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You: Being Beautiful: The Owner’s Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty
Michael F. Roizen
Mehmet C. Oz
Multi-million-copy bestselling authors Drs Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz show you how to look and feel fabulous your whole life long. Packed with excellent information and surprising advice, this is the definitive resource on how to use modern science to take care of every part of your body.Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D., the number 1 bestselling authors of YOU: On a Diet and YOU: The Owner's Manual, delve deep into the modern notion of beauty, showing you how to use the latest science to keep each part of your body beautiful, from head to toe, in the modern fast-paced world.Written with their characteristic humour and clarity, this will be another tour de force from America's favourite doctors.
You Being Beautiful
The Owner’s Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty
Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.
with Ted Spiker, Craig Wynett, Lisa Oz, and Arthur W. Perry, M.D.
Illustrations by Gary Hallgren
To all who radiate outer beauty
because they treasure inner beauty
NOTE TO READERS (#u035fefa4-f23f-55a6-b161-8d4d57fb63f3)
This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its authors. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. It is sold with the understanding that the authors and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any kind of personal professional services in the book. The reader should consult his or her medical, health, or other competent professional before adopting any of the suggestions in this book or drawing inferences from it. For medicine and herbal supplements, remember that herbals and nontraditional medicines can have side effects with traditional medicines and even foods. Pregnant and nursing moms should check with their doctor and pharmacist about these, and even traditional medicines.
In addition, this book sometimes recommends particular products or websites for your reference. Drs. Oz and Roizen are not affiliated in any way with such products or entities (with the exception of the Real Age website). In some instances, other coauthors or contributors may be affiliated with a referenced product or website, but recommendations were made independent of such affiliation. In all instances, bear in mind that there are many products or websites other than those recommended here that may work for you or provide useful information to you.
The authors and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.
CONTENTS
Cover (#u0fc38021-b412-5c48-aa93-9540ce186440)
Title Page (#u10a47b5a-36bf-5a61-b81c-0d8b4135c3de)
Note to Readers
Dedication
Introduction
Your YOU-Q: Measure Your Inner and Outer Beauty
Part I: Looking Beautiful
1. In the Flesh: Make Your Skin Glow
2. Head of Class: How to Save Your Hair
3. Oral Victories: Your Mouth and Teeth Are a Portal to Your Inside—and Say a Lot About Your Outside
4. Digital Revolution: Shape Up Your Hands and Feet
5. Great Shape: How to Get the Body You’ve Always Wanted
Part II: Feeling Beautiful
6. Energized and Revitalized: Power Up Your Body by Resetting Your System
7. That’s Gotta Hurt: How to Manage Your Major Aches and Pains
8. Get in the Mood: What You Can Do to Straighten Out Your Mind
9. The Worry War: Solve Your Most Troubling Job and Money Issues
Part III: Being Beautiful
10. That Lovin’ Feeling: Improve Your Relationships with the People Close to You
11. That’s the Spirit: How to Find True Happiness
The Be-YOU-tiful Plan: Live the Ultimate Beautiful Day (and Improve Your YOU-Q)
YOU Tools: More Strategies for Helping You Become Even More Beautiful
Appendix: Healing with Steel - Finding the Right Plastic Surgery for You
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. OZ
Copyright
About the Publisher
YOU Tools
The Ideal Wash
Body Art
Hair Care
Foot Play Foreplay
Fashion Statements
Orthopedic Injuries
Breathe-Free Program
Finding Your Personality
Green Living
The Band Workout
The Yoga Workout
The Perfect Gym Bag
Health Utensils (Your Medicine Cabinet, Home Hygiene, Infection Protection)
Your Eyes
The Biophysical Battery: Energy Blood Tests
INTRODUCTION
For those of you who think beauty is about mirrors, makeup, and how many pudding packs you have to sacrifice to fit into your skinny jeans, then pull up a chair, postpone your top-of-the-hour Botox appointment, and hear this.
Beauty isn’t some vapid and superficial pursuit that exists solely to sell products, wag tongues, and produce drool. Beauty is actually precisely perceived, purposeful, and rooted more in hard science than in abstract and random opinion. From the time we started prancing around the world with our body-hair parkas and leafy lingerie, evolution has pushed us to be more beautiful. And that’s why beauty serves as the foundation for our feelings, our happiness, and our existence. In fact, beauty doesn’t reflect our vanity as much as it does our humanity.
