Accidently Becoming A Vegetarian – A Journey To Find A Cure For My Acne

This is a great real life story.

What happened? Well, it started when I was 13 years old with one whitehead right in the middle of my chin.
I’d previously vowed to wash my face twice a day when I got acne for the first time. What followed was four years of trying every cleanser on the planet. I even tried taking medication one summer but to no avail. Covering my entire face, neck and back, by the time I was 17, were blackheads, whiteheads, and a thick layer of oil, possibly enough to fry eggs in.

As you can probably imagine, my frustration grew worse each year until the bare mention of my skin problems set my head alight. I was operating on a heavy dose of ignorance, trying everything I could to ignore how people were wiping their fingers on their clothes after touching my skin or avoiding my cheek while giving me a hug. The one thing that made the situation bearable was how my family and friends still loved me for who I was and didn’t give me a hard time about my acne; they knew it was considerably worse for me than for everybody else, and I didn’t need them adding to it.

When I was 18, I started taking vitamin B5 supplements, also known as pantothenic acid. Taking ten 500mg pills three times a day resulted in a significant improvement. Within a few months, my face was looking relatively clear, though I still had the occasional blemish and redness. Blackheads were still a problem and my back didn’t see much change at all.

I kept taking the B5 until I was 22. My acne was getting progressively worse. Perhaps my body was building up a resistance to the pantothenic acid. Whatever the case, it became clear that it was no longer working. Whilst it was keeping my acne at bay, if to a lesser degree than at first, it certainly wasn’t a cure. My fears at this point were really bringing me down. I had two words, “adult acne,” ringing in my ears. Whenever I caught a peek at myself in the mirror I thought, “Oh, God, am I going to have to deal with this for the rest of my life?”

The conventional wisdom on acne that I’d heard for the better part of my life boiled down to some relatively coherent stuff concerning hormones and a couple of anecdotes about fatty foods and chocolate. Everyone had their own special tips but they all agreed that it was just something caused by an individual’s body chemistry. In other words, there’s no known cause and no known cure – you just have to live with it.
That’s what I’d believed until my best friend went to a health shop one day to get me some more vitamin B5 tablets. The man who was running the store asked why she needed so much. After surprising him with her answer, the man revealed that he himself had had acne problems throughout most of his life. He said that he took vitamin A & D as well as some zinc to keep it under control. Most importantly, however, he said that his acne was caused by consuming dairy products, and he was certain that I’d see improvement if I cut dairy out of my diet, too (apparently we had similar acne).

Now, bear in mind that if doctors had tested my blood at any time between the ages of 10 to 22, they would have discovered that it was at least 60% milk. I drank at least two pints a day, often more. It was my favourite drink, and I loved drinking it. Having said that, hate is a potent enemy of love, and when my friend came back and told me what the man had said, I was sick enough of having problems with acne that I stopped drinking milk right then and there. Since that day I haven’t willingly consumed any dairy products whatsoever, although some food really tries hard to hide the fact that there’s milk in it.

At first, the improvement was astounding. For the first time in five years, I could stop taking vitamin B5 without my face becoming a sticky solar panel. I was overjoyed, to say the least. The fact that my favourite drink was “illegal” – as it’s now termed by my friends and me – didn’t affect me much at all. In fact, giving it up turned out to be something positive to me.

I learned about what was actually in the milk that I’d consumed so freely for so long. In addition to the hormones that are in it for the sake of the child that it’s intended to feed – not unlike the hormones found in human breast milk (or indeed any mammalian lactation) – there are also man-made hormones injected into the cow in order to keep it pregnant and lactating, not to mention the pustules that grow and multiply, turning it into a foul-smelling greenish spew within a matter of weeks.

There was also the issue of casein, which is the most abundant protein in mammalian milk (up to 80% of the protein in cow’s milk). This animal protein is on the list of ones that can cause cancer. This forms part of the hypothesis that the consumption of animal proteins – primarily those found in red meat and pork – are the actual causes behind most chronic degenerative diseases. Whilst many people dismiss this theory as vegetarian/vegan propaganda, it has a lot of medical and statistical evidence behind it, both from dietary and environmental perspectives.

Unfortunately, it didn’t cure my acne. After a while, my skin stopped improving. Quite suddenly, I became concerned once more that my skin problems would persist for decades to come. Luckily, the substantial improvement that I’d experienced had opened my eyes to the idea that diet was a major cause of acne.

Almost as if by fate, I’d stopped eating bread for a week because of a concern that the raising agent used contained milk. The coming weekend I tried eating home-baked bread that we could know for sure didn’t contain any milk products. I had lots of it, many slices, with two bowls of wheat-based noodles. That week, I’d seen an improvement that we at first contributed to our suspicion that there was milk in the store-bought bread. My skin was less oily than before, but the next morning my face was once again covered in a layer of grease.

At first, my thoughts were limited to “what the hell is this?” and general displeasure. I had even more bread that day, and a couple of hamburgers that night for dinner. The following day, my skin was even worse. My first instinct however was that there was something in the burger buns, namely milk, but then I remembered the massive dose of wheat & gluten that I’d consumed the previous few days.

