I am 23 years old, 5 ' 11.75 " and 150lbs. I'm slender but healthy. I have no documented food or chemical allergies. Seasonal allergies never posed a big problem. Mom and Dad cook regularly at home. I cook at home myself as much as possible.
I'm neurologically normal. My attention span is typical. Minus a few bouts of situational depression and anxiety, I'm a clean bill of mental health.
I am not the poster-child for a restrictive diet.
But I have struggled with moderately severe acne since I was 10.
Acne is generally regarded as a teenage annoyance, and annoyance it was. It wouldn't go away without 110% adherence to a topical regimen and even when I was on industrial strength washes and creams, my skin took forever to heal. Low grade birth control reduced the number and severity of the zits (including a fair share of pustules, cysts, and redness), but nothing made the acne completely go away. To make matters worse, I occasionally blew off the regimen and I payed for each mistake dearly. Still, I muddled along with acne through middle and high school, undergraduate work, and part of my master's degree. The emotional toll was significant.
Finally, on my 23rd birthday, I realized I had endured acne for over half of my life, and said that enough was enough. Ignoring common medical advice about the connection between acne and diet and figuring I had nothing to lose, I cut out dairy - a common acne aggravator - soy, and gluten, both common allergens, after some research. I increased my fruit and vegetable intake 1000-fold, and perhaps then some. I gave the diet, plus a revamped regimen, 6 months to work. If it didn't, I would try something else.
6 weeks into the new diet-regimen, it was clear that my changes worked. I wanted to share my findings with the rest of the world and toyed with running a blog showing that the diet-regimen worked as well as the difficulties with implementing it (high costs, difficulty finding good ingredients, temptation, etc.) and make the connection between bad food and the mounting health crisis here in the US. I started the first incarnation of The Acne-Free Foodie with those things in mind.
As I continued on the diet-regimen and writing The Acne-Free Foodie, I ran into other difficulties. I found it difficult to create both an all-original cookbook and a good-food advocacy blog on a (very) part-time basis when gfcfsf recipes and good-food advocates are ubiquitous on the Internet. More importantly, I struggled with the social aspect of food (which I firmly believe exists), particularly because I'm the only person among my family and friends who eats this way. While I didn't want to impose my diet-regimen on others, I didn't want to eat what I knew slowed my skin's healing. Learning to accommodate dietary differences with good, "have my cake and eat it too" solutions has become a big part of how I'm managing to keep the peace with family, friends - even professors - and heal myself at the same time. Here, I hope to show ways we can all navigate this together without driving each other crazy.
