How Inflammation In Your Body Can Negate All Your Facial Exercises Work
Two Lessons Learned About Facial Inflammation
A dear friend of mine called one morning.
She was excited because she had discovered the answer to one of her ‘why’ questions, why does my face swell sometimes and not others.
Her search for causes of facial inflammation was finally over.
She tracked the swelling–which was especially pronounced in the area of her eyelids–to chicken! She repeated the experiment with another meal of chicken and sure enough, her face had literally aged years just from chicken!As for me, I never knew that inflammation was aging my face and me until I stepped into a cryotherapy chamber for treatment.
This is a brand new treatment found in the U.S., brought here by pioneers Todd and Kevin Kramer from Europe and Russia. Six NBA teams use cryotherapy so it’s been only something available to elite athletes until now.
Cryotherapy protocols have been used in other countries since the 1970s. In fact, the Europeans have created entire protocols for hundreds of diseases and disorders.
What Is Cryotherapy Treatment?
The treatment involves first walking into an “icebox” with a temperature of -77 degrees Fahrenheit.
After 30 seconds of getting used to this temperature while wearing workout clothes (and mittens, ear protection and socks to protect the Achilles tendon), you would then enter the deep freeze chamber.
The temperature here is -166 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s cold in there!
By walking around in circles, though, you can generate a little bit of body heat during the 3 minutes you are in there. Your skin temperature drops about 40 degrees in the cryotherapy.
Then you come out, ride a stationery bike for 10 minutes and feel all the blood return to your arms and legs. And next, you get cryotherapy spot treatment on your face. This only lasts a few minutes.
How Cryotherapy Works?
The first time I did this I could not believe what happened to my eyelids and facial inflammation. The swelling literally went from sagging eyelids to non-sagging.
If you’re doing facial exercises, you know yourself that the sooner you can eliminate a saggy eyelid, the brighter and younger your face will look.
The cold temperature of cryotherapy stimulates collagen production long-term, but in the short term the immediate benefit is a decrease in inflammation.
And that’s why I had such good results.
I had inflammation in my body that I couldn’t get rid of. I feared working out which only made it worse.
Cryotherapy is similar to what you would expect to find if you applied ice to the body: a decrease in inflammation. But who could sit in an ice bath for 15 minutes?
It’s painful and when you come out, you’re dripping wet. How unpleasant is that?
It would be literally impossible to soak your face in a bucket of ice to decrease inflammation although some beauty pageant winners will apply ice to their face before applying makeup on the morning of the contest.
Decreasing inflammation can decrease any puffiness in the face, period.
Background Information On Inflammation
Inflammation is literally a killer. It kills people when there’s so much inflammation in the body that healing cannot occur.
Inflammation kills people when it’s tied to an infection that has become systemic (throughout the entire body). Inflammation makes life miserable.
Here are some additional times you will suffer from inflammation:
- When you have arthritis, joints will be inflamed
- When you have your period and your body swells
- When you are overweight or obese, inflammation is occurring because of the excess fat
- When you have previous injuries that don’t heal
- If you have a disease such as SLE
- If you have plaque in your arteries, you have inflammation going on inside your blood vessels
- When you have acne
Inflammation is tied to what you eat and what you don’t eat. These foods/diets can cause inflammation in the body:
- A high processed foods diet
- Foods loaded with sugar and sweeteners
- Foods with artificial sweeteners
- A high meat diet without the vegetables
- A diet lacking omega 3 fats
- A diet lacking vitamin E
- Foods you are allergic to or sensitive to
- Vitamin and mineral deficiencies
The big question is what can be done for inflammation. The real answer is address the list of things that cause it.
To this day, the medical answer has been only one: corticosteroids, powerful hormones that can unfortunately destroy the body, too.
The Relationship Between Inflammation And Facial Exercises
If you work out, your muscles will be inflamed for a period of time, then heal.
However, if there’s too much inflammation in the rest of your body, your recovery time will lengthen.
Meanwhile, this inflammation in your body could be affecting your facial muscles. If you experience puffiness in your face–and do not know why, now you have a reason. Inflammation can become systemic.
When you work out your facial muscles, too, you could have slight amounts of facial inflammation.
The reason why facial exercises helps quite a bit in tightening the face is because the muscular activity can end up getting muscles to fire. This then causes an increase in circulation, and causes the inflammatory compounds to be washed away.
Stagnation is equal to pain and puffiness. We must get our muscles moving–no matter where they are in the body. All those things that can cause inflammation then become your enemy.
The inflammation in the body ages you–and your face. You may not realize you even have facial inflammation until it’s gone!
So keep doing your facial exercises and do eliminate as many of the causes of inflammation. And consider trying a little cryotherapy if nothing else works.