Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions

Six Moves For Clear Skin In 2026

• Stacey

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 23:44

A hard year can leave its mark on your face—and your spirit. After navigating loss, stress, and the shift into full menopause, I set a bold goal for 2026: rebuild health from the cell up and let the skin show the results. This episode lays out six priorities that work together to calm inflammation, balance hormones, and restore that clear, confident glow without needles or quick fixes.

We start with food that actually feeds skin: traditional cooking that soaks, ferments, and slow-simmers to unlock minerals and reduce anti-nutrients. I explain why I pause dairy, gluten, and sugar for acne-prone bodies, then bring them back with intention. From there, we zoom into cellular health—supporting mitochondria with hydrogen water, red light therapy, and PEMF—and how high oxidative stress shows up as breakouts, dullness, and fatigue. I share my “power hour” routine and when these tools matter most, especially through perimenopause and menopause.

Next, we move to targeted, needle-free skin strategies. I’m leaning on IPL, gentle peels, and Clear + Brilliant, plus an exciting autologous stem cell approach using hair follicles. Pair that with barrier-first skincare, smart actives like retinaldehyde or azelaic acid, and face yoga to keep expression natural and tone strong. We dig into peace as a performance enhancer: meditation, prayer, and daily bookends that raise HRV, restore sleep, and support digestion. Gentle detox remains a year-round rhythm—saunas, castor oil packs, herbal teas—especially important for “slow detoxifiers” whose skin speaks first. We round it out with smart movement: daily yoga, Pilates for strength, and nature walks for metabolism and mood.

If you’re ready to stop guessing and build a system that clears acne from the inside out, this conversation gives you a practical map and momentum for the months ahead. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a hopeful reset, and leave a review—then grab the first module of the program free as our thank you.

Click here to book a FREE call to learn more about my 1:1 Clear Skin Program.


Click here to learn more about my 7-Week Clear Skin Program.


Leave a Review and Start my 7-Week Clear Skin Program for FREE:

To get immediate access to the first module of my 7-Week Clear Skin Program, leave a podcast review! Take a screen shot of your review and email it to customersupport@naturopathicbeauty.com and you will be sent your login information!

Here's a short video showing how to leave a podcast review:
https://vimeo.com/1050913528?share=copy#t=0




