![]() I’d eat the same exact foods everyday as a precaution to not set off my rosacea. My skin was getting better, but I was still nowhere near coaxing it back to its pre-rosacea state. I kept this up for the better part of a year. Slowly I began eliminating things from my diet. Any processed foods, foods that came in a box, or something with 3,000 ingredients – flare up. It became a habit of mine to routinely check how my skin reacted to certain foods. Every time I ate, it caused a flair up, or at least some type of small reaction with my rosacea. I was going to have to live with this embarrassing inflammation for the rest of my life. I was told there was absolutely no cure for rosacea and I’d have it forever. ![]() Every time I went into the sun I got sunburned. My once robust self-confidence had been gut-shot. I couldn’t look at someone and have a conversation without contemplating what my skin looked like from his or her perspective. I declined certain social events based on the status of my skin. I was afraid to look in the mirror some days. I wasn’t getting anywhere and this had me frustrated and about ready to give up. Some of them masked the symptoms to some degree, while others made them ten times worse. The provided diagnosis was always, “You have dry skin, apply this cream,” and “Your skin is too oily, use this harsh chemical on your face.” Over time, I just became fed up with it. Yeah, it was bad… So as it became worse, I checked in with my dermatologist and doctor. If I can come back from this, I feel anybody can, especially those with a mild case. Look up a definition of “inflammation” in the dictionary, and you might find my pictures. I absolutely HATE these pictures, but I’m sharing them with everyone because I don’t want to hide the truth of how bad it was. But I still ate my whole grains and stayed hydrated, so I was being healthy, right? It’s ironic that the whole wheat/low-fat, FDA heart healthy diet is the one that eventually did me in. At one point or another, I stopped caring about ‘what’ I was eating and was just shoving food in my mouth every two to three hours to “preserve muscle.” I was far too swept away in my own world of “Broscience” to listen to anyone else’s nutritional advice. I don’t recall where my train of thought was at the time, but some foreign instinct told me to keep eating. ![]() I “beefed” or “bulked” up as some of my friends referred to it, but in all honesty, I was just getting fat. I made the jump all the way from 140 up to 180. In my senior year of high school, I got swept away in the idea of gaining weight, building muscle and power-lifting. I’ll hereby state that my condition was, in all likelihood, entirely inflicted by me. But for me, it was an incredibly life halting experience that, for the time I had it, completely derailed my entire life. ![]() So I had a bit of redness going on in my face… so what? Everyone flushes from time to time. Now to most people, including family and friends, this wasn’t such a big deal. For those who aren’t familiar with the condition, rosacea is an inflammatory skin disease known to have an effect on facial flushing and redness. My issues stemmed from the life halting condition (which I believe to be an autoimmune condition) rosacea. Like many others who’ve jumped on the Paleo/Primal eating concept, I didn’t quite start following the regimen for weight loss. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. ![]() If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |