Clear for Life

You can’t get clear until your self-image is clear. Holistic health is the only reliable way to permanently clear skin. Readers love Clear for Life.

Those are just few of the results of a recent customer survey I did. Thanks for everyone who got back to me. Here’s feedback on the feedback, and few golden nuggets that help you get clear. You’ll pick up something useful even if you haven’t read Clear for Life.

You can’t outperform your self-image

Interestingly quite a few people commented that CFL gives them fantastic results when they stick to it. Unfortunately they keep falling off the wagon and in the process making a mess of their skins.

While I agree that staying healthy in today’s world takes some work, I wouldn’t say it’s difficult. The truth is that eating and living healthy is easy - once you get over your own limits.

If you find yourself repeating a pattern where you make progress and then fall back, I believe you need to work on your self-image.

In the personal growth circles it’s well-known that you can’t outperform your self-image.

Deep in your subconscious mind you have an image of yourself; your self-image. That image shows what you really believe and think about yourself. It shows what you can and cannot do. It shows what your life is like.

Your mind’s job is to make sure that your life matches your self-image. Scientists say that 95% or more of our behavior is subconscious. Humans like to believe they behave rationally and logically, but even a cursory look shows this is not true.

Your subconscious mind controls most of your actions and choices. It guides your life to the fulfillment of your self-image. One way this happens is through your thoughts. If you think exercise is boring, you’ll find it hard to motivate yourself to exercise. If you believe eating healthy is difficult, you’ll find that it is. But if you believe exercise is fun and eating healthy is delicious and fulfilling, living a healthy life gets easy.

While it’s true that you are free to choose your thoughts most people don’t exercise that power. Instead the choice happens in the subconscious level. And here’s where your self-image guides your destiny.

In each moment your subconscious feeds your mind with thoughts and images that guide your life towards your self-image. If you haven’t trained your mind your life inevitably slips towards your self-image - even if you fight it.

Acne can be part of your self-image directly or indirectly. You may see yourself as a victim of this horrible curse. Or you may, for example, believe that you don’t deserve love; acne then justifies that belief and gives you something to point your finger at, you can say the reason you haven’t found love is because nobody would date anyone with your skin.

I used to be afraid of success. I has a belief that it’s better to be small and not attract too much attention on myself - thanks to my childhood. This held me back in many ways. For example my mind created food cravings. I used to be able to stick to raw food diet for few days. But regularly also found myself eating pizza, coke or some other junk. I pushed my limits and my mind had to bring me back to my “comfort level”.

Luckily I found that belief and got rid of it. The food cravings disappeared overnight. Now I’m free to choose my meals and eating healthy is easy.

If you keep hitting a wall and can’t get past a certain point, I recommend you work on upgrading your self-image. Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins shows you how.

Holistic health is the only realizable way to permanently clear skin

Going through the feedback it got painfully obvious that getting clear is a holistic effort. Acne is a complicated problem and I don’t think anyone really knows how it happens. Equally obvious is that there’s no simple solution that would be permanent and would work reliably for many people.

Constantly working to improve your health is the only way to permanently clear skin. Further, you must put in all the pieces of the puzzle. Health is not just about diet or exercise. You have to work on it at many levels. You have to eat healthy, you have to move, you have to sleep well, you have to remain positive, and so on.

The feedback shows that you’ll get the best results if all the elements of health are in balance. Weakness in one area can hold you back from getting 100% clear skin.

Most acne treatments ignore this fundamental truth, so is it any wonder their track record is so miserable?

The biggest problem areas for people were sleep and stress and negative attitude.

Stress and negative attitude are related to your self-esteem and mental image, and I wrote a bit about sleep here:

Feeling tired and can’t figure out why?

6 Months to clear skin

I also have to admit that I may have been too optimistic about the time it takes to get clear. I usually tell 3 to 4 months is a reasonable time frame for big improvements.

