Some approaches to healing acne make it all about the inside of the body, so the gut, the hormones, what you eat, the supplements you take…

While it’s incredibly important to take care of this wonderful meat suit and make sure that it’s working like a well-oiled machine…

This approach is kinda like, if you have issues with your teeth, you just eat to strengthen them instead of…brushing, flossing, taking good care of dat sexy ass mouth.

So though gut health and hormonal balance are integral to overall health, they only indirectly affect the skin.

Since what you put into your body is prioritised amongst like a gazillion processes, it doesn’t necessarily go to heal or improve the skin directly.

For example, many people believe that when you drink a lot of water your skin looks better. This is an old pervasive myth…That I myself believed too back in the day!

However there’s no actual evidence of this and it’s a real oversimplification of how the body works.

Dry skin doesn’t occur due to you drinking too little water, it occurs due to a variety of different environmental factors such as sun damage, hot showers, stripping skincare, harsh weather conditions…

That is to say, stuff that occurs OUTSIDE, not inside your stomach has a huge effect on your skin’s hydration.

Though you eating a varied, balanced, whole food diet would benefit your health overall and create a better quality sebum that could do better at keeping your skin from evaporating so much water or oxidising so quickly…

Your skin deals with A LOT.

Skin is the largest organ and it’s here to protect us from the environment: pathogens, sun damage, free radicals etc.

So what happens when we neglect it on the outside, while trying to heal it through the inside?

Bring it back to the teeth example. It’s the same thing.

Lack of skincare or the wrong skincare is like no toothpaste or lemon juice as a mouth wash — not good.

Try to eat well for clean teeth…and you’ll find what? Yellow, decaying teeth.

The point is, if you want healthy, resilient skin you cannot forego skincare.

I’ve worked with over a hundred women one-on-one in my Routine Review service, some of them live on super restrictive diets while others eat whatever…

Guess what? Skincare helped both. Big time. I mean some of the results are beyond astounding.

In fact, some of my clients had super “unhealthy” lifestyles by many standards where I thought that a skincare routine couldn’t possibly help! And they still got clear skin!!!

It may have something to do with the fact that acne starts with a clog in the pore (outside), not necessarily something going wacky in your stomach (inside) — a fact that most nutritionists will forget to point out to you.

Why Do You Need Skin Care?

Your skin needs to be kept clean so that pathogens and bacteria don’t have a breeding frenzy, so that your own sebum doesn’t oxidise and start clogging your pores…

Your skin needs to be protected through proper hydration that doesn’t just involve drinking water — since your skin also evaporates water (trans epidermal water loss).

That means it’s important to seal in the moisture…because dry and dehydrated skin can result in stickier skin cells that cause MORE CLOGGING.

Your skin needs to be protected with sunscreen since the sun is responsible for a whopping 90% of skin aging. Dats right, folks.

People think skin gets dryer with age, but it gets dryer with sun damage which accumulates with age!

Sun damage creates all those wrinkles, sun spots, melasma, rosacea…and guess what? Makes your pores MORE prone to clogging.

Sunscreen or bust.

But if you want to heal the clogging, the rosacea, the dryness, the whatever — then air won’t do it, and neither will your food.

That’s when active ingredients play a huge role. These are ingredients that do more than hydrate the skin, and are found in small or sometimes nonexistent quantities in most conventional and expensive skincare products.

But the right actives, in the right concentrations can heal the skin, strengthen it, and even reverse a lot of the previous damage.

Notice how I didn’t mention reversing wrinkles?

The only way to reverse wrinkles fully is to get a time machine and start caring for your skin properly like since birth…including wearing copious amounts of sunscreen every single day, rain or shine.

Otherwise, skincare can make your wrinkles a touch less deep and look a touch better — but anyone who claims that skincare products can reverse actual wrinkles is lying to you.

Many people do Botox and/or surgeries to reverse deep signs of aging, yet don’t invest in proper skincare to protect their investment.

I’ll say it again, sunscreen or bust.

Final Thoughts

So the approaches to healing acne or other skin issues that deal with nutrition and hormones are incomplete and effed up for a bunch of other reasons…

I’ve recently been loathing these dietary approaches to acne because of how restrictive and stressful and totally unsustainable they are, plus they can totally mess up your relationship with food. This in itself is totally unnecessary.

These approaches make it seem like if you eat the wrong thing you effed up and you’re some kind of huge failure!

Eating should be a pleasure, it should be fun and easy, and you should be able to trust your own body. Any acne-healing philosophy that makes you orthorexic in the process are not healthy, and won’t result in the skin you want anyway because of the stress involved.

Feeding yourself nutritious foods and taking great care of your body are important things to do, so eat well, sleep enough, exercise, and meditate!

But don’t forget skincare!
Since skincare can work directly on your skin unlike all the other things that you’re doing.

No food, no sleep, no exercise, no meditation will UNCLOG your clogged pores.

If you don’t take advantage of well-formulated skincare then your skin will suffer down the road.
Let me remind you that prevention is so much easier than reversal. Just saying…

And implementing a great skincare routine is the easiest thing of all. 🙂

If you don’t believe in skincare, and prefer to skip it or just use random stuff…then I’ll assume that you also don’t believe in toothpaste either. 😉 Let me know if you get my logic!

Love,
Olena

PS. If you need help choosing the right skincare products for you then book a Routine Review with me! Click here to learn more!