Beauty—dear appearance-obsessed friend—is health.
We already know that beauty is always on your mind, because it’s on everyone’s minds. You can’t help but think about it or suppress it—consciously or not—every time you step in the shower or in front of the mirror. It drives many of the decisions you make about exercise and eating, and it determines how you choose between the black dress and the white pants.
This kind of traditional beauty—the outer kind—really isn’t just about looking good. Outer beauty serves as a proxy of how healthy you are; it’s the message you send to others about your health.
Way back when—before we could decode your genome, use fertility tests to see when you’re ovulating, and order MRIs to see what was going on with your liver—people used beauty as the serious assessment of the potential health of a partner. Beauty was the best way to figure it out (and in a tenth of a second, mind you). Now, if you take the concept of beauty a few steps deeper, you realize that inner beauty—the idea of feeling good and being happy—also has tremendous health implications in every aspect of your life.
But for so long, we’ve had it all wrong. We’ve thought of beauty as nonessential and superficial. Just look at our most popular beauty-based clichés:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Translation: Just as we all have different taste buds, we all have different beauty buds, as well. Some like blond; some like brown. Some like their men to wear boxers; others prefer leopard-print G-strings.
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Translation: Don’t make assumptions or judgments about people just because they have big boobs, no hair, or a belt that’s longer than a circus tightrope.
Beauty is only skin deep. Translation: Stop linking outer beauty with the inner kind. They’re as separate as mashed potatoes and maple syrup.
The logic behind all these myths argues that external beauty is unimportant, most likely misleading, and at best relevant only until more useful information becomes available. But we have three words for these three clichГ©s: wrong, wrong, wrong. Scientific study after study shows that these popular principles are more myth than reality.
In fact, research shows that human beings have evolved universal standards of beauty, both within and across cultures. Research also shows that attractive people are judged more positively than unattractive people—even when there’s other information available about them. The data show that more attractive people are judged to be better liked, more competent, and more exciting (all by about a two-to-one margin). Research also indicates that external beauty is linked to personality and behavior.
Though there are biological and social influences on beauty, it does seem that being deemed attractive creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces and internalizes certain behaviors and self-concepts. And guess what? Most of these crucial factors are ones you can change for the better.
In YOU: Being Beautiful, we’re going to share with you the biology of beauty, as well as what you can do to be your most beautiful self by making choices and taking actions that will help you look the way you want, and most important, feel and be the way you want.
We’re going to clarify what beauty really is—and give you the tools to become healthier and happier by paying a little more attention to it. How? We’re going to chop up beauty into three distinct pieces—pieces that will give you a perspective that may change the way others view you and, ultimately, the way you view the world. These three hunks serve as the structural outline for this book.
Part 1:
LOOKING BEAUTIFUL: You don’t have to be a screen star to know that outer beauty matters. Simply, appearance is the proxy—the instant message to others—for youth, fertility, and health. In this section, we’ll explore some of the ways that you can improve your looks when it comes to such things as your skin, your hair, and your body shape. Most of all, these things are important because how you look partly helps determine how you feel.
Part 2:
FEELING BEAUTIFUL: There’s no doubt in our minds that looking like diamonds doesn’t mean squat if you feel like a wooden nickel. You can have the best hair, skin, and butt this side of Kalamazoo, but if you lack energy or your knees creak or you’re sadder than a leashed kitty, then all the outward magnetism you may have will be obscured—and fade fast. Here we’ll take a look at the big things that can keep you from feeling beautiful—things like fatigue and chronic pain and destructive attitudes—so you can help turn the blues into, well, hot pinks or purples.
Part 3:
BEING BEAUTIFUL: Though you may assume that we’d be imposing morality in a section about “being beautiful,” we’re not really talking about behaviors here. We’re not here to tell you what’s right and wrong but to explain how to take your life one step deeper—to find a more authentic and happier you in your life and relationships—and how to use different strategies to do so.
The beauty of these three kinds of beauty is that they’re all tied together: Looking as good as you like helps you feel good about yourself, which serves as the foundation for developing that sense of authenticity and deeper purpose that so many of us crave as we search for meaning in our lives. Plus, being authentic and happier makes you physically more attractive.
Now, let’s get one thing straight so you can relax a bit. You wouldn’t be here unless your ancestors were beautiful. You need to accept the fact that we’re all beautiful; sexual selection guaranteed it, because your ancestors mated with the most beautiful partners. We all have beautiful elements in us; we’re going to talk about ways that we can expose and maximize them.
