Eczema is actually such a broad term. I think doctors these days throw you into the bracket as soon as they cannot identify the cause of your skin problem. But to be fair, the term itself is pretty vague. “Atopic dermatitis (eczema) is a condition that makes your skin red and itchy.”
Now “redness” is key here. The sign of redness is when your body have some allergy reaction which causes inflammation from it fighting against something that has invaded your body.
Allergic reaction is also a very unique thing. I always thought that allergic reaction is when your throat swells up like when you eat peanuts. But actually there are many levels of allergic reaction. When I got my blood tested for allergies from any particular “food and inhalation”, I found out that I was allergic mildly to chicken and crab. But the levels were low. Meaning that, if I have small quantity of those things, there might not be reactions at all. But the more you eat it, the more chances of you having a reaction towards it.
Because it doesn’t show right away, for the longest time before I got tested, I couldn’t figure out what I was allergic to and my eczema was just getting more severe that I couldn’t sleep at night and was itching like a lunatic.
It is a serious problem once your sleep is affected by it. Instead of allowing your body to work and heal on its own while you rest and for hormones to do what it should it fixing you, it couldn’t happen.
I’ve always believed that we have to fix the root of the problem before anything. I did not use any hard medicine on my body because I don’t want to keep relying on it and the problem was not an instant fix or an easy fix. So I dived into research and found a very similar content from people who shared their stories of how they contained their eczema and with the reading up the ‘leaky gut syndrome’ (even if I didn’t have it, the theory of it made sense), I believed that food is the main cause of my reaction.
Although I’ve already stopped eating chicken and crab, my eczema wasn’t healing and I was still suffering from no sleep and itchiness. So I started eliminating high inflammatory food such as sugar, artificial trans-fat like margarine, soy, carbs and dairy and slowly introducing it back into my diet to see that causes reaction. Now since it took time for the reaction to show up on the skin, you really have to be strict with your diet.
Now each diet will be different for each person. Personally, I cannot have cow’s milk, almond milk or soy milk, it instantly gives me pimples with leads to my skin flaring up my eczema, I can only have goats milk. So, it is really important to test it out yourself and see what works for you.
Eczema is such big problem to many people that doctors have yet to fully understand and that people around have yet to learn of how deeply it affects our body and mental health. As confident as one may be, we care for your appearance but more than that it is not fun to feel pain and be uncomfortable in your own skin. Even if you were a confident person, this problem can really undermine you.
Please feel free to share your experience with us and if you ever feel like giving up, know that there’s someone out there that faces the same problem. Even if it’s contained today doesn’t mean that the problem is gone, so this is a life-long battle we have to deal with and I am here with you.
Keep it classy! Xx
PS. I will feature in another post, the products I use for my skin type (eczema type).
