Two Diets to Control Acne

The worst thing about so called dietary cures for acne is that many of them are written by people who don’t actually have acne. There is no “in theory” when it comes to acne or at least we don’t know what it is yet. I have followed every single acne plan prescribed by every genius PhD, MD, or Joe Schmo. They haven’t worked, so clearly the theory surrounding the cure for acne is still largely unknown. Aside from that, on an emotional level, those that suffer from acne definitely don’t need clear skinned, small pored beauties telling them how they do it. They don’t do anything. They simply don’t have the problem.

Some or many aspects of the modern diet have changed the way acne sufferer’s pores secrete oil, the way the pores clamp down and stop healthy circulation, the way hormones are secreted in the skin, and the way the immune system goes overboard to mount an attack on a small cyst.

Yes, acne is a disease caused by a bad diet but no, it is not a disease which is cured by a good one. It can be managed. The acne can be stopped, but as soon as the person starts eating modern foods again, it will return. When an acne sufferer so much as cheats, she will probably get pimples again. This is why the term orthorexia is so offensive to me because these modern diseases are only manageable. Strict eating is requisite. Once a system has gone wrong in the body it isn’t repaired over night.

Making a few dietary changes here and there actually does work wonders for some but for others the problem is more persistent.

Acne can be thought of as kind of a blessing if you’re as morbid a thinker as I guess I am. Eating the wrong types of even Primal foods can give me acne – a clear sign I’m not as healthy as my primitive ancestors. But, for me, with acne always comes other ills – maybe it will be stress and heightened emotions, fatigue, foggy headedness, joint pain, swollen hands – there are all sorts of symptoms that will crop up at the same time as the pimple. It’s a nice gauge I guess for healthy living.

Getting a pimple is like a warning sign to me that I’ve done something wrong and I need to back off. One or two small pimples may not indicate a huge problem inside but as soon as those one or two have become three or four or five, I’m sure to be feeling bad in other ways. If it makes it all the way to 10 or 20, I’m doomed. For me, cystic acne is always a sign of something being very off inside my body. When I have cysts and not just pimples you can bet I have a list of other major symptoms which are bringing me down.

And it doesn’t take much to get there. Just eating full fat dairy or gluten might set me off on a full fledged cystic acne attack. If I keep it up I will be thoroughly embarrassed to socialize and will probably stay inside until I get my shit together again.

But I guess I should be thankful that it has worked as a guide for me to get optimally healthy. I fix the acne and I fix everything else. It’s kinda neat actually.

Logic Break: Saying that when I have clear skin I look and feel marvelous is not the same as saying that anyone with clear skin is marvelously healthy. Quite the contrary. That is a logical fallacy which too many people make, and as long as you’re reading my blog I don’t want you to make it.

Acne is my problem not everyone else’s. For others, maybe not needing to take naps every afternoon (the 3:00 crash) is their sign of having their shit together. We all have our indicators. It’s just that mine happens to be obvious to the entire world (okay I’m not so sure I’d call that lucky when I put it like that).

What Works For Me May Not Work For You

When it comes to acne, everyone seems to be different. The idea that chocolate causes acne for everyone is preposterous. First of all, one single food is not responsible for everyone’s acne. Were it so simple! And everyone’s culprit differs widely.

Allergies can play a big role in acne so, for some, one food may very well be the culprit. But one can be sensitive to salicylates too, which are in most vegetables, spices, and nuts. If you’re sensitive to them it will be nearly impossible to figure out what the trigger is since you’ll be eating some offending food with almost every meal. I am sensitive to these and believe me it took forever to get to the bottom of it.

For years it felt like I was doing everything right. I avoided processed foods like the plague and still the acne wouldn’t let up. I ate a perfect Paleo diet and still I had acne. I tried a hundred different styles of diet to no avail.

Some of the Acne Diets I Tried

• Loren Cordain’s Paleo Diet
• A diet of fruit and fat with zero cooked protein and zero vegetables
• Gluten free
• Weston Price Foundation
• Vegan
• Raw vegan
• Fruitarian
• Candida diets of all kinds
• And countless others that didn’t help at all…

I Started To Think For Myself

Then I thought how beautiful the Japanese people are and I just said, “Screw  the Paleo diet, I’m going to eat like a Japanese!” (of course, these days, that diet wouldn’t be so far off the Paleo mark with all the talk of “safe starches”). Raw fish and rice was my diet then, and for the first time in 10 years my skin looked beautiful, not just clear, but beautiful.

After a couple of years rice started to bother me so I went back to a pretty regular low-fiber type of Paleo diet and the acne returned. Somehow I managed to figure out that an all meat, zero carb diet worked – just by listening to my body and eliminating food after food until there were basically no foods left but meat. My skin looked great and other than having a totally stoic personality, I was in perfect condition.

But a low carb, all meat diet isn’t easy to maintain in Colombia (or anywhere for that matter) so when my family spent the summer there two summers ago the acne returned. Then I hit my head in that horrible bike injury and forgot who I was and what I ate and everything else. Eventually, though, I made it back to square one with my all meat diet but this time I added eggs, pork, and beef. The results were good but not quite as good as before so I kept on experimenting until I came to where I am now.

Avoiding Certain Foods

With acne it is not about what good foods you do eat but what bad foods you don’t eat. Yes, reversing nutrient deficiencies is key but this may be difficult to achieve if the digestion is off. Like I said before, once a body has gone wrong it can take a long time to fix it, possibly many many years. So just moving to a nutrient dense Paleo diet is probably not going to solve a severe acne problem. There will probably be foods and whole food groups that must be avoided.

While a zero carb diet often helps control acne, carbs, per se, are not the enemy. Of course they’re not. How could I have eaten so much white rice and still have had no acne? But you’d think they would be since we know that insulin can cause us to produce more male sex hormones which are pretty much responsible for acne. There really is quite a bit more to it than that. Other things cause a much greater production of male sex hormones where they react on the skin. One of them seems to be dairy fats, another is allergens, and still another is anything that disrupts digestion. Nutritional deficiencies play a big role too so one must be very careful about maintaining a healthy, quiet digestive system. Nuts absolutely kill my skin as do vegetables. Over cooked meat (which is most of the meat people eat) is another skin killer.

And don’t be surprised when someone comes along and says that they neglect all of those things above and that something totally different cured their acne problem. Our bodies are all different and our cures will often be too.

Diets for Clear Skin

Diet 1: Before I became allergic to rice my diet consisted mostly of white rice and raw fish. I ate a little bit of seaweed, a shot of fresh wheat grass every day, and I took a multi vitamin. I didn’t eat processed foods of any kind. I ate nothing but white rice, seafood, and a small amount of vegetable juices (too much and it would come through my skin). I never could tolerate fats with rice so I typically only ate fatty fish by itself. I felt and looked absolutely perfect. I was 29-31 years old and looked 22, literally. I had never been happier, more active and productive in all my life. But all good things generally come to an end for me. Major stressors must have triggered some allergies and the next thing I knew I couldn’t eat rice anymore and most of the vegetables I had been drinking as juice were now poison to me. I started to break out with a vengeance and I felt terrible all around. So I moved on.

Diet 2: Now I eat a mostly all meat diet but have found that zero carb is not quite as effective as a diet with some carbohydrates. I have also found that cooked meat can be harmful to the skin if too much is eaten and especially if it is well cooked. For an acne sufferer, and indeed for anyone, meat should be slightly undercooked. For me bacon and egg yolks are irritating to my gut so I eliminated them along the way.  My skin does not appreciate it when I drink so I rarely do it anymore (boo). I don’t eat vegetables because fiber disrupts my digestion. I cannot digest fruit and it gives me the worst breakouts (possible fructose malabsorption), and I don’t eat grains (they all destroy my gut, “safe” or not).

What I do eat is mostly seafood both cooked and raw. I like canned salmon with bones and skin and I eat plenty of raw oysters for skin healing zinc. I eat a little raw beef and never any cooked (except on the outside of a bloody rare, grassfed steak). Plain table sugar or pure glucose is my carbohydrate of choice since it doesn’t disrupt my digestion like other carb sources do. I eat raw egg whites, warm skim milk with sugar, undercooked turkey with olive oil sometimes (I don’t eat cooked meats much these days but a little), lots of lemon juice, green tea, water, magnesium before bed, vitamin e, vitamin c, Great Lakes gelatin and bone broths, occasional decaf coffee, wheat free tamari, wasabi, and that’s about it. For the occasional treat I have frozen yogurt.

It’s an almost all meat diet but mostly raw and mostly seafood with some sugar and non-fat milk. It works for me and after all these years, that means a heck of a lot more than any theory.