My Diet

Today I'll talk about my diet. Finally :)


It was a long journey to figure out what works well for my skin and what doesn't. I started with the diet that would help to cleanse my liver. I just simply eliminated all fried food and tried to lower amount of sugar in a diet. That didn't really seem to work. Some days my skin would get better but some it would just get worse. I couldn't really understand what I'm doing wrong. Researching on the web brought my attention to the raw diet and fasting. I've read some testimonials where this extreme diet helped people with acne. I've decided to try it: raw diet minus any kind of sugar, not even honey. But how to to do it? I have to change my eating habits completely. It'll be more time consuming since I have to cook separately for my boyfriend. And then it's December - holiday season. We were planing a ski trip with our friends. How can I do it? I started slowly. I did raw diet for one day for detox purposes. There was no improvement on my skin. Then I thought that if I can do it for one day, I can do it for a week. I did it and miracle happened, my skin started slowly improving.  Trying it for a week I realized that I cannot really stick to this diet in a long run. There is not much to eat on this diet, only raw fruits and vegetables. That was just too much of extreme for me. And then came the holiday season and ski trip. I was doing my best to eat healthy. When we're going out and my friends ordered beer and chicken wings and fries and nachos I was ordering water and chicken salad without dressing or cheese or bacon or any goodies. (It was a nice entertainment for my friends when the waitress was writing my order for five minutes. Too may no  :) Basically I ate only lettuce and chicken. I still had lots of bread. So again with my skin it looks like it's one step forward but two steps back. Now after all these holidays I'm 100% committed to my diet.  Wish me luck!


I still don't have the complete list of foods I can or cannot it. But here are some rules that I follow and it seems to help with my acne.


Rules that work for me:

1. Nothing fried!!! I eat mostly raw and steamed food. Fruits and vegetables are the best, but not all of them. I'm trying to avoid fruits with high glycemic index, such as kiwi, watermelon, mangos, pineapples. Fruits with medium GI such as bananas, oranges, pears, I usually split into half so that the amount of sugar I get from them is not very high. I also enjoy beans, chick peas, lentils and peas. They are really good too. My favorite food now - green smoothies: some fresh or frozen fruits, cucumber, lemon, cinnamon and tons of green leaves. Yam! 
2. Nothing sweet!!! No chocolate, candies, cakes or pastries. No pop and juices from cartons/bottles. I think I was addicted to sugar before. I couldn't imagine my life without sweet treats. At the beginning I tried to substitute sugar with honey. I thought that if I eat honey I can eat it as much as I want. I was wrong. Eliminating it almost completely helps. It seems really important to have the insulin level stable, and avoid insulin spikes that happen when we eat sweets or high GI foods. I had horrible cravings for sweets in the beginning, but it quickly went away. Cravings stopped! I'm so surprised.  
3. No caffeine in any form. I drink tons of herbal teas: camomile, peppermint and spearmint. I've tried dandelion tea for liver cleansing and detox. It's ok. 
4. No bread or flour products of any kind. It seems that complicated food, like breads have very high GI index. I'm not quit sure about breads yet. While multi-grain bread seems ok from GI side, it has some seeds that might be effecting acne. So I'll try to avoid it for now.
5. No meet! I'm a meet lover. I consider it as a main source of protein and many essential nutrients. However it seems that meet can also contribute for acne aggravation.  Stopped eating it for now.
6. No dairy! There are many studies that linked dairy and acne. Stopped drinking until I get clear. 
7. I try to stick to low glycemic index foods, so i've eliminated things like potatoes and white rice too. It reduces the insulin spikes, which also affects your hormones.
8. Portion control: extremely important. I'm eating small portions 5-6 times a day.

There are many great healthy foods that I like but have to avoid for now to get clear skin. I will be trying to add these foods one at a time after I get clear. It seems that my skin reacts very quickly to the food I eat, usually within 3 days. So I can easily check what works and what doesn't.


Why does it work?
This is just a short note for know. I'll write a more detailed post with some references to the papers I read. 


As I understand what's happening is that at some point in our live our bodies start to produce an excessive amount of "free" hormones in our blood. This can be cause by quitting or starting birth control pills, puberty, accumulation of toxins in the body due to bad diet, etc. Everything in our body is filtered through the liver, including those hormones. So basically if we eat bad food, our liver is busy breaking up the fats, sugars and other bad stuff in the food and not filtering the hormones. The only way to help it is to eat food that liver can easily digest, so it would be able to deal with excessive hormones better. I'm not a doctor, but that's the only thing that makes sense to me. I've tried all kinds of things for my skin, but the only thing that works is a proper diet.