In my last acne update post, I talked about taking antibiotics and using Tazorac to treat my acne. To be honest, I was hoping it would only get better from there. Not exactly the case. Since August, I’ve been experiencing minor flare ups a week or two before my period every month. The dermatologist warned me about this, so I knew to expect it.
This past month (October/November) my acne was the worst it’s been since July/August. It was painful and stubborn (the bumps didn’t want to go way), although not as bad as it’s been in the past.
Come mid-last week I knew I had to do something. However, I didn’t want to go back to my dermatologist. While the antibiotics she had me take helped clear my skin to a degree, I don’t want to rely on them. As it is, I’m still using the Tazorac gel she prescribed. No more medication!
I then thought back to all times where I’ve gone from a major acne outbreak to clearer skin and what I did to get there. Or should I say the one time, which happened to be six months before our wedding.
This was when I stopped (cold turkey) drinking regular milk and switched to almond milk, stopped (cold turkey) drinking diet soda, and stopped (also cold turkey) using artificial sweetners. During this time, my skin cleared up in a big way. And I had ZERO breakouts the weeks leading up to our wedding. I wasn’t on any medication and I didn’t make any other changes. In my opinion, the only big change I made was to go from drinking 3-4 glasses of skim milk a day to maybe two glasses of almond milk a day. And I’m 95% sure my cheese and yogurt consumption was a lot lower than it is now.
So after thinking about this [unintentional] experiment quite a bit, I’ve decided to try it again for a month or so to see if it helps calm things down. But this time around I’m intentionally trying my best not to consume any dairy at all (I still don’t drink diet soda or use artificial sweetners).
It’s been eight days since I started on my (almost) dairy-free journey, and so far things are going…well. Not eating yogurt is easy for me because it isn’t something I consumed on a daily basis. Cheese, on the other hand, is a completely different story. I love cheese almost as much as I love chocolate, so purposely staying away from it has been a little challenging. And speaking of chocolate, most of the chocolaty treats I enjoy contain dairy…so there’s that.
My plan is to see how my skin reacts to this change after about 30 days and then slowly reintroduce different dairy products one at a time. If my skins goes from mostly clear to acneville, I think it’ll be safe to say that dairy contributes to my acne. If that is the case, I’ll continue to be (almost) dairy-free because let’s be real, I can’t completely give up cheese and ice cream the way I did skim milk!
I definitely plan to blog about the outcome of this little experiment and also share any dairy-free recipes that come out of it.
Wish me luck!