While many people get good results within 4 months this may not be enough to get you completely clear.

I’ve gotten quite a few emails from people who tell me that they’ve been following CFL for 3 to 4 months and are still breaking out. Granted, their acne is much better than it was before starting CFL. Cystic acne has faded to whiteheads and breakouts happen less frequently and fade away quicker.

Still, when you expect to be completely clear, it may be hard to appreciate these changes and many people focus on their remaining acne - instead of how much better their skin looks now.

I should have communicated more forcefully that in the 3 month mark people are still going through the detox process and it’s normal to keep breaking out. It doesn’t mean you do something wrong or you couldn’t get clear.

From the feedback I get 6 months seems to be a better timeframe for completely, or nearly, clear skin.

Of course this changes from person to person, and I’m sure some people say they got clear much faster and some say it took longer than 6 months.

People love Clear for Life

I’m especially happy about this - and perhaps even a little proud. I asked those customers who bought Clear for Life at least 6 weeks ago - so that they had enough time putting it into practice - how satisfied they are with it.

A whopping 51% gave the highest rating. Here are the results:

About 10% of the people I send the survey filled it. I realize that there can be a positive bias in the answers - people who are happy with CFL are more likely to respond to the survey. Still, it shows people get results with Clear for Life.

And if you haven’t read Clear for Life the chances are you’ll love it.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Your friends see your new diet as an open seasons for nasty jokes? Perhaps you could have written this email.

Just as a side note, when you do decide to go out with friends, do you find it easier to cheat / enjoy your food (and not invoke cognitive dissonance) or do you have to explain your life philosophy of being a raw vegan? Personally, my friends do not want to hear such nonsense and I get so much crap everyday for how I eat but oh well!

I don’t have any rules regarding my diet, so the concept of cheating on my diet doesn’t make any sense in my case.

Instead of rules I have preferences. Those preferences change depending on the situation I’m in and what I want to achieve (my goals). Often they are related to health, but not always. When I go out with my friends I tend to focus more on just having a good time.

So I try to use diet to my benefit without letting it rule my life.

Perhaps as a consequence my friends never give me grief about my diet. They know that I eat in a week more fruits than they probably eat in a year, but they hardly ever mention it. Sometimes they are a bit curious and ask question (usually arising out of dietary ignorance), but they do so out of curiosity.

I also never bring up my diet. Sometimes they want to eat in a place I just don’t want to eat (such as McDonald’s). In those cases I tell them ‘I can’t eat that crap, let’s go somewhere else’. I just tell them it’s bad for my skin/health and makes me feel terrible afterwards without going into ‘I’m a raw vegan and can’t eat that’ nonsense.

I don’t think your friends intentionally want to see you fail in your diet. At least if you don’t make an issue out of it. They probably do give you grief about it if you let your diet come in between you and your friends. If they notice that it stops you from going out and having fun with them.

So don’t let your diet rule over your entire life. Remember that being happy is at least as important as eating healthy. In most cases you can still make reasonable food choices even when eating out with your buddies. As a guy, just don’t order a salad if your buddies have big burgers. That’s just asking for trouble

Finally talk to your friends. I’m sure they understand you don’t want to eat at McDonald’s because of your skin.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Lot of people email and ask what I eat normally.

I decided to come clean and unloaded everything from my fridge and cupboards on my bed. Here’s what it looks like:

So let’s see what we have:

• Tons of bananas
• Mangoes
• Oranges
• Pineapple
• Watermelon
• Peaches, Asian variety
• A dragon fruit
• Few bags of greens
• Tomatoes, cucumbers and few other vegetables

At any given day those make up for the majority of my diet; though the selection of fruits changes depending on availability, season and whatever I happen to fancy.

Most of that will be gone in the next two to three days.

What’s missing from the picture are the few kilos of frozen berries occupying my freezer.

