Watching Angels – Blog

by Henry Rant

Good skin care and a healthy lifestyle can help delay the natural aging process and prevent various skin problems. Here are seven simple, and effective tips you can implement into your daily routine to get you started.

Tip 1: Protection from the sun

One of the easiest and most important ways to preserve and protect your skin is to minimize exposure to the sun’s harmful UV rays. A lifetime of sun exposure can lead to wrinkles, age spots, and a multitude of skin problems, including an increased risk of skin cancer.

So what steps can you take to protect yourself from the sun

1.Use sunscreen of at least SPF 15. Apply it generously and frequently, preferably every two hours or more, depending on your activity level

2.Try to avoid being outside between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm, as that is when the sun’s rays are the strongest.

Tip 2: Don’t Smoke

Smoking ages the skin and contributes to the proliferation of wrinkles. . Smoking narrows the blood vessels that are closer to the surface of the skin, depleting them of blood flow, thus contributing to less oxygen and nutrients reaching the skin.

Smoking also damages the fibers collagen and elastin, which give the skin its strength and elasticity.

Tip 3: Get Regular Sleep

In today’s busy, busy world, achieving eight hours of sleep seems more and more like a luxury. Unfortunately, the importance of sleep cannot be emphasized enough. Regular sleep optimizes the secretion of human growth hormone, which promotes collagen production.

Tip 4: Exercise Regularly, Meditate Frequently

Exercise increases circulation and the flow of nutrients to the skin. Try and aim for 30-45 minutes of exercise, for 4-5 days a week.

In addition, activities like yoga and meditation helps keep stress in check, which thereby reduces the production of stress hormones, which are to blame for acne, eczema and rosacea.

Tip 5: Drink Lots of Water

Drinking plenty of water is important for your body to function at peak performance. Dehydration takes a toll on your skin, causing it to look dull, flaky, saggy and loose.  Water gives your skin a more radiant, healthy, and younger complexion. Aim for at least 8 glasses of water a day. Increasing water intake has show to decrease occurrence of acne. The effects won’t come overnight, so be patient.

Tip 6: Eat your Way to Healthy Skin

Most of our favorite skin care products contain naturally occurring vitamins and nutrients. Know what else contains these vitamins and nutrients? Our food, of course! Start by implementing more fruits and vegetables into your diet, on top of your skin care products to see the most benefit. For starters, incorporate more foods containing Vitamin C, such as Oranges, Strawberries, Broccoli, and Sweet Potato, and Vitamin E, such as Avocadoes, Almonds, and Hazelnuts. Least but not all, incorporate more Zinc into your diet, which can be found in fish, lean read meat, shellfish, whole grains, and poultry.

Tip 7: Be Patient

As much as we would like to see our skin bounce back to its youthful look in a short period of time, it won’t happen. It took years for us to damage our skin, so it is only logical to assume it will take time for our skin to heal and recover. Be patient and be consistent with you skin care regiment. Don’t be discouraged when you don’t immediately see results.

Read the story

Living with Cancer: it’s about living your life the best way you can and helping others to do the same.

By Henry Rant

I’ve loved sports for as long as I can remember. My first word when I was a kid was “ball.” From a very young age I was an athlete, so when I was diagnosed with Prostate cancer in December of my freshman year of college, that was a shock. I’d been having stomach pain, and trouble urinating since the beginning of the previous summer, and no one could tell me what was wrong. Of course, the idea that I had cancer never crossed my mind. But after a tough fall season I finally had a colonoscopy at Staten Island University Hospital, where the oncologist diagnosed me with prostate cancer.

I was 18 years old. I had no idea what Prostate Cancer was, and it was hard to wrap my head around the idea of having this illness for the rest of my life. I was not exactly in the best state of mind at that point. I played both tennis and baseball my whole life, but fall of my freshman year I couldn’t play either anymore because I couldn’t make it through a match without crunching up into a ball on the court because of the pain, not to mention the catheter attached to me. Right now, I’m studying biology at City College of New York with an interest in going on to medical school to become an oncologist. I was reading about prostate cancer in America. American men have a 16 percent risk of developing prostate cancer in their lifetime, but only 3 percent lifetime risk of dying from it.

My freshman year, I was spending a lot of time at the University Hospital in Staten Island and I realized there were many kids there suffering a lot more than I was. I would come in once a week and see the same kids, week after week, who hadn’t been able to leave their rooms. I thought there must be some way I could help them.

At the time I was really into collecting baseball cards, and I thought collecting and giving away sports cards to kids in hospitals would be a cool idea. My friends and I decided to better organize ourselves which would do this for as many kids as possible. By the time I left college, we’d given out 500,000 cards to kids in need, and every single pack we give away makes these kids so happy. It’s just amazing the reactions we get — from both the kids and their parents, who are usually sports fans, too. Here at City College, I’m still heavily involved, overseeing the ambassadors around the country. I just love being able to do it for these kids.

If you have a disease or a prolong illness like Prostate Cancer, you have to try and find a way to keep doing what you love. And if you have to let that go, try and discover something that’s similar. I wasn’t able to keep playing tennis, so I resorted to ping-pong. It doesn’t take as much energy, but it’s the same concept and I enjoy it so much. Accept the fact that you’re going to have this condition for your whole life. It’s not going to be easy. But if you have doctors you trust, and if you take advantage of all the support that’s available — and there are more support groups and camps and things out there now than there were even a few years ago, when I was diagnosed — you’ll be surprised how full a life you can still lead.