Hey y’all.
Eczema post warning BTW. I know some of you read this blog for different things.
For me, the environment plays a major role in my eczema. My skin is always really clear during the winter and gets worse in the spring when the pollen comes out to play.
I’ve only been treating my eczema with my diet since spring 2019, so I wasn’t expecting these changes. I just thought my eczema was bad year-round.
Because of that, during the winter of 2019, I stayed away from my really bad food triggers, but I started eating a fair amount of things I shouldn’t. Then when spring 2020 hit, my body wasn’t cleaned out and prepared to handle the pollen. And that’s just the start of what happened this summer.
My skin was still reeling from fending off pollens, and I still hadn’t done a cleanse to clear out the mess from winter. Then, I began eating some chocolate cereal. My thought process was that the cereal, though processed and sugary, was gluten- and dairy-free and would keep me out of the candy bowl at work which contains a lot of milk chocolate. Unfortunately, the sugar in the cereal (as well as the other junk, I’m sure) make my skin even more inflamed, so I’m doing a no-sugar cleanse for at least a month. Even natural sugars, like bananas and raisins, are making me itch right now, and that didn’t happen before.
Now to explain the title of this post. When I cut out sugar, I experienced a couple days of relief. My skin got less red and began to show signs of healing again. However, I’m a few more days into this, and my skin has stopped looking better (in some aspects). At first I was concerned until I remembered how healing began when I first tried this back in 2019. It always gets worse before it gets better.
I like to think of this stage of healing as beginning to deep clean a house. When you begin, all the furniture gets moved so you can mop the floors. You know it’ll be put back and look even better for being cleaned, but at the moment, the house looks chaotic. That’s how doing one of these cleanses is for the skin. When you first start, the skin looks worse because your body is getting rid of the mess from however long ago. It can’t clean with new mess coming in because all the time is spent keeping up with the new stuff.
Yes, my skin currently looks worse (in some ways – less red but more weepy), but I know that it will be put right soon enough.
Frugal Treehugger 