The beauty industry is one of the biggest money-takers around (it sells us a lot). We have cosmetics companies and cosmetic surgeons. We have super-models with their own magazine covers, commercials, and reality shows. We’re obsessed with fashion and our weight. We fret over inopportune pimples in inopportune places. We exercise our bodies, we scrub our faces, we wax off gnarly hair, we buy expensive underwear to push our breasts up and suck our stomachs in. And maybe you’re right. We’re all emphasizing the wrong things.
Here we argue that beauty is also much more than outer appearances alone. As we’ll explore through the middle and the end of the book, beauty is also about how you feel and how you define your life. These three interlocking elements—look, feel, be—work together to form what we believe is the ultimate goal in all of our lives: to feel good about yourself because you have strong self-esteem and a healthy, energetic existence that allows you to appreciate the subtle beauty of day-today life, and because you know your purpose in life—and to show off that purpose by helping others do the same.
YOU: Being Beautiful is really about the fact that we’re all hardwired with automatic thoughts and perceptions about beauty. That means that many of these ideas have evolved over thousands of years to form a foundation for human behavior, emphasizing that it’s especially hard to overcome some of the automatic drives.
To that end, beauty is very serious business—as in survival-of-the-species serious. When we think about survival of the species (living long enough to pass your genes on to the next generation), it’s natural to emphasize the survival part of the equation. But when it comes down to a choice between surviving and breeding, breeding often wins. (Think of male grizzlies fighting to the death for a mate.) Considering the stakes, you’d better be sure that the object of your affection (that man with those magnificent abs) is worthy of the effort to attract him. But how can you know for sure? Thankfully, just like the metal detector–toting treasure hunter who leaves luck and serendipity to the amateurs, you come fully equipped with your own professional-grade beauty detectors.
When we spot a particularly attractive person, somewhere deep in our reptilian brains, a beauty alarm goes off. It tells us when we’ve struck gold, and it does so automatically and subconsciously. Just like a reflex, it’s automatic, impossible to stop, and Annie Oakley accurate. Your beauty detectors have the mathematical precision of a Swiss watch, and this precision comes in the form of some very specific numbers that you’ll learn about in this book, including something called the Fibonacci sequence. You’ll also learn that’s the reason why we make so many decisions with our emotions and not our logic; those decisions play a major role in how beautiful and healthy we feel.
To teach you about these things, we’re going to use some of the same techniques you may be familiar with if you’ve followed us along this wonderful journey about YOU. We’ll offer YOU Tests to allow you to assess your various states of beauty. We’ll explain (both verbally and visually) all of the biology that makes up the systems we talk about; once you know the why, you’re more likely to take action with a what. We’ll offer plenty of YOU Tips and YOU Tools that you can use to look and feel better than you ever have before. Right after this introduction, we’ll test your YOU-Q—a measurement of how well you’re doing in your overall pursuit of authenticity and happiness, since there’s quite possibly a large difference between the current you and the potential you (it’s hard to be happy if that difference is big). And we’ll end up with the ultimate beautiful day—24 hours of simple changes that can help you get where you can.
Along the way, you’ll be challenged, shocked, and surprised—and your perceptions about inner and outer beauty may very well implode right in front of your freshly exfoliated face. You’ll learn why shampoo may not be all that necessary, why and how the perfect smile can be measured down to the millimeter, how a secret to effective foreplay centers around your ten toes, why female orgasms are crucial to the continuation of the species, how tennis balls can mend an aching back, why a simple change in language fosters or stops addictions, and why our definition of spirituality is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. We’ll cover lots of topics in these three parts of beauty—including all the health implications and easy-to-follow solutions that can help you get the most out of life. (In our humble opinions, it doesn’t get more beautiful than that.)
As you dive into this book, you’ll come across essential information about the seemingly inconsequential things in life (hello, pores!), and you’ll come across mind-blowing inspiration about the absolutely consequential things in life (how to find true meaning and purpose). While we’ll hit you with the nuts and bolts of outer beauty, we also hope to inspire you to make changes about how you feel on the inside. Throughout, we’ll try to challenge your assumptions about what true beauty is.