Let’s move to the stuff I eat less frequently:

• Some dried fruits, occasionally snack with these
• Tuna, sometimes add it to salads
• Olives, again for salads
• Mix of sesame seeds and seaweed, excellent stuff to sprinkle on salads
• Salad dressing
• Bottle of lemon juice

Finally we have the rest

• Instant coffee, I know it tastes horrible and is very bad for your health, but what can I say I’m hooked on coffee and have no plans to quit it.
• Green tea and herbal teas
• Natural and unsweetened cocoa, sometimes drink this in the evenings
• Salt, baking soda and honey, bought them to try some homemade skin care recipes but don’t eat them
• Instant oats, unopened for the last few months and I doubt I’ll ever open it

That’s about. When I’m at home that’s what I eat.

I have to say that when I’m out I eat more ‘normal’ food, i.e. cooked food. I usually eat one cooked meal a day, usually Thai food since I’m in Thailand. Some days I’m 100% raw, aside from two cups of coffee.

If eating like this scares your socks off, don’t worry, you don’t have to go this far just to get clear. 50% raw and the rest from natural, whole foods should do the trick.

Just so you know, I just didn’t one day decide to eat like this. It has been a gradual transition to me. Now eating mostly raw is very natural for me. It makes me feel fantastic and I wouldn’t want to eat any other way.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

“Help, I’m losing too much weight and my friends comment how skinny I look!”

Please cool down, you are not going to fade away : )

This is one of the most frequently asked questions I get from Clear for Life customers. Perhaps it’s on your mind also, so I wrote a detailed reply to it.

Let’s start with an ABC of body composition and weight control.

Three elements make up for your body weight: water, lean tissue and fat. Water makes up as much as 70% of our total body mass.

Water has many important functions in the body. One is that it’s used to dilute toxins to bring down their concentration to less harmful level.

When the body cannot eliminate all the toxins it has to store them. But it doesn’t store just the toxins, it also stores the water they are diluted in. Solution to pollution is dilution.

Once you stop putting toxins in the organs of elimination have a chance to catch up. The load of toxins in the body starts to go down. As the body gets rid of the toxins it also releases the extra water.

Any rapid weight loss is always water loss.

That’s one part of the weight loss issue.

Second, and this may make you a bit uncomfortable, nearly all of us are under muscled and over fat.

Here’s a quote from Dr. Graham:

“When thin people have a desire to gain weight, they usually fail to recognize that they need to gain muscle, not fat. Almost every client who has even come to me wanting to curtain their weight loss because they thought they were getting too ’skinny’ actually still needed to lose some fat…

One client, a high-end fashion model, came to me saying she would do whatever I suggested in order to extend her youthful beauty, but she could not afford to lose any more weight. She was long and lanky and looked skinny to be sure, but she was under muscled. When we measured her body fat, she was shocked to discover that it was almost 29% - at least 10% above what I would consider healthy. She did not need to lose weight; she needed to lose fat while gaining muscle.”

Dr. Graham
The 80/10/10 Diet

For most people it only looks like they have muscle because of water and fat. Water inflates their muscles. Within the muscles there’s also lots of fat, and there’s a padding of fat around the muscles.

Once the body starts to release water and fat it looks like our muscles are shrinking. But in reality we have only been stripped off our illusion of muscles. Perhaps for the first time we have to face the fact of how under muscled most of us really are.

Muscle loss happens only in two cases: you don’t use the muscles or you starve yourself. Starving is not an issue, because the body first burns off fat before using muscle for energy. If you purposefully leave yourself calorie-deficient for long periods of time (months) it may happen, but for the vast majority it’s not an issue.

So the only way you can lose muscle is not to use them. Use it or lose it. And as you start using them your muscles gain their size back quickly.

That’s another part to weight loss mystery.

As you can see it doesn’t really make sense to look at your weight and ’skinniness’ as an indicator of how well you are doing. Rather focus on how you are feeling. Do you still have energy? What about your athletic capabilities, are they still the same/improving/declining?

