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Allergies and Acne

MemberMember
61
(@missbiscuit)

Posted : 02/09/2017 2:26 am

(moderators, please do not move this from the general acne discussion forum)

Hey Guys!

So my darling mother has always spent way too much time on scouring through Google and watching Dr Phil to diagnose herself with any number of things, and it drives me nuts. She's tried to diagnose me with all sorts ever since I could remember, but within the last year, I became very firm with her about not doing that anymore. One of the last things she had brought up before my 'ban' was "histamine intolerance", which just sounded like another one of the regular ailments she came across, and so I never looked into it.

Going on over a year now since the first time she brought that up, I'm working on bringing down my remaining 2 of 8+ cysts that came up last week within a couple of days. It was saddening that they had come up, but not entirely unexpected (albeit, maybe not in such a quantity). You see, I had been mowing down on peanut m&m's like no man's business, along with eating oranges every day, and tomatoes in my dinner wraps. I've proven to myself in past that all of these foods cause me to break out (especially peanuts!), but I did it anyways. What can I say - masochist. In any case, I was telling my mom how dairy, oranges, tomatoes and peanuts all break me out, and I couldn't figure out the correlation between them all. She said to me, "I know you hate when I talk about health stuff, but did you ever look into histamine intolerance?"

Well now I have, and Im glad that I did! (Thanks Ma! You were right! :D )
I have accumulated a huge list of food items that I cannot eat without breaking out, and every single one of them is on the high histamine list. All of those foods not only break me out, but they also upset my stomach terribly, leaving me gastrointestinal issues as well. I also have unexplained hair loss, low weight, and appetite issues which have improved since I started on anxiety medication, but are still there (and this is mostly due to the fact that I have no idea what I can and can't eat anymore - it's exhausting, and so I sometimes forego food even when Im hungry). 

Among others, acne, eczema, hair loss, gastrointestinal issues, painful periods are all on the list of symptoms, and I have every single one of them. And not to mention that I've noticed in the past that my acne gets worse during the summer, which would now make sense being that my body would be in histamine overload with my seasonal allergies on top of all of the rest.

Admittedly, I have not tried a low histamine diet yet, but I do plan to once I've done more research. In the meantime, I have stopped eating the oranges, tomatoes and peanut m&m's. Within the week, with a little help from my sulphur spot treatment, most of my cysts have all but gone, and certainly no new ones have popped up. I'm really excited and hopeful about this, guys! I hope it can possibly help you guys out as well! Give it a google - histamine intolerance + acne, and you'll come up with a lot of articles to read. :) 

 

Oh and mayo, bananas and alcohol (beer and wine) were all on my 'avoid' list long before I knew about this. Turns out they are on that histamine list as well! You can imagine why I was going out of my mind trying to find the correlation between all of these things. I would never have even thought about histamines!

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MemberMember
61
(@missbiscuit)

Posted : 02/25/2017 1:52 pm

Following up two and a half weeks later. I've done my best to stay away from all of the foods on the aforementioned histamine list, and my neck and jawline have all but cleared up, except for one of my cysts. The one that is left is old and on its way back from whence it came, but it's just taking a little longer to go down. So the real take away here is:

  • No new breakouts
  • Existing breakouts cleared up

Aside from avoiding histamine-rich foods, my cleansing regimen is:

  • I clean my face and neck with a warm wet cloth. I know - a facecloth?!This goes against everything I ever knew. But so it goes...
  • I massage a few drops of organic cold-pressed castor oil into my face and neck for about one minute
  • I rinse my face with room-temperature water
  • I use a sulphur spot-treatment on any spots (which I haven't needed to use for a while now), and then rinse off after 5-10 minutes
  • On any extra dry days, I use a couple of drops of the castor oil as a moisturizer
  • I use a light foundation which is good for acne-prone skin, but mainly because it has a sunscreen and I find it difficult to find sunscreens that don't break me out
  • After finding that my hair was softer and healthier after spending time in my home town, I started to consider water quality more seriously. It's something that I have looked into before, because my skin has always been much better when I've been basically anywhere other than my current city. I've since purchased a shower water filter which attaches to your shower head and turns hard water into soft water. For more on this, please see below:

http://www.progressivehealth.com/acne-water.htm

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