Along the way, you’ll surely look in the mirror—both literally and metaphorically. You’ll get new perspectives on body shapes, on fingernails, on tongues, on depression, on knee pain, on energy levels, on sexuality, on prayer, on so many things in your life that you can strengthen to live healthier and happier. It may be hard to imagine that hangnails and deities belong in the same book. But as we hope you come to appreciate, beauty isn’t about the parts. It’s about how those parts work together to form the whole. The whole YOU.
YOUR YOU-Q
Measure Your Inner and Outer Beauty
In this book, we’re going to give you lots of advice about things you can do to look, feel, and be more beautiful. Some of them you should absolutely do, because they contribute to your overall health. Others? They may not be so clear-cut, because, unlike flip-flops and baby cribs, they’re not a one-size-fits-all proposition. What works for you may be absolutely wrong for someone else.
To that end, we’ve developed the ultimate YOU-Q Test—a quick exercise that will help you identify the things that can help you become happier and more satisfied with yourself. And your life. The key to all of it: finding what we call authentic beauty. True beauty comes when you engage with your fellow man in a healthy fashion. That’s real authenticity and what will make you happier.
Authentic beauty comes from closing the gap between the Current YOU and the Potential YOU.
Current YOU (who you are right now): This includes your physical appearance (bunions and all) and all of the characteristics and quirks that make you, you.
Potential YOU (the person you would like to be, remembering that that may not be the perfect person): Current YOU with some adjustments—perhaps a bit thinner, a little more empathetic, a better cello player, maybe even a redhead.
When the gap between Current YOU and Potential YOU is wider than a 12-lane interstate, you’re going to feel less beautiful, less satisfied, and less confident. Close the gap, and bingo, you’re hitting the bull’s-eye on the target of authentic beauty.
No IQ test or SAT or insect-looking inkblot can help you identify the size of your gap. This YOU-Q Test will. The YOU-Q tests the nature and size of your gaps in four major areas—and gives you plenty of issues to ponder. But don’t think of this as a final exam. Think of it as more of a practice test that you can retake and retake and retake until you come as close to perfection as possible.
As you read the book, your test results will help you understand where to focus your attention in order to bring Current YOU and Potential YOU into better alignment to find true happiness. To help you along the way, you’re going to record your scores on the YOU-Q report sheet at the end of the chapter. OK, sharpen your No. 2 pencils and let’s begin.
Note: All the questions in this test are based on validated studies, i.e., real docs spent years proving that these are the appropriate questions to ask to get accurate answers to help you understand yourself. We even enlisted the help of world expert psychologist Dr. Art Markman from the University of Texas to ensure accuracy.
Part I: Looking Beautiful
Think about the appearance you present to the outside world—your face and body. Using the figure below, answer these two questions (be honest, bucko, nobody’s looking but you):
1В Circle the image that most closely corresponds to the body type you have right now.
2В Circle the image that represents what you think would be the ideal body type for you. This body type should be the one that you want, not the one that you think others might want for you.
For this part of scoring your test, look at the difference between your responses to questions 1 and 2. Just count how many bodies are between the ones you picked; don’t worry about the direction.
If the difference between your answers is:
6 or 7 bodies: We have some work to do. So put 0 in the Body Score box in Introduction.
5 bodies: Give yourself 3 body score points in the box at the end of this section.
4 bodies: Give yourself 6 body score points in the box at the end of this section.
3 bodies: Give yourself 9 body score points in the Body Score box below.
2 bodies: Give yourself 12 body score points in the Body Score box below.
1 body: Give yourself 15 body score points in the Body Score box below.
0 body: Give yourself 18 body score points in the Body Score box below.
Picked the same body for both: Congratulations! Give yourself 21 body score points in the Body Score box.
Answer these four questions about your face and skin:
Your raw score can range from a low of 4 to a high of 49.
Your Looking Beautiful Raw Score
The scales in this section reveal about how happy you are with your overall appearance, focusing on your face and body. Find the range for your score on the Looking Beautiful test analysis below. After you read what scores in that range mean, write down the number of YOU-Q points you get for this score in the YOU-Q worksheet at the end of the section.
If Your Raw Score Is
4–18
There’s a lot about your appearance that bothers you. You probably feel bad whenever you look in the mirror. It will take a lot of work to change your appearance, but there are many things you can do to improve your body, face, hair, and skin.
19–30
You don’t feel like putting a paper bag over your head, but you also aren’t thrilled with the way you look. It may be that you want to change your body, or perhaps your face or your hair. We have a lot of suggestions that will help you improve the way you look, so it won’t be long before this score starts to go up.