As long as you feel great and can perform athletically (the way you used to) you have nothing to worry about.

Initially, you may experience a drop in your athletic capabilities. That’s a result of detoxification.

Initially the body may break down more tissue than it can rebuild. So you may lose a little strength. That’s ok. It’s temporary and you will gain the ‘lost’ muscle back.

It doesn’t happen to everybody, but if it happens to you it’s important to be aware of it, and keep an eye on it. This ‘weak’ period should not last for more than a month or two. If it goes on for more than two months, you may have a problem with your diet.

With strength training you can minimize or completely avoid this weak period. I’ve noticed and heard from other people that by training your muscles you can prevent the temporary muscle loss.

On a personal note I can tell that none of this happened to me. Yes, I’ve lost some weight, but I was carrying few extra pound that I was happy to get rid of. Instead of looking skinny I have far more muscle now than I did when I was eating a more standard diet. Putting on muscle has become much easier than it used to be. I get bigger gains from doing less work - you just can’t beat that.

My body builds itself almost automatically. And all I’m doing is to follow the diet guidelines in Clear for Life and the exercise routine I learned from Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program.

I never go to the gym anymore. My strength training routine takes only 5 to 10 minutes a day. I only do exercises that I enjoy - I just can’t stand boring and repetitive stuff. And I do it all in my home.

When exercise is so simple and fun there’s no need to look skinny. That’s why I recommend Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program.

So to sum things up, ensure that you:

• Do something with your muscles
• Eat sufficient calories
• Keep your fat consumption under 20% of total calories, preferably under 10%
• Eat a pound of greens a day
• Drink enough water; even a slight dehydration can lead to reduced capacity for muscular work

Isn’t it funny how good things just stack up when you do the right things? The same advice that helps you to get clear also gives you a great body. It’s a total transformation from skinny and acne ridden to clear, athletic and sexy. And that really sucks when everyone else is getting fatter and lazier : )

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Share your views and experiences about acne, getting clear and weight loss at Clear Skin Space forums: “Help, I’m losing too much weight!”

I recently changed my chemical-laden shaving cream to coconut oil and that has made a huge difference on my skin.

The skin on my neck is very sensitive and used to get flaming red after shaving. I thought that it was part and parcel of shaving and that there’s not much I could do about it. Since I started shaving with coconut oil my skin takes it much better. Sure it gets a bit red, but not nearly as much as when I used chemical-based shaving creams. So probably the chemicals had a lot to do with it.

And for some reason I’m going through an extended detox at the moment. Due to that I’ve gotten some nasty pimples on my neck. They’ve already settled down quite a bit, but are still there. I used to hate shaving because it turned those pimples really red and angry looking. Of course they settled down quickly but it was obvious shaving irritated them a lot. Even that has settled down after switching to coconut oil.

Coconut oil also makes the blades so much easier to clear. While using shaving cream the space between razor blades used to get full of cream and whatever was coming off my skin. I had to open the tap full before it flushed the blades clean. With coconut oil I just have to run a little water through the blades and they come clean nicely and easily.

The only downside is that it’s a bit messy. I have to wipe the oil into a towel to get it out of my hands. But I’m willing to wash my towels a bit more often to keep shaving with coconut oil.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Does it feel like your family is against you getting clear?

Of course I don’t mean that they literally would want you to have acne. But that they don’t seem to get what you have to do to get clear. And because of that discourage you, or at least do not support you. Because they don’t understand natural health they think you are nuts eating the way you do.

Perhaps these people are your parents, or your loved ones, and this situation causes tension in your relationship.

How do you live in such a situation? That was the question Alissa emailed me.

Right off the bat I have to say that I can’t speak from my own experience. I have lived on my own for more than 10 years and didn’t have to go through that. Plus I’m lucky to be blessed with a mother who respects my decisions and doesn’t want to interfere with my life - unless I ask for her advice.

