Is Your Elimination Diet Making Your Acne Worse?

You cut dairy, then gluten, then sugar, and you're still breaking out. 

In this episode, I explain why an elimination diet that never ends stops being a tool and starts being a stressor, and how that ongoing restriction can actually keep your skin inflamed. If you've been cutting things out for years with no real improvement, this episode will show you what's actually missing from the plan.

Transcript

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Imagine someone like a person named Sarah. Okay, so Sarah is at dinner with her friends. There is bread on the table, but she looks at it and she doesn't touch it. Someone asks why and she gives the short version because she doesn't want to get into it again. She spends the next 10 minutes watching other people eat the bread and doing mental math about the rest of her meal. Like, okay, if I eat the bread again, should I eat the soup or should I eat the crackers? So she is doing the math in her brain. It means that she's physically at dinner, but she's not really there. And this is not all. Sarah is so obsessed, and somehow I can relate to Sarah that she googles the restaurant menu before she goes anywhere. Just to check, just to have an idea of the calories, if it's like gluten-friendly, you know those things, right? Besides this, all of this food calculating thing, there's another thing she does. Sarah feels her face before she looks in the mirror in the morning. So every day she wakes up, and the first thing she does is that she puts her hand on her face just to check if she has a new bump or not. And that's not all, girls. She compares the photos every day to check how her skin is changing. And you know what? I used to do that before as well, and I feel so bad about it now. Like I used to bring like 2019 picture of mine, and then I would check the recent picture of mine, and I was like, was I fairer then or was my skin better than? How does my skin look now compared to that version? And that's such a wrong thing to do because it makes you tired. Like you're everyday calculating the calorie, you're everyday doing the math, you're everyday comparing yourself to yourself. It's not like you're comparing yourself to other people, but you're comparing yourself to your other versions, which is so tiring and so exhausting. But you know the unfortunate part is even after doing all these things, she is not having a good skin. She is still breaking out. So Sarah is confused as hell. Like, what's happening? Hi, I'm Selvine. I'm an aesthetician and gut health specialist, and this is Skin Barrier and Beyond my own podcast. So I work with women who have been at this for years. Okay, this whole acne diet, whole acne journey. When I ask them, like, what are you doing for your acne? The first thing they tell me the list of everything they have cut out. And most of the time it's the dairy, the gluten, yes, most importantly, sugar, seed oils, soy. And what gets me every single time is that they're so embarrassed about it. Like they're apologizing for still having acne after all of that. It feels like they feel guilty that everything is happening on their skin is cause of their ignorance or failure. And I just want to tell you that the story you tell yourself, the one where your acne is still here because you haven't been disciplined enough, that story is false and is costing you yours. And today I want to talk about something that I think a lot of people in this space are too scared to say directly. And I want you to really hear this because I know that a lot of you can relate to Sarah. In fact, I was Sarah sometime. You know, it it's kind of my story. Every time I used to go somewhere, I used to check the menu, I used to check the calories. If the menu didn't mention the calories, I used to ask the waiter, hey, what's the calorie here? So I was obsessed like this, and I know a lot of you are like me, so I want you to hear this. Pay attention, okay? I'm not telling you that, hey, food doesn't matter, eat whatever you want. Good luck. No, I'm not saying that. I am saying that, see, food matters, and I genuinely believe that my whole work revolves around that. I fix the diet of my clients, I fix the lifestyle of my clients. So I'm not someone who would tell you that food doesn't matter, okay? Food does matter. And choosing the right kinds of food and avoiding the nasty foods, I'd say, like those ultra-processed stuff, high sugar, those are really important. And some people actually truly do react to dairy, so eliminating dairy is also sometimes helpful. But see, the point is, the point I'm trying to make is that your body is not that simple. It's not a straight line from plate to face, okay? Think about it this way. You, on a day where you actually slept, your gut is moving, you feel okay, nothing is on fire. Now, you on a day where you got four hours of sleep, your stomach has been off all week, and on top of that, you have been anxious since you woke up. So if you are in that stressed state and you are taking a healthy meal, do you think that would help you? Because when you're stressed, the food lands differently, it gets processed differently, it gets digested differently, and the inflammatory response is completely different. I was having the best foods ever. I was having super healthy food, I was not on curves, yet my skin was extremely dehydrated, and my saboric dermatitis was on fire. So if food helped, it would have solved this problem, but it didn't. That's why I'm saying that food is part of the picture, not the whole picture. And when someone sees years of chronic inflammatory acne on your face and just says, hey, just cut dairy and sugar, and you'll be fine. Trust me, if you do that, you are skipping so much. Because if you are only following the generic advice, you are skipping what's in happening in your gut. And most importantly, with your gut, what your nervous system is doing, what your gut barrier looks like, how your skin barrier is acting, how your hormones are behaving. You have to think about all of this stuff together, and then you have to have a solution. It's not like you pick one piece of a 10-piece puzzle and fix the whole thing. That's not how it works. And I think somewhere in you you know this because if cutting things out was going to fix it, it would have fixed it by now. That's why I never believe in elimination diet if you have acne. Yes, elimination to some extent is healthy, but completely eliminating foods, I don't believe in that, and I think moderation is the key here. And on top of that, food moderation doesn't work if your nervous system is always on fight and flight mode, and they have to go simultaneously. You cannot do one thing and skip another thing completely. Because I want you to think about it like how many years has it been? Really, like how many years? How many things have you removed? How many times did you start something new? Feeling like, okay, this might be the one. And then a month later, you're back to square one. Except now your food list is shorter and your patience is thinner, which is the worst part. It breaks my heart when I see someone is managing their whole life around this. Like sometimes people cancel plans, they stress before events, they check their face consistently, and then they check the menus like me and count the calories and count whether they are putting like creams, cheese. You have built an entire infrastructure around managing your skin, and it is exhausting. Like following this whole thing is exhausting, and I'm quite sure if it works for some time, after a time, it doesn't work. And this is not a you problem. The whole framework is just too shallow for what you actually have going on. When I look at a case like this, here's generally where my head goes. First, what I do if a client comes like this, where that person has eliminated everything, I first think about their gut. Like, how many rounds of antibiotics did you take? Was she on birth control for years or was she bloated all the time and just calling it normal? Does she have constipation? She doesn't mention because it feels unrelated. Because sometimes when I ask people like what's the color of your bowel or how regular are you, they get embarrassed. But trust me, these information are so crucial. And if you are visiting a functional medicine practitioner or functional skin specialist, you have to tell them this information because these are related to your digestive system. Things are important to know because the gut and the skin are talking to each other consistently, and that conversation has almost nothing to do with whether you had oat milk this morning or not. After gut, I ask them about their nervous system. Like how stressed are they? And when I ask that how stressed are you, I mean that is she's someone who hasn't truly rested in so long that she has forgotten what that feels like. And I can talk about myself. I have been someone like that who have been so stressed. At one point I took it normal, but that's not normal. And it's so sad that at one point when someone asks you, Hey, are you stressed? and you say no, because being stressed is normal for you, and you don't even realize that you have been stressed all along. Okay, so the things I ask, like, oh, how early do you go to your bed? Do you wake up tired and just keep going and you are not following a specific sleep schedule? These things are important because these things tell a lot about your nervous system. If these things are not on a correct state, this can put you in an inflammatory state as well. So I have to know this. After that, when I'm thinking about their gut, their nervous system, I go to their skin. Like, okay, girl, how is your skin behaving? Is it dehydrated? Is it getting red very quickly? So these things I have to know because these are also connected. If you are in a constant flight and fight mode and your gut is inflamed, your skin will definitely show it. So, moral of the story, okay, moral of the whole thing is that if you have been eliminating food and you have been doing this for years, cutting the obvious stuff, being consistent, and your skin is still going red, full of breakouts, I need you to hear this. You don't need to find more things to cut. Okay, you need a different question entirely. The question isn't what else I can eliminate. It's what is actually happening inside my body that is keeping this information going. And if nobody has asked you that yet, that's why you are still having the breakouts. If this felt like something you needed to hear today, send it to someone else who needs it too. And I'll see you next time. Until then, ciao.