Heya Gorgeous!
I had a great conversation with an awesome woman today, and I wanted to share lots of what I told her so it might help you, too!
She came to me saying she was jumping off the pill, and has been having some troubles with acne.
She was hesitant, after reading some of the possible side effects of minocycline, to jump on it, and so asked me about the natural side of things for acne.
Are there natural things you can do for acne (adult or otherwise)?
At the very base of things, there are LOTS of different natural things you can do for acne. And while it makes sense to swap skin creams and so on, as is most people’s first thoughts, this stuff really does come from the inside-out, so re-balancing what’s going on inside can be a thousand times more effective than changing up what you put ON your skin. (Aiming for the root cause, not continually throwing stuff on the symptom)
In this article, I talk about hormonal balance, probiotics if you go the minocycline route, sugar and it’s relationship to acne, fiber and why it’s helpful in alleviating acne, yeast cleansing and putting it all together.
If you go the route of taking the low-dose antibiotic, it’s SUPER important you’re also taking high-dose probiotics!
The low dose antibiotic is going to knock out both the bad bacteria in your system, and the great ones. So making sure you’re re-filling on the great ones will help keep your immune system strong, your digestive system firing, and they can help to prevent and fight off yeast infections (that can become quite chronic in women who take antibiotics regularly).
In this case, what birth control pill were you on?
Depending on which hormones were used in high amounts, that can set your body up for a few different hormonal imbalances, which can lead to acne at any age.
If I was on hormonal birth control, I would be doing some pretty specific things to help my liver detoxify the estrogen in it. (And if you’re looking at natural birth control methods, I wrote a wicked article on that over here for my friends at The Naked Label).
I think that some women *could* do this, and have the pill have little to no effect on them (besides preventing conception) because they were on top of their hormones, but it would be a challenge.
As far as why I’d do this, too much estrogen in our bodies can create a few different symptoms;
- acne is one of them,
- low iron is another,
- asthma that gets worse is another,
- depression is another (that would be my mega-concern for me, just based on my mental health history),
- uterine fibroids, PCOS, fibrocystic breasts, endometriosis,
- fatigue,
- fluid-retention,
- gall stones,
- irritability,
- loss of sex drive,
- memory loss,
- irregular, long or short, or otherwise strange periods (different women’s bodies will react a little differently on this one),
- weight gain and
- raging hot flashes/night sweats
So I would want to help my body take the estrogen out effectively.
Now, on it’s own, your Doctor is totally right, maybe the pill wouldn’t have enough estrogen in it to create acne. And maybe if you were really careful, you could get most of it out really effectively, and not have those symptoms.
BUT – that’s not the only thing we’re taking in/being surrounded by even daily, that contains these zenoestrogens (really, really strong-acting estrogens).
- Plastics,
- herbicides (so concentrated extra on our big gmo crops),
- stress,
- dark coloured hair dyes,
- some anti-depressants,
- not working out,
- cosmetics with parabens in them,
- bleached tampons,
- nail polish with tolulene or phthalates,
- dairy and meat that was raised conventionally,
- first or second hand smoke,
- drinking moderate or high amounts of alcohol,
there are LOADS of things we do every day that add to our estrogen bucket (those were a few).
So, if some or a bunch of the symptoms above kind of jumped out at you, then it’s really a good idea, while you’ve gotten off the pill, to help your body balance back faster.
To help my hormonal balance,
I’d use maca powder daily, which is a superfood from peru, and it’s slightly progesteronic, and it helps bring female sex hormones back into balance. If you google ‘maca-cino’ that’s one of my favourite ways of getting it in (or you could even stir it into your coffee, or take it with cocoa powder as a ‘shot’ kind of thing with water, if you prefer the quick and mostly painless approach).
And then I’d focus on eating lots of the cruciferous family of foods; broccoli, cabbage, sauerkraut, broccoli sprouts if you can find them (a 1/4 cup of them contains the same nutrient levels as 2 cups of broccoli), brussels sprouts, cauliflower, mustard greens, etc. Whatever you might like out of them, whatever you’ll eat from that family.
They contain a few different nutrients/plant-chemicals; indole-3-carbinol is one and sulforaphane, both which help the liver pathway that detoxifies estrogen to work more efficiently.
So that’s the hormone relationship.
Next up is sugar.
There is a HUGE relationship between blood sugar swings and acne. So it’s something to be very wary of.
Blood sugar hurts can look like eating lots of sugar or white bread or white potatoes, but it can also look like skipping meals; both are bad on our blood sugar levels.
- So eating regularly,
- reducing the amount of sweet things in your diet,
- subbing some of them out with liquid stevia, if that helps with your cravings (I’ll do a lemonade sometimes with fresh lemon juice and 5-10 drops of stevia if I’m craving something sweet, just to make the craving go away),
- and if you’re going to have something as a sweet treat, then try your best never to have it on an empty stomach (the worst ever).
