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I gave up sweets.
Chocolate, ice cream, convenience-store desserts.
I tried hard, and went without.
The first week was hard.
By the second week, I had gotten a little used to it.
By the third, I wanted to give myself some credit.
But when I looked in the mirror, not much had changed.
That yellowish dullness still seems to be there.
Has the firmness come back? I couldn’t really say.
After all that effort.
After all that going without.
— Was I doing it wrong?
Not wrong at all
Cutting back on sweets wasn’t a mistake.
It truly meant something.
It’s just that “sweets” may not have been the only cause.
Even without sweets, eating carbohydrates such as rice, bread and noodles raises blood sugar.
When blood sugar rises sharply, excess sugar in the blood binds to proteins in the body.
What forms as a result is a substance called AGEs (advanced glycation end products).
AGEs are known to bind to collagen, leaving it prone to stiffening and losing its elasticity.
Yellowish dullness in the skin.
Loss of elasticity.
Loss of firmness.
Glycation is being studied as one of the causes of these.
Glycation itself can’t be brought down to zero.
What matters, perhaps, is cutting down, as much as you can, the times when blood sugar shoots up.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried hard enough.
The enemy was also somewhere other than where I thought — that’s all.
👉 Collagen was something to save. — On the collagen bank, and exercise.
That 2 p.m. heaviness
After lunch, I get sleepy.
Around 2 p.m., my eyelids grow heavy.
In meetings, I start to drift away.
In the evening, in the restroom mirror, I see a face like someone else’s, not the one from the morning.
There are several reasons for drowsiness after a meal, such as lack of sleep or how much you eat.
One of them is thought to be a sharp change in blood sugar.
When blood sugar spikes, a lot of insulin is released.
As a result, blood sugar can drop sharply, and that fall is said to sometimes lead to drowsiness and sluggishness.
The drowsiness and the dullness may have shared the same root.
I thought it was only about feeling sleepy.
I never imagined the face in the mirror led back to the same place.
Even knowing all this, I can’t skip lunch.
I can’t just not eat.
So what am I supposed to do?
It happened by chance
One day, a colleague invited me.
“Want to shoot a little after lunch?”
I knew there was a pool hall near the office.
But going there on my lunch break had never occurred to me.
I had no reason to say no, so I tagged along.
It was going to be just 30 minutes.
Walking around the table, getting down, shooting, walking again.
Before I knew it, in those 30 minutes I had circled the table again and again.
It wasn’t as if we were running.
I wasn’t sweating.
My makeup hadn’t budged.
We were just standing, walking, laughing, and shooting again.
Back at the office, I noticed.
The usual 2 p.m. drowsiness never came.
I thought I imagined it
Just that day, I thought.
But the next week I was invited again, and went again.
That afternoon, too, felt a little lighter.
In the evening, I looked in the restroom mirror.
The gap from the morning seemed smaller than usual.
Moving your body a little after a meal is said to make blood sugar rise more gently, and to make sharp swings afterward less likely.
Maybe that is how the 2 p.m. drowsiness eases.
And keeping blood sugar from spiking is thought to help lower the risk of glycation, too.
The afternoon drowsiness eases.
Perhaps, added up over time, that leads somewhere good for the skin, too.
And all because I happened to be invited.
I’m glad I didn’t try so hard
The three weeks of going without sweets were hard.
But the days I shoot pool for 30 minutes after lunch aren’t hard at all.
I’m not holding back.
I’m not doing it for beauty, either.
I’m just playing, laughing with a colleague.
And that, as it turned out, had me moving my body.
What I tried so hard to keep up stopped after three weeks.
What I keep doing because it’s fun is still going.
That’s probably all there is to it.
You don’t have to start by giving up sweets.
After lunch, just 30 minutes: walk, get down, shoot.
Something I was simply enjoying turned out, later, to be good for my skin and my body.
Maybe there’s room for a beauty habit like that.
Why not make pool your next beauty habit?
👉 Before the serum, walk. — On skin and exercise.
👉 See the Yokohama Billiard Hall Guide
References
- Gkogkolou, P. & Böhm, M. (2012). Advanced glycation end products: Key players in skin aging? Dermato-Endocrinology, 4(3), 259-270.
- Colberg, S. R. et al. (2016). Physical Activity/Exercise and Diabetes: A Position Statement of the American Diabetes Association. Diabetes Care, 39(11), 2065-2079.
- Engeroff, T., Groneberg, D. A. & Wilke, J. (2023). After Dinner Rest a While, After Supper Walk a Mile? A Systematic Review with Meta-analysis on the Acute Postprandial Glycemic Response to Exercise Before and After Meal Ingestion in Healthy Subjects and Patients with Impaired Glucose Tolerance. Sports Medicine, 53(4), 849-869.
