startofsummer

it took about 10 days for me to see the start of a change, and from then on it got better.

So I'm 18 and after a couple of years of on-off bad acne I finally gave in and decided to cut dairy out of my diet. I decided to do it at a particular flare up in my skin at the beginning of 2017 when i was just feeling awful and felt like I had tried everything else. It took a week of dairy free for me to really see a difference... and there was a good difference! For the first week i saw no change though and was close to giving it up but decided to stick it out for 2 weeks because it would make sense to take time to see effects. After 1 week exactly my skin drastically changed. Its difficult to explain but it generally took away the oily greasiness of my skin, and when i looked in the mirror it didnt look as angry, red and inflamed and wet with grease. But the main thing is that I wasnt getting my usual new 3-4 spots a day!!! my skin was calm, no longer angrily, producing spot after spot. HOWEVER and this is a big however, I'm not entirely sure of the effect of dairy free alone. One week after going dairy free was when I started taking saw palmetto supplement, probiotics and evening primrose oil.... and it was around that time that i saw the difference. So its difficult for me to isolate the effect of dairy free alone. About 1 month later, I stopped taking those supplements temporarily for 1 week (because i ran out) but did continue dairy free. I had been dairy free for about 1 month at this point and i thought i had it all sorted. HOWEVER my skin went back to its normal self, oily red inflamed.. 3 spots a day etc... I was confused and it shows that it wasnt the dairy free which was having an effect it was the supplments!!! Dairy free didnt work alone..... But then last week i accidentally ate some toffee popcorn compleltey forgetting that it had milk in the ingredients. i was taking supplements at this point, but because i had broken my dairy free, i did have 4 more spots on my face over two days and the oilyness retuned for 1 day. SO this shows that dairy free does work and have a difference... i think the moral of this tale is that, for me anyway, i need to combine dairy free diet with other supplements for the desired effect. In terms of the pain of not having dairy in the UK there are plenty of substitutes... you can get dairy free butter (its not actually butter though obvs) spread, chocolate, biscuits, chocolate puddings, milk obviously, cheese, pizza and theres plenty of nice food which is not dairy; namely crisps, some popcorn, sweets..... *note that i have PCOS hormone imbalance related acne and that dairy free might work differently for that