Excerpt: 'You: Being Beautiful'

Nov. 14, 2008 — -- In the follow-up to the best-selling book "You: Staying Young," Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz are taking on beauty from three vantage points: looking beautiful, feeling beautiful and being beautiful.

Click here to take the "Your You-Q" inner and outer beauty quiz.

The book provides tips on how to care for your body with everything from healthy diets to weighing the value of cosmetic enhancements. It also teaches readers how to care for their spirit by identifying major stresses and examining relationships.

Read the introduction and a chapter of the book below, then check out some other books in the "GMA" library.

Excerpt courtesy of Free Press.

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 clichés: 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.