Mornin' everyone.

So, I've had some theories about my skin for some time now, and I feel like I've got to the point where I can really narrow down what's causing my problems, but I wanted to get some opinions from anyone else here who might suspect the same things, or anyone that feels like they may have an interesting point to add in general.

My skin has been acting up since I was about 14, and I'm now 26, and of course over the years I've gone through all the shit everyone else suffering from these issues has gone through. My breakouts have been between mild to moderate, but annoying enough that it's definitely prompted me to take action.

I've always suspected it had something to do with diet. While this may not be true for everyone, I feel like everyone has a unique trigger that causes their acne, and the solution that works varies from person to person. For me, I ate a huge amount of pasta, bread, and all of that kind of stuff growing up. Some years I would literally eat pasta 5-6 days a week just because it was easy and my family specialized in making sauces for it and stuff.

So half a year back I tested basically going on a paleo type diet, which basically means removing all of the artificial sugar, the gluten, the wheat, and basically everything that isn't a fruit, vegetable, or basic meat like chicken. After a couple months, my skin cleared up for a month, more clear than it's ever been in a seriously long time. A few weeks to a month prior to my current breakout, I had started eating 2-3 Sweet and Salty Nature Valley bars which obviously have gluten and wheat products in them, and then a week before my current breakout I had a couple rice stir fry, two plates of pasta and a pizza throughout the week. Directly following that week, my skin has broken out, and continuously broken out, and it's been several weeks since the breakout started.

Now, I'm trying to figure out if it was the nature valley bars, or the week of rice/pasta/pizza that triggered it, or if it was all some freak coincidence (which I highly doubt). If it was the nature valley bars, then that would imply that what you eat takes weeks before the effects of it show up on your skin. So if I happen to have a sensitivity to gluten, that would make sense, to me at least. Then there's the possibility that it was the week of rice/pizza/pasta and that it caused the breakout directly after binging that week. If the latter is true, and my former theory about it taking weeks for the effects to show on the skin is not true, then the nature valley bars didn't trigger it and something during that week of binging was the trigger. Of course, there's always the third option where all of those foods compounded together to create an even worse skin situation. It just makes sense though, where if the skin reaction was delayed and didn't happen until your body processed the food, then after several weeks when the symptoms first start, you would see problems for the entire duration of the time you fueled your body with what was causing the problem. So if nature valley bars and pizza/pasta/rice was the problem, then my skin "should" breakout for about a month once the reaction starts, assuming the first day of the reaction is tied to the first day I started eating the gluten/wheat, and the reaction stops towards the last day I was eating the gluten/wheat.

At any rate, I'm back to the basics, and have been for weeks, waiting until this breakout passes and my skin starts to stabilize again.

But if any of you have any thoughts or experiences relating to any of this, I would love to hear it. The most aggravating part of acne/sensitive skin is trying to isolate what the cause of it is!