31–39
Just because you may enjoy walking by a window to catch a glimpse of your reflection, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few changes you’d like to make. There are always things you can do to help maintain the beautiful you and to protect it from bad habits, the sun, and age.
40–49
Frankly, we’re surprised you had time to fill out this survey between modeling gigs. All we can say to you is, stay out of the sun, wear your seat belt, keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.
Part II: Feeling Beautiful
The questions in this section focus on how you feel physically.
Calculating your score for Part II:
Your raw score can range from a low of 4 to a high of 28.
Your Feeling Beautiful Raw Score
How you feel is a combination of whether you are in pain and how much energy you have. If you are in pain, it’s hard to feel beautiful. If you’re dragging all day, it’s pretty darn hard also to be a beauty.
If Your Raw Score Is
4–14
If you score in this range, you may have some kind of chronic pain like arthritis that makes you feel like one tired and hurtin’ pup. Pain may be keeping you from exercising as much as you would like, which may also affect your energy level. The chapters in Part II will be particularly important to you.
15–21
There are days when you feel as though your get-up-and-go got up and went. On those days, you’re just happy to get through the day (certainly not a recipe for beauty). We’ll have a lot to say about how you can feel better and increase your energy level.
22–28
Most of the time you feel pretty good. You get out of bed, you have a full day. Not much keeps you from doing what you want to do. Keep it up. And check out the tips in Part II to help you keep feeling good and running strong.
Part III: Being Beautiful
Answer these questions (honestly).
11. Check the one statement below that best describes your average happiness.
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Extremely happy (feeling ecstatic, joyous, fantastic)!
Select Only One: (11 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Very happy (feeling really good, elated)!
Select Only One: (10 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Pretty happy (spirits high, feeling good).
Select Only One: (9 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Mildly happy (feeling fairly good and somewhat cheerful).
Select Only One: (8 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Slightly happy (just a bit above neutral).
Select Only One: (7 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Neutral (not particularly happy or unhappy).
Select Only One: (6 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Slightly unhappy (just a bit below neutral).
Select Only One: (5 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Mildly unhappy (just a little low).
Select Only One: (4 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Pretty unhappy (somewhat “blue,” spirits down).
Select Only One: (3 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Very unhappy (depressed, spirits very low).
Select Only One: (2 pts.)
IN GENERAL, HOW HAPPY OR UNHAPPY DO YOU USUALLY FEEL?: Extremely unhappy (utterly depressed, completely down).
Select Only One: (1 pt.)
Now answer these six questions on a scale from 1–7.
Calculating your score for Part III:
Your raw score can range from a low of 7 to a high of 53.
Your Being Beautiful Raw Score
Life satisfaction is just what it sounds like. How happy are you right now, and how pleased are you with the way your life has turned out so far? Self-esteem is a good marker of how good you feel about your ability to get things done in the world and your influence on other people. By boosting your self-esteem, you are able to be more effective in the world and more beautiful in the broadest sense of the word. Finally, two of the questions ask about the role of spirituality in your life. There is good evidence that having a solid spiritual foundation increases your life satisfaction. We’ll have more to say about spirituality in chapter 11.
If Your Raw Score Is
7–19
You’re not that happy with life right now. And you’re down on yourself quite a bit. There may even be other people who are down on you. You might want to talk to a therapist or counselor (if you aren’t doing so already). Depression affects many people over the course of their lives, and it can really stand in the way of your ability to be beautiful.
20–31
There are still days when you wake up and think you could be happier and that you could be doing a better job of living up to your potential. We have a lot of advice to offer. Inner and outer beauty will help increase your life satisfaction, self-esteem, and spiritual health.
32–42
Overall, you feel pretty good about life and your place in the universe. There are days when you can be hard on yourself, but our goal is to help you experience fewer of the bad days and more of the good ones.
43–53
Life feels pretty great to you most days. You probably have a lot of inner and outer beauty already. At the same time, there are a lot of insights in this book that we believe will help you in your continuing quest to make yourself a better person.
Part IV: Understanding YOU
From the list of 60 descriptive words below, pick 5 characteristics that most accurately describe the Current YOU. We know that many of the words could describe YOU, but your challenge is to whittle the number down to the top 5. Next pick 5 words that describe the Potential YOU. Remember, many of the things you would ideally like to be may be things that are already part of the Current YOU. That is, you may be living out some of your ideal characteristics right now.
