongside those. And that's because the lymph will extract and take toxins out of our bloodstream, put it in our lymph nodes. But the thing about lymph is that we actually have to move it out of the body and kind of break it up and get it moving. Stagnation is limps biggest enemy and stagnated lymph often leads to diseases to scum for all sorts of ailments inflammation, well dry brushing brushes the surface of your skin. And when it comes to the surface of our skin, we have a lot of really, really, really, really, really tiny blood vessels, kind of where the exchanges in our tissues happen. Those blood vessels are so tiny that they're able to literally put oxygen molecules and other things into our tissues and take out things out of our tissues and our cells that don't need to be in there anymore. So those capillaries are literally the smallest of our blood vessels. And that's what we have at the surface of our skin. So when we're dry brushing, we're gently stimulating those capillaries and that helps break up the limbs and start draining everything from less capillaries to the smarter arterioles to the arteries, to then you know where they need to go to flush out. Tribe dry brushing before you get in the shower. First off, it feels really good. It also gives like if you've ever brushed down a horse like with one of those like dry brushes, that's just kind of how I feel when I dry brush. You can also try acupuncture to relax and to blow up. I know that facial acupuncture exists for acne for wrinkles, and also just various acupuncture for various parts of your body. It just depends your practitioner can help you work on. Okay, do you want to de stress? Do you want to loosen some tension? Do you want to work on certain pain points. And you might be asking me Lena, I'm sorry. But how is sticking needles into my body gonna help me relax? Well, it's very counterintuitive, but what happens is when they stick the needle into the surface layer of your muscle, and the needle does not go in deep at all, like it's just a few millimeters. When they stick it into the muscle. At first the muscle is going to tighten up around the needle, but then the needle is going to cause the muscle to relax around it. Think about all the muscles that we have in our bodies that are constantly tensed up tight that we might not even notice until we're like well like I can't move my neck to the side. What acupuncture does is they put the needles into these tight spots in your body and over time, it loosens them up. And finally a self love self care routine thing that maybe can switch up for yourself is try going on your walks without listening to anything but your surroundings. This is definitely a step up from the regular hot girl walk because I think it's pretty common for us to enjoy a podcast or some music on a hot girl walk or even a walking meditation. But I feel like the next level is to just have your phone away not have any headphones on and just observe your surroundings. This for me is kind of necessary as I live in a city and it's a safety concern for me for sure. I can't always be on my phone when I'm walking might get hit by a train or stamped by somebody but there's something so regulating for your nervous system about just walking and watching what's happening around you It's so beautiful, definitely try it. And there's some intentions too that you can take to beautify your routine your life this spring and some intentions that I included for this episode is aim for one serving of the greens daily. This is going to give us a more radiant complexion again, help our liver do its job and detoxifying and keeping our skin clear and beautiful. So a serving of greens could look like broccolini roasted broccolini is so good a Rugal like kale in a salad if that's what you like, or collard greens, just any sort of greens that you like, find a way to incorporate those at least once a day. Another intention that you can set for yourself this spring is to check your skincare and beauty products. Depending on your skin issues, you can check the things that you're constantly using on your face, check them for maybe fungal acne triggers, you can check them for poor clogging ingredients. And yes, girls just because beauty items market themselves as clean beauty. And that's a very hot buzzword especially at Sephora as a clean DNA clean beauty. But clean beauty doesn't mean that the item won't have poor clocking ingredients and won't break you out. So just something really, really important to keep an eye out for and I know it's super grueling and not that not the most fun thing. But you can make it fun where you're going in and you're evaluating all your stuff and just truly seeing if this is something that's going to be helping your skin or is an active intruder in your skin and his making you fight the battle uphill. So another intention that kind of goes along with that. One is to listen to your skin, our skin tells us a lot about what's going on with our lifestyle with what we're doing that our environment. So don't discount things that are going on with your skin. I know it can be really, really tough to deal with skin problems. And it's really vulnerable. It can be really damaging to your self esteem. But listen to your skin. If something's going on with your skin, do the work to get to the bottom of it because it's asking you for help. Another really good intention to have during springtime to set yourself is try not to leave the house unfulfilled. What I mean by that is don't leave the house on an empty stomach, I find that I make the most erratic and unhinged decisions when I leave the house unfulfilled. I leave the house with an empty stomach try to have a chomps a protein bar just something before you set out on your day because truly satiating yourself before you leave the house really makes a big difference on how you move throughout your day how you behave, the decisions that you make what you prioritize, because guess what if you're leaving the house unfulfilled now your morning is taken up by maybe ordering food that's not the best for you just because you're in a crunch in a pitch. So just something to be a little bit more mindful of maybe that intention will work for you and help us be more organized about your life. Another intention that I think is a good reminder for all of us is to journal I truly believe that journaling keeps girls pretty because if we don't journal and if we just allow our thoughts to eat us up, and we're just constantly fighting the wars in our heads that leads to stress that leads to high cortisol that leads to tissue damage, okay, like there's no way that can be good for you. But journaling, I don't know there's something so inherently feminine about it. And I've fallen back in love with journaling over this past week and the evening in the evening. No excuse I have to sit down and I have to write a page about my day and lighting a candle drinking some tea, watching my cursive handwriting just spell out my day and kind of dump everything out and reflect I can't tell you like it just feels like such an integral part in my evening routine. So hopefully that will