Skip to main content

Getting Rid of Acne after 30 Years

I've had acne for almost 30 years. It started with a few pimples when I was 12 and escalated into cysts when I was 20. A coworker actually said to me, "God, what happened to your face?" "Oh," I wish I'd replied, "I bet you say that to all the girls." What's the French word for repartee you think of as you're walking out of the party, down the steps?

My sister had acne too. She was good-looking until she'd been on meth for about a year, and afterwards lived on coffee, Pepsi and burritos. She blamed her acne on--wait for it--green beans and washcloths.

I should have taken a clue from her diet. My poison isn't Pepsi, but Coke. When I stopped drinking Coke in 2007 to help my stomach, my skin cleared up. It was less dry and flaky, too. So except for falling off the wagon and going through caffeine withdrawal again in 2007, all has been well.

Then I started drinking Coke Zero a few weeks ago. "Since it doesn't have sugar," I thought, "it'll be fine." A crop of pimples proved me wrong. So, goodbye Coke--again. It's back to water, diet rootbeer, diet Dr. Pepper and tea--they don't seem to affect my skin.

My socially inept coworker aside, I've usually gotten compliments on my skin, since I've constantly been doing something to keep the acne in check. In a nutshell, here's my skin care program. It might not work for you, but I don't think there's anything in it that would be harmful for most people.

  • 100mg zinc per day
  • Burt's Bees Orange Essence Facial Cleaner
  • Queen Helene Mint Julep Mask applied at night to pimples
  • Neutrogena Anti-Wrinkle Anti-Blemish cream for rare breakouts
  • No Coke
  • No wheat
  • Low-carb, high-fat diet
I also have some good genes. My mom has wonderful skin and looks quite a bit younger than she is. We both have a lot of fat on our faces, too, which makes us look younger.

Here's a rundown of everything I've tried and the results I got:

Prescription and OTC acne medicines:
Benzoyl peroxide: no effect.
Cleocin T: mildly effective.
Antibiotics: effective.
Retin-A: very effective. Really dried out my skin, though.
Accutane: effective while I took it, but made my pores large.
Salicylic acid: effective.

Skin care products:
Queen Helene Mint Julep Mask: dries and shrinks existing pimples.
GNC Hair, Skin & Nail Vitamins: helps prevent acne.
Special soaps for acne: no effect.
Cold cream: too heavy for my skin, especially in summer.

Dietary measures:
Green beans: well, whatever you have to tell yourself.
Wheat: reducing wheat really helped my skin when I first took this measure in the late 90s. It wasn't 100% effective, but helpful enough that I kept it up through the years.
Low-carb, high-fat diet: this has been great for my skin, but doesn't prevent all breakouts.
Coke: Coke was it.

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
To me dairy products are the culprit. I'm mildly lactose intolerant. I can eat butter in moderate amounts and also cheese before diarrea, but I get acne from even smal (1-2 slices) of cheese.
June 30, 2011
Lori Miller said…
Glad to hear you've found out what causes your acne--it's miserable and the cause can be hard to pinpoint.

My skin has been even better since I started the cavity healing diet (which includes vitamin D3 pills):

http://relievemypain.blogspot.com/2011/03/cavity-healing-diet-is-working.html
June 30, 2011
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black Friday Deals for Good Health

Here are some great Black Friday deals--all ONLINE--that can benefit your health. I've used most of these products and vendors and recommend them. I'm not an affiliate.  Vitamins iHerb.com is having a 25% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday site-wide sale. Vitacost.com is offering $10 off $50, stackable with a variety of other deals. Tried and True Supplements I use: Doctor's Best magnesium ( peach powder , unflavored powder , and tablets ) Country Life kelp tablets Solgar zinc, 22 mg NOW vitamin D, 5,000 IU NOW astaxanthin, 4 mg Jarrow hyaluronic acid, 120 mg Solaray vitamin C tablets, 485 mg Collagen Powder, Dips, Dressings, Mayo and Sauces Primal Kitchen products--all made without added sugar or Frankenfoods--are on sale. If you remember Mark Sisson from the Mark's Daily Apple blog, Primal Kitchen is his company. PrimalKitchen.com  (25% off this week only) iHerb.com  (25% off) Vitacost.com (20% off) I love their vanilla, peanut butter and chocolate-mint collagen pow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more

In Defense of Fast Food

Another modern trend - healthy food should be expensive, not nutrients-dense and preferably exotic, or you would be eating like plebs who live on a dollar McD menu. --Galina L. I don't try to jump over seven-foot hurdles, I look for one-foot hurdles I can step over. --Warren Buffett, pleb who eats at McDonald's Despite all the talk about wild-caught v. farmed, grass-fed v. CAFO and the vilification of fast food, a lot of us plebs benefit simply from carbohydrate restriction. But even though diabetes and obesity are rampant, and carb restriction alone would help millions of people, the impression is out there that you need to eat in a very specific way, far beyond just watching the carbs. Following a low-carb diet is already a high hurdle for many people. If some people want or need to raise the bar for themselves, that's fine with me, but there's no need to turn low-carb into a hurdle that a lot of people can't jump over. Organic produce and grass-fed or p...
17 comments
Read more

My New Favorite Sweetener

If you're looking for a low-carb sweetener with no aftertaste, no franken-ingredients, and that doesn't upset your stomach, try monk fruit (also known as luo han guo). This is what Quest bars were sweetened with when they first came out. Monk fruit is Dr. Davis approved. You can buy monk fruit in powdered or liquid form; both are super-concentrated. They might seem expensive, but you use the powder by the spoonful (even in baking recipes) and the liquid by the drop. The baking recipes I've made with the powder have turned out well. Available from Amazon . Beware monk fruit sweeteners with erythritol.  The package of powdered monk fruit sweetener I bought says, "Use 1/8 teaspoon to create the same sweet taste as 1 teaspoon of sugar." But it's so sweet that I use 1/10 the amount. To replace a cup of sugar, I would use 5 teaspoons of monk fruit sweetener. Tip: hand-stir this in before using the beaters. It's such a fine powder that it flies up and out of the ...
2 comments
Read more