Healing My Acne & Cysts With Dietary Changes - My Physical Healing Journey

I used to eat the worst foods, yet I was a skinny 135lbs as a 5'10" teenager and by all medical measures, I was considered a very healthy person who could even stand to gain some weight, so it didn't seem to matter what I ate.  However, it actually did matter and it was affecting my body, I just didn't link the symptoms to the causes, because doctors refused to acknowledge any nutritional relationships they couldn't prove across hundreds of different people through medical research, and I wasn't body-aware enough at the time to understand how to observe myself and my relationship to food and drink.

I had acne, cysts, and benign tumors.  The acne occurred on my face and upper back.  The cysts were on my neck, chest, and underarms.  The benign tumors were in my breasts and occasionally made a random appearance elsewhere.  I started to believe these conditions were permanent, since medical treatments only created temporary relief and never eliminated the problem, yet I persisted in my desire for a solution since I did not want to be on medicine for the rest of my life.

Every doctor and dermatologist I went to wanted to treat these things topically, yet I was already cleaning my skin more than most people and using all the topical solutions I could get my hands on.  I remember asking if it might be the fried foods or sodas I was drinking, but they all said no.  Their reasoning was that there were plenty of other teenagers who ate the same bad food I did, but didn't have the same skin problems, so medically, these foods and drinks were often dismissed as causes of acne.  I accepted their expert advice and continued to try various medical treatments.

However, when it became clear that the medical solutions were only providing mild temporary relief while never solving the root cause, I stopped listening to doctors and started listening to my body's intuition to try and find the cause and solution.  I knew that I didn't always have bad skin, and there must be a way to get back to healthier skin.  I knew some of my skin issues could be explained by hormones and being a teenager, but that reasoning didn't seem as relevant after I reached the age of 28.  If it wasn't hormones, and medical treatment wasn't working, I needed to observe my chemistry in other ways.

I started to notice that my skin often got worse after drinking brown colas.  So I started by cutting brown colas out of my diet first.  For the first time, I noticed an observable change and sign of improvement directly related to making a dietary change!  When I went several days without brown cola, my skin started to improve a little bit and seemed less inflamed.  However, I still craved sodas a lot, and through trying different types of sodas and bubbly waters, I learned that what I craved most were the carbonation bubbles and acidity, which I could still get with Seltzer Water & Fresh Limes or Lemons, which were much better for my skin.  Once I made the full switch away from colas to sparkling water, I noticed a sustainable improvement in my skin's inflammation and break-outs.

I was getting closer, but hadn't completely eliminated the issues.  One of my friends working in Cancer Research posted findings on the dangers of High Fructose Corn Syrup and Partially Hydrogenated Oils.  While the study didn't mention the effect on skin, I had an intuitive hunch and thought, let me try eliminating those too if I can.  Unfortunately, these ingredients are rampant in American packaged foods.  Ketchup.  Bread.  Pasta.  Jelly.  Fruit Juice.  It's amazing how far you have to search in packaged foods before you can find something without High Fructose as an ingredient.  However, the packaged food industry is constantly funding research to disprove these findings in order to influence the FDA to continue allowing these cheap and government subsidized chemical sweeteners and preservatives into our diets.  Meanwhile, these ingredients have been restricted in other countries and have been proven to be a contributing factor to higher rates of obesity and diabetes.

It seemed it would be impossible to avoid these ingredients in the American food system and I liked to eat out a lot, which meant not knowing what is in a lot of foods.  However, I got a little lucky on a health breakthrough in 2012, when I got to spend five months living in Australia.  I ate all the exact same "bad foods" I would normally have in the United States.  I'm talking fried fish and chips, burgers with fries, buttermilk fried chicken, chocolate, sweet pastries, and donuts.  However, even though I was eating the exact same "bad" things, I noticed a huge clearing of my Acne as well as a drop in Cystic activity AND a reduction of weight and fat storage.  SAME exact foods, but my body was operating in a much healthier way and even losing weight without effort!

Was Australia a magical place where inflammation and calories disappeared into the ocean?!  Or did they just have a cleaner food system that tied nutritional research to public health?  If I hadn't experienced living in another country without these common American ingredients embedded into so many foods, I may not have had any personal experience with how I might be able to modify the foods I was used to eating, but get better results.

What was causing the issues in the US that weren't happening in Australia?  The first thing I noticed was that in Australia, High Fructose Corn Syrup is hardly ever used, because Cane Sugar is locally grown and cheaper to produce due to what Australia grows and subsidizes in the farming industry compared to what the United States subsidizes.  I ate the exact same foods, but they were sweetened with Cane Sugar rather than High Fructose Corn Syrup.  My acne started to clear.  I had fewer cysts.  I even lost weight.  Eating the exact same packaged and prepared foods simply made with natural Cane Sugar instead of High Fructose.  If I hadn't experienced my own body at a new level of healing, I may have never believed it for myself.  Something in the chemical quality of High Fructose and how it interacted with my body created a cellular binding that was causing inflammation.

This experience gave me the motivation to try harder to eliminate these ingredients once I was back in the United States.  So, when I returned to the states, I cut all artificially sweetened sodas regardless of whether they were diet or regular, and eliminated anything that was made with High Fructose Corn Syrup.  If I had anything sweetened, I tried to make sure it was made with natural sugars like Cane Sugar, Honey, or Maple Syrup rather than chemically modified sweeteners.  For diet sodas and foods, I replaced artificial sweetener ingredients like aspartame, sucralose, and saccharine with things that were sweetened with stevia leaf, a naturally sweet no calorie leaf that can be made into a syrup or crystals.  Two effects were immediate with this change...

- Fewer to total elimination of skin cysts and large painful pimples

- Breast tissue went from being firm with areas that felt like hard lumps and tumors to soft and squishy (this was an unexpected body response that seemed to be part of reducing total tissue clumping and inflammation in the body)

I thought I found the cure to my skin issues!!  Just eliminate HFCS and Colas!  But there was still more work to do, because once the acne and cysts were toned down, I then noticed connections to other issues that I thought were always linked directly to acne and cysts.

Now that I wasn't focusing on acne or cysts, I started observing an almost immediate skin oil production response to cheeses and fried foods.  Whatever fats went into my body were often pouring right out through my skin.  I was like a sponge squeezing fats from foods and converting them to skin oils.  This may have been fine if I lived in a warm ocean environment where the body can really benefit from all those oils on the skin to protect from salts or drying heat, and maybe that's something my body adapted to while growing up in Arizona as a form of skin protection, but I have also often lived in dense urban areas where that oil is like a magnet for every air pollutant possible, which meant my face was an oily magnet for dirt, soot, and dust particles.

Once I started to observe the connection to oil on my skin appearing within an hour or two after an oily or fatty meal, I knew that if I wanted to reduce the total oil content on my combination skin, I'd also need to reduce the intake of oils in my diet.  Fried foods. Cheeses. Oily Foods. Fatty Meats. High Butter Content.  For the girl who grew up skinny living off of French Fries and Fried Corn Tortillas, this was no easy task.  

I tried total elimination of fatty foods for a while, but noticed that this caused digestive issues because the fat was needed to trigger a healthy bowel response, so I just worked to reduce the chemically constructed fats like partially hydrogenated oils as much as possible, and turned my focus to healthier fats like Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Nuts, and Seeds that provided some of these necessary oils.  The state of New York prohibits Trans Fats from foods for public health benefit - so you can be assured you aren't going to have them when you're here - however, whenever I visit family in Michigan and Missouri, the limits are off again and I often come back to NYC feeling more weighed down and heavy than when I left.

Eventually, through a lot of self-observation after eating, I started to become more aware of which fats went through my body without leaving me feeling heavy or weighed down and which fats left me feeling groggy.  I also became much more aware of portion sizes of fatty items like meat and cheese that seemed to be OK for my body and skin, versus what became too much and led to an over-production of oil.  This aspect continues to require lots of self-observation, self-monitoring, and paying attention to what happens to my body within 30minutes to 2hrs of eating, which is when I notice the most positive or negative impact a food has on my system as a whole and how it feels while it is being digested.

My eating habits are by no means perfect at this point in time, because I really enjoy trying new foods and love going out to eat where ingredients can be unknown, but I can absolutely say that I do eat and drink much healthier than I once did on a day to day basis.  It may not appear so when you compare the size of my body now to the size I was as a teenager- but if I ate the same things now that I ate as a teenager- I would likely be sick, irritated, angry, cranky, and tired all the time, which were regular issues when I was essentially living off of chips and soda as my daily teenager nutrition.  My health is so much better with more even and sustained levels of energy through the day, even though I may weigh more now than I did then.

My skin healing journey isn't over or completely solved.  My skin has been sensitive as long as I can remember due to a condition medically named Dermatographic Urticaria, which essentially means my skin histamines are closer to the surface and can be easily triggered by being scratched, touched, or coming into contact with allergens that flare the histamine response.  I still get an occasional small or mild breakout during hormonal phases of the menstrual cycle, but they are much more predictable and I've found a few teas that help me balance things before they get really out of whack.  I still get oily skin, but now I know what will cause it even before I start to eat it.

What I no longer have is the kind of acne that feels untreatable, or the cystic activity that feels uncontrollable.  I no longer feel hopeless or out of control with my skin or digestive health.  I no longer feel crazy for thinking food makes a difference while listening to doctors tell me it doesn't.  I know now how to make things better from personal experience and personal experimentation.  Even if I always have challenges due to the biological build of my skin's natural sensitivity and structure, my skin is much better than it once was, and I feel much healthier, with more consistent and sustained energy than I once did.

By listening to how my individual body responds to food, I've also discovered what makes me feel even better than normal, and how food can be used as medicine.  I've found that 3-4 cups of warm whole leaf green tea makes my entire body's inflammation level lower to the point of easing intense joint pain and it gives my skin a healthy hydrated glow above and beyond what great moisturizer or makeup can do.  I've also discovered that if I have too many fried or oily foods or a much higher level of sugar-containing foods than usual, that I can use a glass or two of diluted organic apple cider vinegar to help balance things out and break up any binding happening in my lymphatic and digestive system.  These are my own observations from my body's constitution, and rather than suggesting everyone should do what I do, I think it's more wise to suggest that everyone tune into their own body's individual responses and then treat their body's response like a science experiment.

The journey of connecting our diet to observing our body's response is a very long one with many twists and turns, and rather than expecting ourselves to eat perfectly every day or feel like we have to start over from the beginning if we make a mistake, we can simply treat each meal and each day as a chance to make better choices.  Making better choices 2 meals a day is better than none at all.  Better choices 4 days a week is better than none.  Even if you fall off the wagon, just get back on again and keep on going.  It's not an all or nothing kind of process - it's a little by little process that requires small changes one step at a time.  As we start to feel better, our body changes and produces different feedback.  As long as we stay in tune with our body, we'll continue to find what works best for us.

PS. As I write this, I have a pimple on my forehead, but now I know the exact meal that caused it - the splurge of a deep dish chicago pizza and a root beer.... it was a fall-off-the-wagon kind of day... because I'm still human and pizza still tastes good, even if I end up paying for it on my skin.

Anne Ruthmann, Certified Reiki III Master Practioner, www.abundantsphere.com