The Acne Elimination Diet

Today we are going to talk about the acne elimination diet, what it is if you need it and how to do it. 

The Acne Elimination Diet is really designed to eliminate inflammation in the body because the health of the gut has been strongly linked to the inflammatory processes throughout the entire body.

So if you have acne, acne is inflammation, which means you need to do some type of elimination diet to help you identify which foods may be contributing to inflammation.

So how does an elimination diet work?

Specifically the acne elimination diet. When your body is inflamed, research has shown that an imbalanced microbiome is often behind this. And an imbalanced microbiome occurs in the gut and often this means your gut is inflamed and certain foods can aggravate that inflammation.

In order to fully heal the gut, we need to remove those foods that are aggravating the inflammation.

We need to heal the gut, which can take two to three weeks for the kind of like normal gut. If you have a deep symbiosis or an autoimmune condition, it can take up to 12 weeks, but the good news is that once you’ve healed your gut, you can start to reintroduce certain foods that we eliminated.

We can see what foods you can tolerate, how much of certain foods you can tolerate and which foods you just need to avoid for good. An elimination diet is the best way to determine which foods are helping you and which foods are hurting you.

A lot of my acne patients come to me and they’re like, “Oh my God, Stacy, I do not want to do an elimination diet. It’s too difficult. It takes too much time. Can I just spend a few hundred dollars and do a food sensitivity test?” And my answer to them is no, not a good idea because a food sensitivity test determines which foods are causing a delayed immune reaction in the body.

This is important to know, but my acne patients have food intolerances as well, and this means that food are not being properly digested and absorbed in the digestive tract. An example of this is a dysostotic condition such as CBOE. CBOE is a small intestinal bacterial disorder and it create a lot of gas, a lot of bloating.

Certain foods do aggravate it, but if you were to do a food sensitivity test, those foods would not show up as a potential aggravators and you think you have the answers with the test, it’s not giving you the whole picture.

The elimination diet is the only way.

It’s gold standard test recognized throughout the medical community as the very best way to determine which foods are helping and which foods are hurting your gut.

What foods should I be eliminating from my diet?

In my elimination diet, there are always the big three foods that always need to be eliminated. These are gluten, sugar, and dairy. 

Mark my words, you will feel such a difference just by getting rid of these three foods.

Chocolate can be one of them. So I do get my patients to take the chocolate out of their diet, which is a big deal for me because that just happens to be my favorite food. And so I get my patients to remove these foods from the diet for at least two to three weeks.

The gut is behind most of the inflammatory processes in the body. Again, research has shown that over the last few years, it’s the microbiome that’s the culprit. When there are too many pathogenic microorganisms, not enough beneficial organisms an imbalance happens, inflammation happens.

Thank you so much!

Xoxo

Dr. Stacey