When I speak to people about their skin, they usually ask what they can remove from their diet to heal their acne. That’s a tiny part of the puzzle in my experience.
If you’re thinking of trying an elimination diet to heal your acne, read on to learn from my mistakes.
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What is an elimination diet for acne?
Before we go any further, let’s look at what an elimination diet is.
An elimination diet involves removing foods that can trigger acne from your diet for four weeks, then adding them back in, one at a time, and monitoring for any reactions.
Common triggers to remove during an elimination diet are:
- Dairy
- Gluten
- Sugar
- Eggs
- Soy
- Fast food
- Alcohol
If a particular food is negatively impacting your health, you’ll feel better having removed it from your diet for those four weeks.
Elimination diets are safe because you are removing foods for a short time only. Just make sure you get the all-clear from your doctor before starting an elimination diet.
Will an elimination diet heal acne?
On its own, no. Eliminating foods from my diet had little effect the first few times I tried it. It wasn’t until I started adding in lots of healthy foods that my skin healed.
I eventually abandoned elimination diets and focused on improving my gut health. I consciously increased the variety of foods I was eating, particularly fruits and vegetables.
As my diet became more diverse, I naturally ate less dairy. It wasn’t long before I noticed that my stomach would feel uncomfortable, and my skin would itch on the days I ate dairy.
Elimination diets did not heal my acne. Improving my gut health and limiting my intake of trigger foods (in my case, dairy) were two key steps on my healing journey.
What to do before starting an elimination diet
Improve your gut health. My experience over the years has taught me that what you eat matters more than what you don’t eat. This means that removing foods alone is unlikely to heal your skin.
Acne is very often a sign of an underlying gut health problem. It certainly was for me.
Elimination diets focus on removing foods. On their own, they don’t help you improve your gut health, which is why they don’t benefit everyone. You may very well have removed a food that your body doesn’t like, but you’re not seeing results because you’ve done nothing to address the underlying reason for your acne.
There’s no single test that can tell you how healthy your gut is. The best way to tell is to experiment on yourself. Eat a gut-friendly diet and see how much better you feel and how it transforms your skin.
Gut friendly diets and acne
Your gut needs two things to be healthy:
- Fibre
- Water
A healthy gut diet promotes eating a wide variety of plant-based foods and drinking enough water. If you want to understand more about why your gut needs water, click here.
For now, we’re going to focus on fibre. Your gut is at its healthiest when it is teeming with bacterial diversity. Your microbiome (the bacteria living in your gut) thrives when you feed them well with a wide variety of plant-based foods, including fruits and vegetables.
Focus on getting a healthy gut first by feeding your microbes what they need to thrive. Once you’re consistent with this, you’ll see clearly the foods that make you feel good and the foods that don’t. You might not even need an elimination diet to tell you this.
Gut health protocols
If you prefer to follow more defined protocols, check out the following gut health diets:
Jeanette Hyde – The Gut Makeover
The Gut Makeover is a 4-week plan the author describes as a restoration programme that builds your gut up to a state of bacterial diversity and abundance. There are recipes and meal plans making it super easy to enrich your diet without worrying about what you can and can’t eat. I particularly resonated with this quote from the book – “to have beautiful skin we need to support our microbiome”.
Dr Michael Mosley – The Clever Guts Diet
The Clever Guts Diet also features recipes and meal plans to help you repair your gut and reboot your microbiome within just a few weeks. The author also gives you an in-depth tour of the gut, having swallowed a camera as part of a live experiment in the Science Museum in London.
Improving your gut health is the best way to improve your acne. Both of these gut-friendly diets remove most common trigger foods in the early weeks of the diet, but they get results by also adding in the foods that will boost your gut health, which is what you need for long term healing.
If you’re thinking of trying an elimination diet for your acne, get your gut in good shape first.