Keeping your body healthy is one of those often ignored keys to beauty. People talk about it constantly. You can look around and see dozens upon dozens of articles without even searching hard. The problem is that not everyone listens to all that advice. Taking proper care of your body takes effort. You need to eat well while maintaining a healthy diet. These both take further effort in and of themselves all for effects that many people say that you can’t really see. This idea is incorrect, though. Proper care of your body does have direct, obvious, and quite visible benefits to your body beyond the maintenance of a healthy weight. People just don’t always know what they’re looking for when it comes to benefits. All of the true benefits actually lie in the promotion of the growth of various types of cells in the body. Those, in turn, need a little help too and that is where it becomes directly relevant to your skin.

Constant Replacement
It is an important fact to remember that your body is alive in a much more visceral sense than most of us can fully recognize. Much of your body is made up of countless tiny cells that all have their own particular life cycles as part of the greater organism that is yourself. They live and die without most of us ever really noticing them. That means you constantly need to produce new cells. For your skin, the area of new cell growth is beneath the outer layers of dead skin cells that help to protect your skin. This protective layer itself is a fairly visceral reminder of the consistent cell growth going on in our bodies, but we need to clarify one point: your body is made up of more than cells. Proteins and countless other compounds that aren’t quite cells help to give your body structure. They’re necessary any time your body wants to alter a particular area of the body as new structure is needed. Generally that’s when your skin starts to produce more collagen and elastin.

Structural Support
If cells are the building blocks, then collagen serves the role of being the foundation on which these new cells are placed. Collagen is necessary for helping to keep your body growing in a proper fashion. In your skin, it is the reason that your skin has any firmness to it. The protein fills out the area around the cells and holds them in place. You tend to have an abundance of it when you’re younger and that’s why our faces tend to be fuller at such ages by comparison to when we begin to show signs of aging. A lessened ability to maintain collagen with age is why this happens. The cells just don’t have the support structure they need to help maintain your previous appearance. You’ll also find that this is the same reason our joints begin to cause use issues as we age. Collagen plays a role in supporting and cushioning the area to help prevent issues. Without a regular supply of collagen, your body’s entire ability to maintain itself through cell replacement just start to break down.

Snapping Back
When collagen is the solid structural support, it needs a little bit of help to ensure that it doesn’t get bent and twisted out of shape. That’s where elastin comes into play. Elastin acts as the body’s way to handle the fact that so much of its structure is in motion constantly. It needs to have a default position to return to so that it can work from there to any other position. That’s the function of elastin. You can see it in action the best by pinching a bit of your skin and lifting lightly. How long did it take to snap back into place? When we’re younger it tends to happen so fast that we don’t even notice the skin settling back into place. This lessens with age because, like collagen, production begins to taper off with time. Our skin begins to take longer and long to fix itself after simply tests like the above as a result. Your body needs elastin working alongside collagen during cell growth as part of the active support of the body and without it, you’re body is in trouble.

Cell growth is happening constantly whether you know it or not. Things aren’t always as simple as replicate and replace in your body though. Structural changes demand the additional support of collagen and elastin to keep everything operating as expected. The three are irrevocably tied together as a result. All of that complexity goes into making you and everyone you know possible. So hopefully you have a new appreciation for how your look. After all, your body works hard to make and maintain all of it.