After a couple of internet searches, it became clear that I wasn’t the only one to suspect wheat as a culprit for oily skin. I revealed this to my friend and she mentioned that the man at the health store had indeed suggested that wheat & gluten would be next on the list of allergens. Just like the dairy, they caused a rash on my skin, like a mild form of eczema, which made it vulnerable to infection. Safe to say that since then, wheat & gluten have a spot on the list of illegal foods.

Then there was a long period without any new discoveries. My face was healing slowly but surely. At one point, I had to stop using a certain oil-free moisturiser because, well, it made my skin oily – the very opposite to what it was designed to do. One of the ingredients was lactic acid. It’s debatable whether it’s actually derived from milk but combined with the noticeable effect it had on my skin and the fact that it was applied topically was enough for me to stop using it.

Instead, I tried a specially made moisturiser for people with sensitive skin. For a while, I thought it worked, but before long, I noticed it had the same effect as the previous one. A couple of months later when my skin was clearer and a lot of the eczema had healed, I tried it again, thinking that maybe my skin didn’t like it because of the eczema. Safe to say, it didn’t work, but it yielded an important clue for later on. Other than that, I was confident that I’d found the dietary causes of my acne and was waiting for my skin to clear up.

I continued to see steady improvement for a few months but after a while, I started to wonder if my face was healing slower than I would expect. I had new blemishes almost every day even though my face looked better overall. It didn’t concern me that much, anyway, because before long I had two weeks when my face was completely free of oil. It was matte, not shiny as it’d been for the better part of a decade. This made me very happy, as you can probably imagine.

The next allergen was harder to pin down. Not much unlike with the wheat & gluten, my face was suddenly oily one morning. Again, I thought, “now, what the hell is this?” and my spirits sank to the floor. However, my first instinct this time was to investigate my diet again. I was quite sure that there was something left in my diet that my skin didn’t like, but probably something that I ate in smaller amounts.

I knew exactly what I’d recently introduced into my diet. It was something I hadn’t had in a very long time – cornflakes. Well, golden nuggets actually, but they’re made from the same stuff – corn. By this point, I was already persuaded, but I couldn’t leave it at that. An internet search discovered that more people had linked corn and corn-derivatives to their acne. I went to my best friend and told her about this. She revealed to me that the yummy new wheat & gluten free pasta I’d had lots of for the last few days is made from corn. I went into the kitchen and checked the ingredients of the chicken nuggets I’d been eating several times a week for months, and what did I see? Maize flour.

You would’ve thought that I’d be quicker to adapt to this new information given my experience with discovering major food groups that I’m unable to eat. However, I wasn’t very happy. I took a couple of minutes to centre myself, and whilst I was comforting myself using the notion that I could still have rice (which remains my saving grace through this whole ordeal), something else popped into my mind.

That specially made moisturiser I told you about, the one that didn’t work? It proudly presented a very natural and organic ingredient, used to control shine throughout the day – corn starch. In a way, I felt as if the entire food and cosmetics industry was pissing in my face. Over the course of 6 months, I’d discovered that through a combination of can’t and shouldn’t, I could no longer eat red meat, pork, dairy, wheat & gluten and corn – almost every modern food group on the planet. Odds are, if people didn’t eat it 2,000 years ago, I can’t have it, unless I want my face covered in blemishes.

In some ways, I’m still glad for all this. As I said, hate is a good ally if you’re trying to fight love. I’ve always loved eating chicken nuggets at McDonald’s, enough so that I could barely keep myself from eating them more than twice a month. Because I really hate having acne, I now have a powerful card to use against cravings for foods that I shouldn’t be eating anyway. There really is no contest – there is not a single thing in the world of which eating I would value higher than having clear skin. Pizza, cheeseburgers, tacos – they all lose. I still want to eat them but I have so much reason not to that I have no difficulty giving them the proverbial middle finger. Even simple stuff like bread and ready-made meals, stuff that we all know we shouldn’t be eating, allergies or no allergies, gets the shaft. My food sensitivities saved me from a bad diet. That shame we all feel for indulging in bad eating habits? It’s gone, along with the bad food.

It’s been a month since I stopped eating corn. I’ve seen a slow but steady improvement and the only new blemishes I’ve gotten have appeared after shaving, something I do as seldom as possible. My face is still red because of the many fading scars left behind by a long history of acne problems, but they are fading every day, along with the frustration I’ve felt for so many years.

I’m told I shouldn’t expect a complete recovery until 6 – 12 months have passed. The eczema caused by the food insensitivities takes several months to heal and then the acne blemishes themselves have to take their own time. But that’s ok. Every day I notice one more faded scar, one more smooth patch of skin.

10 years of acne has given me some scars. Many of them are lessons on how to treat yourself. Some are superficial that they say give me character. The most important one is the new knowledge that diet rules the body chemistry, and that it is the first place to start whenever something isn’t right.

Best wishes on your journey,

The Accidental Vegetarian