Still, I think I can offer some helpful advice. And hopefully you can pitch in also. Use the comment field to share your own experience and advice.

OK, let’s get back to Alissa’s situation. In her case it was her father who was unsupportive. I’m going to write this to her situation (just because it makes referring to the ‘other side’ easier - I can just use ‘he/him’ instead of a more vague term ‘them’).

First, whatever you do, don’t fight him. This is the most important advice I can give.

We, as humans, always do what we perceive to be the right thing - given our beliefs, experiences, values and ethics. Given his view of the world he does what he thinks is the best. Deep down he probably wants to help you.

He probably thinks you put yourself through unnecessary struggle and suffering for nothing. (Most people still believe doctors can fix health problems.)

Remember that good intentions coupled with bad information is a dangerous combination. This is just one example of it.

Give that, please don’t fight or try to argue with him. It probably won’t do you any good, and most likely just upsets him and causes him to just argue back harder.

If I were in your shoes I’d try to talk to him.

First I would start by understanding his concern over me and thank him for it.

Then I would tell him that I’ve already been to the dermatologists many times (as you probably have), and say that it hasn’t helped. Despite all those visits and all the medicine I’ve taken, I still have acne.

Then, given that be still believes in doctors and that they can help, I would work on that angle. I would say that latest research indicates that diet is linked to acne. Then I would probably tell a little white lie. Cook up a story of a friend or a friend of a friend (someone your father doesn’t know of) who went to this dermatologist who treats their patients with diet modifications. And that your friend, or friend of a friend, cured his/her acne following the doctor’s advice.

Now I don’t really advocate lying or cheating. But framing your message so that it fits into your father’s existing belief system, or the way he sees the world, makes it easier for him to accept. And probably the upside of maintaining harmony in your family outweighs the downside of a harmless white lie.

Then I would tell him again that I appreciate his concern, and that doing this is really important to you. That you really believe this is going to get you over your acne. And finally that it is really important to you that he supports you. It’s not important that he agrees with your choices, but that at least he would respect them and support you.

Finally, if necessary, I would point out that many respectable doctors and researchers say that diet and lifestyle are the major causes of most diseases. Two excellent books on the subject are The China Study by Colin Campbell, PhD  and Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

Again since he believes in doctors and scientists I would use their books, rather than pointing it to my site or my books, since I lack the formal credibility indicators before or after my name.

So instead of fighting him I would try to talk to him calmly and respect the concern he has over you.

If you are or have been in a similar situation, I would really appreciate if you would share your experiences and help Alissa and other’s in a similar situation.

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Clear for Life - The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear
Skin

For me it’s easy to eat healthy while I’m at home.

Going out with my friends is when the **** hits the fan and my diet goes downhill.

Perhaps it’s the same with you.

While I was reading Zen Habits blog I noticed an interesting post ‘9 Fail-proof Tips for Eating Healthy at Social Gatherings‘.

Here’s are the tips I thought were the best.

• Eat before you go out. If you know there’s a change you’ll end up eating something that makes your acne worse, load up on healthy foods before going out. That way you are not so hungry and can minimize the damage.
• Place limits. In many cases little unhealthy food isn’t going to make much of a difference, especially if you don’t eat foods you are allergic or sensitive to. So set limits for yourself. Perhaps 2 drinks, or 2 snacks or something along those lines.
• Have a big salad before the main course. Again, this way you are not so hungry and can avoid some of the damage.
• Log what you eat. Writing down what you eat makes you more conscious of your choices. Often times unhealthy eating ‘just happens’. We do it almost automatically and without thinking about it. Writing it down forces it on your face.
• Eat healthy most of the time, but don’t stress over small slips. Eating healthy is important for clear skin, but it’s not the only thing. Stressing two days over a small dietary slip causes far more ‘damage’ than the slip did. Remember that you are just one meal away from eating healthy again.

Got any tips on your own? Share them as comments.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin