In my previous post, I began my quest to figure out why my skin has started to fuck with me. Click back there if you want to know exactly what I'm talking about, but in short, I'd been getting worse acne, blackheads, clogged and enlarged pores, fine lines/wrinkles, rough texture, etc., over a really short period of time, and it sucked. I mentioned that I had identified four possible causes for my skin's shittiness. To recap:
- Increased use of moisturizer to combat seasonal dryness.
- Discontinued use of BHA exfoliant.
- Increased consumption of delicious, delicious wheat.
- Use of battery-powered, rotating face brush for cleansing.
I started to address the second item on the list in Part I, and I'll return to it in a future post. For now, I thought I'd explain what the hell I was talking about with the other three. The thing about wheat probably sounds particularly weird.
First: moisturizer. I don't really think this was a major culprit. The moisturizers I was using didn't contain ingredients that differed much from anything I'd used successfully in the past. Plus, while this could, perhaps, explain an increase in clogged pores, it doesn't explain other problems, like lines/wrinkles.
At any rate, I've scaled way back on the moisturizing, simply because my skin seems to be adapting to the dryness and I don't need as much. That started before I took the other steps described below, and it didn't make much difference in my skin's condition.
Second: The wheat. Okay, here's the thing: my body just has a problem with wheat. I am not gluten-intolerant (I've been tested), but eating wheat does cause issues for me. The main problem is that it severely worsens the inflammation in my joints, which is pretty bad to begin with. I'm not imagining this. Wheat is inflammatory. Plus, I have tested whether or not it has a negative effect on me very extensively, like so: (1) I feel shitty (mainly joint pain in my hands, wrists, and arms - but there are other things too) so I stop eating wheat. (2) I feel dramatically better. (3) Wheat constantly taunts me with its seductive perfection and I begin to forget how shitty I felt when I was eating it. (4) I gradually start incorporating more and more wheat into my diet (bread! pizza! just a little pasta!) until . . . (5) I feel really shitty again. And repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat. At this point it is abundantly clear that wheat hurts me.
So what does this have to do with my skin? I'm not completely positive, but I have a theory that isn't any more sophisticated than this: Wheat is aggravates inflammation (at least for me). Inflammation is bad for the skin (for example, an inflamed, clogged pore = a pimple). Therefore, inflammation caused by eating wheat makes my skin worse.