Fresh Year, Honest Reset

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions where we heal your acne from the inside out. Hello, beauties, and welcome to the Clear Skin Sessions. I'm Dr. Stacey Shillington, Naturopathic Doctor, and this podcast is for you. I know that you are on a clear skin journey. Your skin is not where you want it to be. And I've been helping women heal their acne for 20 years. I've pretty much seen it all. I've pretty much tealed it. And this podcast is to help you clear your skin. So welcome to 2026. It is the beginning of January, and I love the new year because to me it's always about a fresh beginning, a time to just kind of look around at my life and decide what I need to shift in order to feel better, in order to look better. And to be honest, this has been a really big new year's for me, 2026. 2025 was a bit of a rough year. I'm going to tell you a little bit about that in a moment, but it just kind of left me a little fatigued, not feeling my best, not looking my best. And so 2026, I feel like it's a real reset for me. So what happened in 2025? And by the way, I'm sharing this with you. I'm sharing kind of my personal story, where I'm at, what I'm looking to do this year. And I I want this information to help you, to inspire you, because there are so many things that you can do to up-level your health. When you uplevel your health, you heal your skin. And I've been suffering, I suffer with skin issues that, you know, I solve by healing my body. If I didn't do this work, my skin would be an absolute disaster. So, you know, I suffered with acne for many years. It was really chronic. It was quite awful, as I'm sure you can relate to. And um, so this is the work that I do on an ongoing basis to keep my body healthy and in a place where my skin is glowing, where it looks good. I'm 52 years old. I think compared to a lot of other 52-year-olds, two-year-old, 52-year-olds, I think my skin looks pretty good. However, I'm going to talk about that in a minute as well. So 2025 was one of those years. It was a year where, you know, I was confronted with two really stressful deaths, you know, in my my circle, which was which took a lot out of me and my family. Um, my husband lost his job, and then he also had some really serious health issues that we dealt with. So just those activities on its own, those were very, very exhausting and very stressful. And in fact, I actually my back seized up one day in late August so badly that I was in bed for a week. I could not even move. And I think it was just all accumulative stress. But for a very active person who always prided myself on never having any aches or pains, that was a bit of a shock. I was like, wow, okay, stress is really affecting me. I have to take a step back and I have to look at what's going on. And, you know, I'm I've very much monitor my HRV. I have an aura ring. I'm on top of what's going on in my body. So I could see that, you know, a lot of markers were off. My HRV was really low. My sleep wasn't great. Um, you know, I just wasn't feeling that great. My body had a lot of aches and pains, and that had has never happened to me before. I didn't have the same energy. And stress, stress just takes a lot out of us. So at the end of 2025, I was like, wow, you know, something needs to shift here. I need to really take control of my health, make some changes. And the other thing that happened to me in 2025, which I didn't mention, is that I 100% officially went into menopause. So that is a shift for any women out there that are in that stage of life, going into menopause is definitely a change. The physiology feels it, less progesterone, less, much less estrogen. And so dealing with that has been an adventure as well. So 2025 for me was a year of, you know, stress. And you know, it's funny, unlike many years before, obviously, I've been on the planet for 52 years. I've had a few years, but 2025 was definitely one of those years that challenged me, challenged my mindset. You know, I really had to learn how to think positively, how to surrender. And I think that was my word for 2025 was surrender. Just like, all right, I'm up for the journey. I'm up for it. Let's go. I'm up for the adventures. So, anyways, I feel that's a lot of preamble to what I am doing in 2026 just to get my system back on track and to really take everything to the next level. Because now that I'm in menopause, you know, I have to take even better care of my body. As we, I mean, we can age absolutely beautifully. And this excites me and this really drives me, this really motivates me because I'm like, wow, you know, I can be 80, 90, 100 years old and still be really strong and vital and you know, have a great quality of life. But the older you get, the more you have to work for it. So I have to up level a few things in my life, and that is what I'm sharing with you. And I'm sure if you're much younger than me, you don't have to do all of these things. Absolutely not. Most of my patients, they're in their 30s, and what I'm sharing with you, this is not not, I'm not saying you have to do all this stuff in your life, but this is the work that gets people to an optimized place. So there are six things, six things that I am focusing on this year, and I want to share them with you one by one. The first thing is my diet. So I have committed to using a cookbook called Nourishing Traditions for 2026. And this cookbook is about traditional cooking. It's about the cooking that our grandma used to do: a lot of soups, a lot of stews, a lot of roast dinners, um, teaching me how to prepare food so that nutrients are as bioavailable as possible. For instance, soaking grains and soaking nuts and fermenting food. So this is the style of cooking that I'm committing to in 2026. I'm very excited about it. One of the reasons I'm so excited about it is because I have teenage boys and my boys get incredibly hungry. So, you know, I definitely need to present them with a diet that satisfies them. And more of a traditional diet is definitely the way they want to go. They want to have like the stews, they love the stews, they love soups, they love very hearty foods. So, you know, this diet is as much for them as it is for me. I mean, research and, you know, a lot of medicine is showing us that traditional diets are really quite intelligent. There is wisdom and there is experience in these traditional diets that allows us to just be more nourished, to absorb vitamins and minerals. And a lot of the times the diet that we've been, we've been following for many, many years, and me included, as a naturopathic doctor, we have not utilized processing techniques that allow us to uh consume as many nutrients as we need. For instance, I will give you a big for instance, you know, probably about