Posts Tagged by experiments

I think we’ve all had those moments when it feels like, in some small way or another, your body has betrayed you.

You’re good to yourself, doing all those little things that are supposed to result in a desired outcome. And yet when it comes down to it, the outcome is anything but what was desired.

Today my chief complaint is my skin. Oh my skin. Ask any girl on a regular day and she’s likely to find at least two things she’d like to change about her body. On a bad day, I can fill a notebook. Those days don’t come often – there are many things I love about my body. Not everything, but a lot of things.

Given the short amount of time I have before the Queen of the Pirates’ wedding, my big goal was to get my skin cleared up. Despite everything I’ve done, my skin has stayed ferociously the same – broken out like crazy. And in the last two days it has gotten exponentially worse.

I follow the rules of skin care: I wash twice a day, applying toner, benzyl peroxide for the blemishes, and a moisturizer with sunblock. If I’m really doing my regimen properly that includes 3 different types of moisturizer – a base, something for my eyes, and then a day or night cream depending on the time of day.  Naturally when this mess flared up I dropped all of my moisturizers (not at once – slowly and scientifically) figuring that less was more when it came to putting stuff on my skin. And then I dropped the toner too, thinking without my moisturizer it might be too dehydrating.  So I’m down to soap and water and 10% benzyl peroxide twice a day.

When that failed me, I started looking into other ways to improve my skin. Though diet is not consisently indicated to be a factor in skin condition, I began making changes. I started by subtracting the greasy foods from my diet.  Then I attacked sugars – no more fake/bad stuff (splenda, high fructose corn syrup) – and  I only allow a little bit of the real deal, but mostly my sugar intake comes from fruit sources and I try REALLY hard to avoid that but it’s almost impossible. Now I’m cutting my sodium.

Aside from dropping my sodium, nothing has seemed to do any good. The sodium didn’t make a darn bit of difference in my skin – but my weight has dropped. I interpret this as meaning I was retaining water, and I’ll take it. No one wants to look puffy in wedding pictures!

Let me tell you, I don’t even remember my skin looking this bad when I was a teenager! Maybe it did and I just blocked that out of my mind. I know that worst case scenario I can put makeup on and look nice for the wedding, but now I’m on a mission. Next on my diet experiment will be dairy. I’ve already cut back significantly on my dairy intake, but I’m willing to try getting rid of it entirely just to see.

Since my diet hasn’t seemed to help (so far), I’ve also considered other sources:

• I don’t touch my face/neck with my hands.  
• I keep my hair off my neck and out of my face. Same with my clothes.
• I exercise regularly (and wash my face after).
• Though my sleep wasn’t ideal last week I am getting at least 7 hours a night, usually closer to 8. This week when I am sleeping all the way through the night, my skin is actually worse.

That leaves me with two other options:

• Stress. Due to a variety of circumstances, some I can control and some I can’t, my stress level has been really high lately. I am doing everything I can to manage it – cutting back activities I really don’t need to participate in, exercising, eating appropriately. I’ve even managed to give myself time to relax and just watch TV.  I don’t know what else I can do. The major stressors in my life are things I cannot just walk away from – I do what I can do change them, but sometimes things really are just out of our control.
• Hormones. There’s literally nothing I can do about mine. Again, shifting the focus of what I eat might help (in terms of foods that discourage estrogen production) but these things are designed to shift for good reasons. Odds are high mine are just doing something new (by which I mean not “new” but normal, and I’m just at a different point in that cycle).  

I am literally at my wits end. I’m chugging water like it’s going out of style – that too, however, has not been proven to impact your skin though it does have other health benefits I’m willing to accept.

And so I’m not willing to give up the fight against this disaster, but I hope SOMETHING will eventually start to work. There are 3 days until wedding day so I’m not expecting a miracle (but that won’t keep me from praying for one!). At this point I’m on a mission to figure it out once and for all – without resorting to witch doctor sounding remedies like rubbing egg whites, honey, and cayenne pepper on my face.

(Before you think too many variables exist in this experiment, just be aware I did each thing separately and saw no results – not that I did them all at once. I may be obsessive, but I’m methodically obsessive.) 

Help me out, friends. Am I the only one whose body seems to take joy in betraying her?