Since our greatest strengths are often things that are invisible to us, you may want to get some feedback from other people about your strengths. Copy this page and share it with loved ones and coworkers. If they’re the same people, perhaps you can forward this document to Human Resources instead.
Calculating your score for Part IV:
See how many words overlapped between the lists you created for the Current YOU and the Potential YOU. For each word you have in common, take 6 points.
0 overlapping words: Give yourself 0 points.
1 overlapping word: Give yourself 6 points.
2 overlapping words: Give yourself 12 points.
3 overlapping words: Give yourself 18 points.
4 overlapping words: Give yourself 24 points.
5 overlapping words: Give yourself 30 points.
Your raw score can range from a low of 0 to a high of 30.
Your Understanding YOU Raw Score
In this section, you described aspects of who you are that can be changed, and your answers will help focus your efforts.
If Your Raw Score Is
0
Get going, tiger. There’s clearly a lot that you would like to be that is not quite the same as who you are.
1–18
You’ve started to achieve your ideals, but there’s still lots more work to go. Part III will help work out a game plan for change.
19–30
You’re well on your way. Keep it up. Remember, you don’t necessarily want Current YOU and Potential YOU to be identical (you always want to be striving for something!).
Your Final YOU-Q Score
Add your raw scores from each part to determine your YOU-Q Score:
The YOU-Q ranges from 15 to 160
Add up your YOU-Q points and start spreading the news. The closer the score is to 160, the more your Current YOU and Potential YOU match. This match between Current YOU and Potential YOU really does tell you a lot about yourself. It tells you how good you feel about who you are. It also gives you a sense of how well you’ve been able to make changes in yourself in the past and how well you’ve addressed challenges in your life.
Just to give you an idea about your score, a score of around 160 is nearly impossible to achieve, and you shouldn’t think of that as a goal. Just as you probably don’t know anybody with an IQ of 160, you probably don’t know anybody with a YOU-Q of 160. If your YOU-Q is 100 or above, then you are pretty typical of people who take this test. Finally, don’t pay a lot of attention to small differences between scores. If you got a 105 and your best friend got a 110, that is essentially the same score. It does appear that having a younger Real Age than biological age helps you achieve a higher score—and more happiness. (Take the Real Age test at www.realage.com.)
To validate the YOU-Q, we gave the survey to 1,174 women and 533 men who had taken it on the RealAge website. The average YOU-Q score for the women was 95 and for men was 99, so both genders have about the same happiness score. This average stays the same across our lifespan, but individuals can increase and decrease their score as they age. If your YOU-Q is way above 100, congratulations! You’re already well on the path to beauty. If it is well below 100, then you have got some work ahead of you. Luckily, your YOU-Q differs from your IQ, because your YOU-Q is easy to change. So no matter what your YOU-Q, you’ll find plenty of great advice in the pages to come that will help that score go up.
As you make changes in your body, your health, and your inner self, you will also experience changes in your life satisfaction and self-esteem. All of these factors will increase your YOU-Q. Periodically come back and take the YOU-Q again, and watch the YOU-Q grow—just as you do.
Part I
Looking Beautiful
Glowing Skin (#ulink_8f1e4766-a587-580d-8613-a28d4cf1facc)
Luscious Hair
Marvelous Mouth
Nice Digits
Sexy Shape
Quick, think of a place that doesn’t have a mirror. Pretty hard, right? Bathrooms, of course, have them. So do cars, department stores, gyms, supermarkets, hotel lobbies, bars, subway cars, purses, bedroom walls, and bedroom ceilings. In fact, you’d almost have to be living in solitary confinement or a single-seat submarine not to have the opportunity to judge your own appearance through your reflection.
Besides constantly being judged by your own gaze, your face and body often serve as the target for other people’s eyes (and perhaps whistles). While it may seem unfair to be under such constant visual scrutiny, the fact remains that beautiful people have more advantages than unattractive folks. Sounds harsh, we know, but just consider the evidence:
Mental acuity, interpersonal skills, and moral goodness are all associated with physically beautiful people.
Beautiful people are believed by others to have happier marriages and more rewarding jobs. And they’re more likely to be hired, have a higher salary, and be promoted sooner.
Better-looking people are more likely to marry sooner, as well as to marry people who have more money and higher social status.
More attractive babies have even been shown to be rewarded with greater overt maternal affection.
In this part of the book we’ll be examining the elements that primarily determine whether or not you’re perceived as beautiful or not—things like skin, hair, and body shape. But before we start any specific discussion of various wrinkles and jiggles, we’d like you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
Though we’ll have plenty to say about the body’s anatomical wonders, the most important body part of all when it comes to beauty isn’t a luscious lip or hardened glute. It’s your brain.
Now, we’re not suggesting that the pituitary gland and hypothalamus are party-stopping body parts the way a silky mane or a plywood-flat waist may be.
What we are suggesting is that beauty is always on your mind. In fact, your brain needs beauty.
Your brain—under intense demand to process an infinite amount of information at any given moment—must make choices about whom to trust, whom to mate with, and whom to run from. It does this by dispensing with unnecessary stimuli—and drawing conclusions from a select few pieces of info. So we’re not programmed to not worry about whether a strand of hair is out of place but are programmed to note the subtleties of facial expressions, whether the slight curve in a lip is conveying anger, sadness, or fear. That process, really, is the foundation of perception—how you perceive and contextualize the facts and faces all around you.
Beauty is not as much a physical property of the person, as the end product of a complex mental process that translates millions of meaningless dots of light on the back of our retinas into 3-D shapes, objects, and faces. Embedded in the software of the mind is a set of rules that are used to decode these raw “bytes” of visual information. Think of these “bytes” as the letters in the alphabet. The perceptual rules are like grammar; they determine how the parts are combined to create a whole.
What’s most interesting is that these observations are automatic—a beauty reflex, if you will. Most of us, especially when we’re young, have a strong sex drive—a drive so strong, in fact, that it often overshadows all of our other natural drives. But nobody instructed us to be sexually attracted to others. We didn’t have to learn about hourglass figures or chiseled jaws. It was instinctive—a genetically programmed behavior.
These instinctive behaviors aren’t conscious acts. They’re spontaneous, irrepressible, and predictable. They’re performed without evident reason, but rather with stimulation. Your beauty detectors, like Doppler radar, are able to scan the environment in real time for signs of an attractive mate and forecast a conclusion about that environment. Your assessments are fast and accurate. For example, you can observe a human face for a fraction of a second and accurately rate its beauty—and what it’s trying to communicate to you, through expressions, nuances, and all kinds of nonverbal signals. Similarly, your appearance affects the first impressions that others have of you. And that first one can be a lasting one.
So how do we make those snap judgments? It all starts with a group of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. That sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. Each new number is the sum of the two before it, and the ratio of each number to the one before it approximates the value of phi, or 1.618.
OK, so you may be asking what in the world a group of numbers has to do with the fact that you prefer just a little bit of nicely groomed chest hair. Well, phi is the basis for what’s called the divine proportion or the golden ratio: the ratio of lengths from one element to another is 1.618 to 1 (see Figure A.1). This golden ratio is found throughout nature, from leaves to seed arrangements to conch shells, and it also figures prominently in a list of man’s greatest accomplishments, like the Great Pyramids, the Parthenon, Michelangelo’s David, and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The omnipresence of phi throughout our world creates a sense of balance, harmony, and beauty in the designs we see naturally and artificially.
Phi is also a driving force in human attraction—men and women around the globe prefer a mate whose face is symmetrical and follows this ratio. (More than 2,000 years ago, Pythagoras developed a formula for the perfect female face, which included such stats as this one: The ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nose should be—tada!—1.618 to 1.) In this part, you’ll see more examples of this on the human body. Now, we’re not suggesting that you move your eyeballs closer together or farther apart if they don’t meet these statistical standards, but we are suggesting that there are many easier options that can make the ratio closer.
Figure A.1 Oh, Rats! The reproductive patterns of animals gave us the formula for beauty. Each generation of life—whether flower petals or lips—reproduce with a predictable ratio. As the proportion of offspring produced increases, the ratio of one block divided by the one before it serves as the foundation for things we perceive as beautiful. So,
/
is about
/
is about
/
, or about 1.6—the golden ratio.
Our point: Humans do have universal (and subconscious) standards of beauty—underscoring its importance and the fact that your brain really does make reflexive decisions about people based on appearance that affect every aspect of your life.
There’s a reason why we have to use this reflex—it would take way too much time to assess others if we didn’t have it. Consider this:
Just about every situation we confront in life provides infinitely more inputs than we’re able to process productively. A classic example of this idea is chess. While the game is reasonably well defined and contained, after just ten moves there are literally billions of possibilities to consider for a next move. Assuming we could evaluate these options at a rate of about one per second, it would take about 9,000 years for us to consider all the possibilities. Not only would this make for a really long chess match, it underscores the brain’s need to keep it simple.
Safari Secrets:
Lessons from the animal kingdom
The reason we all look a little different may not be obvious today, but there’s an evolutionary basis for our genetic differences. At first glance, zebra stripes seem like a bull’s-eye for predators. In fact they’re the wild’s greatest camouflage system because predatory animals, which see only in black and white, can’t see zebras standing in the tall grass. Also, zebras blend in with the heat waves coming off the ground, which look alternating black and white against the sand, so they’re especially confusing to the pestering tsetse flies—an example of how an animal’s looks respond to external pressures.
Because of the immense computational complexity and impracticality of processing all the inputs a particular situation presents, the cognitive system has developed a number of mechanisms that limit the number of possibilities that are considered. How? For one, the eye takes in a limited amount of high-quality information (through a part of the eye called the fovea), which is supplemented with lower-quality info as needed. As your eye moves to process the info, it takes in only a fraction of what’s in your horizon. In a constant state of vibration, the eye repeatedly refreshes what it sees (like refreshing web pages). These movements help your brain decide what it is you’re looking at (and without the movements, we’d actually lose our vision because the rods and cones in our eyes respond only to certain changes). So you take some shortcuts and make leaps about what you see; you need cues like beauty and waist-to-hip ratio—things with scientific and universal standards—to make judgments about people. You can’t contemplate 9,000 different nuances in someone’s face in a timely fashion. You keep it simple.
For example, the most information-dense visible area in nature is the human face, so we process a small area of the face and extend our conclusions to the entire surface. The right changes (even if they’re small) can make a huge impact on how you’re perceived. Much of “seeing” someone you know is memory, since we don’t reanalyze an entire face each time.
The richest connection of nerve and muscle density in the body is actually around the larynx (voice box), and the face is second—underscoring how important it is that you read subtle messages through speech and body language. Some argue that growth of the frontal lobe of the brain happened because of these rich connections and our ability to sense and transmit so much information beyond what most animals can.
Your face communicates whether you’re happy, sad, mad, disgusted, surprised, or ready and willing to do the two o’clock tango. Similarly, you receive information about other people through their eyes, their mouth, even their skin. The whole notion of beauty revolves primarily around nature’s hockey masks—either you’ve got a well-designed one or you don’t. Now, the question is: How do we define well-designed?
The theory is that the more symmetrical a face is, the healthier it is. As you can see in Figure A.2, that symmetry is divided into several planes, including horizontally, vertically, around the eyes, around the nose, and so on. The formula for beauty is that precise golden ratio (go ahead and pull out a ruler and a calculator on your next date). The same ratio holds for the width of the cheekbones to the width of the mouth. Scientists also believe that symmetry is equated with a strong immune system—indicating that more robust genes make a person more attractive.
Figure A.2 Divine Ruler Using the golden ratio of 1.6, we judge the beauty of other people’s faces (and other body parts). We use that ratio—subconsciously and reflexively—to decode whether someone’s eyes, face, and body are, in fact, beautiful.
Of course, that’s the element of beauty that you typically can’t control. You have what you were born with. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make changes—changes to enhance your beauty and, along with it, the way you feel about yourself.
That begs a few very interesting questions about our own beauty. What do you see when you look in the mirror? How do you think others see you? How much of your self-image has been determined not by who you are but by who others think you are? How much has your sense of the outer you influenced the inner you? To some degree your appearance influences how well you do in love, at work, and in life, but most of us feel we don’t measure up. So the question is, should you just accept yourself as you are? Or should you try to improve your appearance? How far should you go? What should you try to improve? Will it make you happier or feel more satisfied with yourself? And which comes first? Does being satisfied with your appearance lead to a higher self-concept, or does having a high self-concept create a greater sense of happiness?
In the first five chapters of this book, we’ll be showing you tips and tricks that will help your skin glow, your hair shine, and your body shrink. They’re things that we believe will not only make you look better to the rest of the world but also help you feel a lot better in your inner world.
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