help you guys too. If you don't journal another intention that's good to set for springtime that kind of goes along with spring cleaning is see where you can make swaps from processed foods to Whole Foods. This is literally at myself more than anybody else with my popcorn snacking. It was just like reaching for chips and that was I get busy and then I don't realize how hungry I get until I'm five or six hours of work in. It is 4pm I have barely even had a full meal. Just girly foraging things you know how it is we just we just forage our meals but that is how the good Lord made us. If I'm thinking for myself like right now, something healthier that I can swap out popcorn for is hummus and crunchy veggies like that's already good. Right? And that also leads me to another intention which is try to eat one raw thing daily and then bump that up to one raw thing per meal. What could that look like a serving of fruit with your breakfast or some veggies during your lunch or dinner? Something raw. Make it easy. It could be an apple with some almond butter, like that's good, but just try to slowly incorporate little things like that into your life. And you'll notice how much more beautiful it makes you for an afternoon pick me up, you guys know that I've been in my coffee era. And I kind of slide in and out of being obsessed with coffee and needing it every single day. I'm out of that era right now. So this is probably going to be easier to talk about. But you know how sometimes we get into the afternoon slump, right, and a lot of us will need that coffee or whatever it is to amp us back up and get us to performing again in the afternoon. Well, some things that you can swap out for coffee for your afternoon, pick me up, you can brew some tea, my favorite has been Earl Grey and lavender tea, that one will do the trick. You can also go for a walk for a few blocks, maybe do a meditation, that's something that's worked for me so well that if I find I'm in a slump in the afternoon, I'll just grab Nova we'll go for a walk for 30 minutes and I'll come back ready, refreshed, revitalized, re energized, refocus. So take a walk around the block and revitalize yourself. And you can make an afternoon adrenal cocktail or jump rope like you might think jump rope that sounds so childish and stupid. But now jump roping kind of activates you about as you rebounds, gets your body kind of amped up and gets yourselves like jazzed up and ready. And so that is our intention section. And finally, our final glow up section for springtime is going to be beauty science, just a few things that have been studied, shown and proven to make us more beautiful. The first one, this is a very interesting one. And it's that doing yoga after eating actually helps your digestion because it brings circulation to your core, right. So any sort of Light Movement, post eating is going to be beneficial because as opposed to you being slumped from your meal and all that blood going to your tummy to digest the food and make use of it if you move and if you go for a little walk that's going to push some of that blood to your peripheral limbs like your arms, your legs, and it's going to keep everything moving, keep everything going. I will be trying some yoga after eating because I don't always have time to go for a whole walk. But I can definitely do a 10 minute yoga after my food because the alternative is an hour nap and I can't be doing that anymore. That takes too much time out of my day. Next, if you are someone who is looking to cook at home more, it's been proven that if your environment is aesthetically pleasing to you, you're more likely to utilize it if you want to cook more at home look at your kitchen be like Is this like a cute space that I want to be in making my beautiful nutritious meals in? Or can we improve on this believe me when you spruce up your kitchen a bit and make it more special and meaningful to you, you will probably want to cook there a little more. The other thing that I personally will be implementing this spring and a kind of have been is nose strips and mouth tape when I'm sleeping. The nose strips have come out of necessity because I was sick over the past week and I literally could not breathe out of my nose. So putting on the nose strips kind of helped open up my nose more and actually helps me breathe through the night time. Trust me there's literally nothing worse than being sick and having to breathe out of your mouth for a full week. No thank you. And on top of that mouth tape. I know mouth tape is gaining a lot of traction in the health and wellness space currently. But truly there is something about mouth tape that just helps you sleep better it will slim down your face and just has a lot more health benefits that reach beyond beauty than we know of with your breathing, your digestion, all sorts of things that we don't really think about. And finally, oxytocin, which is the hormone that our bodies make when we bond with someone physically, oxytocin makes us more beautiful. So I would recommend that you guys appropriately with consent, touch on and hug on the people in your life that's going to beautify you. I know that sounds weird. Well, I'm going to wrap up today's episode. In conclusion, springtime it's a great season for beauty. It's a great time to implement or revitalize your beauty routines and the things that you like to do daily to make yourself look and feel beautiful and healthy. And like we found out during this episode, a prominent theme during springtime health and beauty is to help our bodies do their best at detoxifying. So detox is a big theme during the springtime and all the things that I listed throughout this episode had some sort of element of detox to them, so hopefully won't be too easy to forget. And I want you guys to remember that your ability to redefine yourselves at any moment is one of your most beautifying powers. You can change who you want to be what you want to achieve. And that in itself is so beautiful. And don't forget that when we do all these As we're actually building our intuitive skill at balancing our bodies when we shift our meals habits and intentions with the seasons, it's actually really important for us to pay attention to the seasons and how to assimilate and best use our bodies and our house to win and each season so I want you guys to commit to living like your best self this spring and you're going to feel so much better heading into summer knowing that you did your absolute best to help your body increase your health work on your beauty and just feel and look your absolute best self thank you guys today for joining me on this spring beauty and glow up episode please follow us on Instagram at stellar cycles pod you can download a free grocery guide I have for you in the link in our bio. As always, I'm very happy to see ratings and reviews from you guys. So if you have the time today please leave us a little message of feedback under our show and until the next episode spread the good word about stellar cycles to your fellow friends and let's all elevate our lives, our cycles and our dreams together till next time stellar cycles out