Eating sweets with fat, protein and/or fiber all help to slow down the sugar absorption (because they take longer to digest, so it forces the sugar eaten with it to be digested slower).
That’s why a good dark chocolate (in part), is better for you than sweet tarts (or another straight up sugar candy). In part, the antioxidants are awesome, but in real chocolate, there’s also a great fat boost, which can help you to absorb the sugar a little slower, and have less impact on your blood sugar levels.
How Fiber Helps Acne:
The fiber part comes into play not only because more fiber generally throughout the day = less blood sugar spikes, BUT, it’s also a mega-benefit to acne because when we spoke about the liver detoxifying estrogens, that’s a phenomenal part one to the picture.
But the second part is getting those broken down hormones OUT of your bod STAT so they don’t get re-absorbed, making your body have to repeat the process again (and slow down what it’ll be able to do today, because it’s working again on yesterday’s stuff).
So honestly, fruits and veggies are awesome here, beans, nuts and seeds also superb.
And my favourite is flax seeds, whether in baked goods to replace the eggs, or added to smoothies (only smoothies you can pretty much drink on the spot, though, otherwise the flax will gel them up by the time they get to work). You always want to grind up your flaxseeds yourself.
If you’ve tried to increase fiber before and found yourself bloated/gassy at all, then it generally means you’ve just gotta start drinking more water as you increase the fiber you’re getting in.
And you’ll generally know when your fiber counts are great, because it’ll take under 2 minutes to poo, and there’ll be no straining required.
So the natural route and putting it all together:
If you had:
- repeated use of antibiotics in your life,
- birth control pill use,
- constant cravings for sugar, alcohol or bread,
- lots of food sensitivities you couldn’t quite place,
- rectal itching or bladder infections,
- frequent yeast infections,
- a coated tongue all the time (white/yellow),
- vaginal burning, itching or discomfort,
- indigestion from eating sweets,
- severe tobacco reactions (or perfumes or sometimes chemicals),
then I’d probably recommend doing a candida cleanse as a great step one. Note that this depends on your individual health history, current medications you’re taking, and a few other factors, so it’s always important to cross-check any info you find with your natural healthcare practitioner, and because they have taken the time to know YOU and your unique history, they’ll be able to let you know your best next steps.
You can get boxed kits (I’ve used CandiGone), and you try to eliminate as much/all sugar as you can when you do it. There’s a tincture (liquid herbs) and a pill, and you take ’em every day for 15 days (I’d do two boxes over 30 days if I had really bad everything from above), and they help to knock out any bad stuff hanging out in your gut (that lower the immune system, increase inflammation and can really cause badddddddd sugar cravings that you can’t seem to ever escape from). Then I’d throw in a WHOP-LOAD (very scientific 🙂 ) of good bacteria every day for a few months.
With some people, I’d skip right to the high-dose probiotic part, if the symptoms from above didn’t ring very true. One of my go-to’s price-wise and efficacy is NOW Foods 50 Billion, 10 strains of probiotics.
From the candida cleanse, you can generally expect a few headaches, generally feeling a little tired, and probably craving sugar pretty badly for the first 7-10 days.
If you were taking the probiotics you might expect to feel a little bloated/weird digestive-ly for 7-10 days (like things are shifting).
The candida cleanse contains a whole bunch of herbs that have been shown to kill different yeasts and bacteria in the gut. Then you re-load the gut with good bacteria so you don’t ever have to do the cleanse again (the good bacteria, once you’ve got lots of them, create a cool environment where the bad guys can’t thrive).
Quick Recap:
- drink water as you increase your fiber
- increase fiber to help hormones have an easy way out of you (fruits, veggies, beans, nuts, seeds)
- increase foods from the brassica family to help your liver detoxify estrogens
- add maca powder to your life to help balance your estrogen and progesterone
- eat regularly
- eat sweets with fiber, fat or protein when/if you have them
- never eat sweets on an empty stomach
- talk to your awesome Holistic Nutritionist about whether a candida cleanse and/or high dose probiotic would be right for you
Xo,
Nathalie
Sources:
A Smart Woman’s Guide to Hormones – By Lorna Vanderhaege
Advanced Nutri-Body Analysis – David Rowland, PhD
Thank you for posting this. I’m sure my hormones are wonky though I don’t have acne. I’m intrigued by what you wrote,
“Next up is sugar.
Basically, researchers behind a big study on acne were ballsy enough to say that ‘acne is basically diabetes of the skin’.”
I would love to read this study — could you post a link to it?
Hey Diana,
Thanks so much for your comment! I’m glad you found this helpful.
You’d want to reach out to The Canadian Medical Association Journal, it was published in 1959. At this point, I can’t find it online as an open study, though I did search for you. I knew about it from my schooling.
I hope that helps to point you in the right direction.
Xo! Nathalie from Glow