six, seven years ago, we were eating a lot of kale salads. I remember making this kale caesar salad and it was delicious and it was fun and everybody loved it. And then we find out that kale is actually an ant is full of anti-nutrients when it is raw. You know, it is actually going to leach minerals. And not only that, it contains lots of oxalate. So while we're eating this raw kale salad and we think we're being so healthy, we are actually depleting our body of nutrients and introducing oxalates. So there's quite a few examples of that. And of course, I go into this cookbook, I open it up, and they're like, don't eat kale, raw, whatever you do. So, you know, there's a lot of traditional wisdom that we need to re-embrace and we need to re-examine so that we can be sure that we are eating the very best quality diets for our bodies possible. So the cookbook that I'm using this year is called Nourishing Traditions. It's by a woman. Um her name is, oh my gosh, it was just on the tip of my tongue. I'll put it in the show notes, but Sally Sally Fallon, Sally Fallon, that's her name. And uh is it's quite an epic book. So I encourage you to pick it up and read through it if diet is something that you really want to take a look at. If you're suffering with with acne, there are certain foods that I want you to hold off on for until we get your acne under control, we get everything cleared, and that's dairy, and that's gluten and sugar as well. And I'm gonna do a whole podcast on sugar because my sugar consumption over the past few months did get out of control. And whenever my sugar gets out of control, my body rebels. And so I want to talk about that, but I'm gonna do that in an entire podcast on its own. Okay, the second thing that I'm doing this year is I am focusing on cellular health. So when my husband got sick this fall, I invested in some tools to really help nourish and energize the mitochondria and the cells of the body. So hydrogen water. Hydrogen water is excellent at reducing oxidative stress. Red light, I got a red light panel. This is great at energizing the mitochondria. So this is really good for the mitochondria, a pamph mat. And this is again, this is very good at energizing the mitochondria. Um, what else am I doing? Brain tap. Brain tap is a headset. You use it for meditations, but it includes uh visual light, so it really stimulates the brain. So it's very good for the parasympathetic nervous system and getting us into a state of relaxation. And I have put together a power hour morning routine using these biohacking devices to really up-level the health of my cells and the health of my mitochondria. So this is excellent when you want to age beautifully. Now, if you're 30 years old and you want to do this, that's great. But typically when you're 30, you don't need to do this. This is something we need to do when we start to get, you know, into middle age and we really want to enhance and maintain optimal health. So don't panic, you don't need to run out and buy all these devices. But if you are a perimenopause, menopause, and you do want to do some extra things to boost cellular health and cellular health, that is the foundation of our health. If cellular health declines, that's when we start to age. And I will say very often, people that have acne, we tend to have high levels of oxidative stress. And quenching that oxidative stress by making sure the mitochondria are functioning properly, um, this is really, really important. So it can only be beneficial. Okay, the third thing that I'm doing, this is all about targeted skin health. So 52 years old, menopausal. I have been, I've been doing great with my skincare up until now. It's been very simple. I've never done Botox, I've never done fillers, and I don't intend to start doing those at all, but I do need to take my skincare to the next level. And last week I was with one of my very good friends, a medical esthetician. She's late 50s, I think, and her skin looks so good. I was actually salivating over her skin. So, you know, she's helping me this year put together a protocol. A few months ago, we took some hair follicles from my head, some hair strands, and we are able to get stem cells from these hair follicles. So we are going to be doing stem cell therapy on my face this year, which I'm very, very excited about. We're doing some IPL, we're doing some peels, we're doing a clear, brilliant, clear, and brilliant laser. So I'm very excited about that. Just to keep things fresh, just to keep things as youthful as possible. I always like to do natural things. I do not, I'm terrified of fillers. I have tried Botox a few times in my life, but you know what? I I actually just like the look of my face as it is, even though I have some crow's feet, even though, you know, it's not as youthful as it once was, obviously, but that's because I'm not as youthful, but I do want to maintain it as much as possible. So this is more about maintaining and optimizing versus, you know, injecting something foreign into my skin, freezing muscles. I really don't believe in that. I do a lot of face yoga. I really care for the muscular tone in my face because when you're doing Botox over and over again, you're freezing those muscles. Those muscles actually lose their strength. So when the Botox wears off, your face is going to be sagging more than it would be without the Botox. But again, that's another discussion, and we can talk about that in another podcast. I feel like I'm going on and on here. Um, the fourth thing that I'm doing, the my number one possession is my peace. Peace. P-E-A-C-E. Having a feeling of peace within yourself. This is the most important thing. This is my number one priority. I have been cultivating this peace for many decades, and I'm protecting it like crazy. I've had a yoga practice since 1995, a daily yoga practice. I do meditation, I do the course of miracles, I bookend my day. So, first thing when I wake up, last thing before I go to bed, I am meditating, I'm reading Course of Miracles, I am praying, I am in a zone. I go into that zone. I don't know if you guys have been into that zone yet. If you haven't, go because it is the best place ever and it fuels you and it it gives you the energy and the strength and the passion to walk through your days very intentionally. So cultivating and maintaining peace is my number one priority. And this, of course, is critical for the nervous system. This is what ultimately, ultimately, ultimately gives you a nervous system that is calm, that is resilient, and that can carry you through, you know, whatever life throws your way. So, you know, 2025 was tough. I think overall I did get through it quite well, but there's definitely room for improvement. And I see that, and I'm like, okay, yeah, I didn't maintain peace and serenity all the time because I'm human, but you know, I think I can even do better next time that the universe throws something my way that I am not expecting or that is not necessarily, you know, positive. It's the universe is teaching us something. We have to reframe things. So that's my spiritual practice. That is my priority, that is what keeps me balanced and happy. Happy. Um, okay, the fifth thing is just rededicating, you know, continual detoxification practices. I my skin is the weak spot in my body. It is going to show, you know, it is going to break out when my body is not doing great. I'm a very poor detoxifier, as are most of my acne patients. And so I always do detox practices, whether it's sauna, whether it's castor oil packs, whether it's hydrotherapy, whether it's herbs, whether it's homeopathy, whether it's a cleanse or a more official detox. There's always something that I am doing to help my body detoxify. Because if I don't help my body detoxify, toxins are going to build up. My skin is going to take up the slack. I'm going to start to get breakouts. I'm going to start to get age spots. My skin is going to start speaking in a language that, you know, I really don't want it to speak. So I'm always doing light detoxification. Now, you know, that and that is it. Detox ebbs and flows throughout the year. So right now, in the middle of winter, I'm not going to embark upon an intense detoxification fast or anything like that. This is a time for the body to be treated very, very gently. So I do that, but I'm still supporting detoxification, even though, you know, this is a very gentle, very yin time of the year. And how do I do that? I drink teas, which are really great. I do certain supplements, I do homeopathy, you know, and these are the practices that I use. And I do sauna. Oh my gosh, I love sauna in the middle of the winter. It is a huge longevity practice. So I consider it biohacking, but it's also a huge detoxification process. And my husband and I are actually committing to three saunas a week, which is pretty fun because it's kind of like one of our bonding activities. It's good for our relationship too, which is always a bonus. And then the sixth thing that I am focusing on this year for beautiful skin is smart exercise. And, you know, this is something that I've been cultivating for years and I've been practicing for years, but I always like to double down on it in January to make sure, you know, everything's in place. So I've had a morning yoga practice, as I mentioned, since 1995. I maintain that. Some days it's, you know, a longer practice than other days, but I feel the difference. The days I do not do that practice, I absolutely feel it in my body. I love it. But because I'm 52, I need to maintain muscle. Yoga does that, but not as much as I would probably need. I do Pilates a couple times a week, and I love Pilates, keeps me long and lean, um, but really develops that strength, which I like. I'm not a heavy lifter. So um I'm I the thought of going to a gym to lift weights actually repulsed. I don't like that thought. That's not something that I would find enjoyable. Pilates, however, that's something that I find very enjoyable. So adding in Pilates a couple times a week, my daily yoga practice, and then I just get outside. I go for forest walks every single day if I can. I actually get in my car and I drive to a local park and I walk in the park for about 45 minutes. If I'm in Toronto, if I'm not in Toronto, and if I'm not in Toronto, I'm usually in Huntsville, which is a town a few hours north. Then I'm out in like the big national parks doing cross country skiing, doing hiking, getting outside for a couple hours and just being in nature. And that that is my food. That is what I really, really love. So those are Are the six things that I am focusing on this year so that I can have beautiful skin? And but more than that, so I can be healthy, so that I can enjoy my life, so I can feel that peace that I was describing to you earlier. So would love to hear what you are doing for 2026. And if you need help getting a protocol together for your clear skin journey, if you're suffering with acne, if you're suffering from any type of skin issue right now, check out the show notes. My seven-week clear skin program, this is a program I have put together. I started it in 2017. I've been fine-tuning it since then. It's based on my 20 years of practice as a naturopathic doctor healing the skin and healing acne. It's also based on me reading thousands of functional medicine tests. This program is not based on, you know, just some whimsical, you know, protocol I put together. It's based on solid scientific, you know, information, research, testing. And I put you through a seven-week program where I deliver this information to you step by step so you can incorporate it. Now, I'm not necessarily promising your skin's going to be clear in seven weeks. That's not how it works. But you'll be able to get the information in seven weeks, put it together in a protocol and go forward with a precise system that has been proven to help women clear their skin. That is what I'm promising you. The cost, super affordable,$4.97. Check the show notes. If you would like to leave a review of this podcast, our gift to you is the first module of the program free. So check the show notes for that. If you know you want to work with me and my team one-on-one, where we do testing for you, we do GI mapping testing, we do organic acid testing, we do functional blood work and any other tests that you may need, interpret it. We put together a personalized protocol. Book a free call to learn more about my one-on-one clear skin program. This is the program that has helped thousands of women get clear skin, especially those that have been suffering with chronic acne for a period of time. Often there's a lot of deep-rooted, you know, imbalances that need to be sorted out. And that's what I specialize in doing myself and my team. We are here to help you. So I hope that this podcast has been interesting for you, not overwhelming. I know I do a lot of things, but I've also been doing this work for many years. I've been a naturopathic doctor for 20 years, and I've been doing this work long before then. So I've had time to cultivate a lifestyle that incorporates a lot of different pieces that I personally love and that keep me afloat. They keep me feeling good, they keep my skin beautiful. So if you want to, you if you want to gain access to all my learning and start incorporating your own lifestyle that is going to support clear skin, check out the show notes. All the links are in there. And I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day. And here's to a healthy and beautiful twenty twenty-six. See you later.