Gut Instinct

Firstly, I want to thank everyone who read my latest blog, for all the positive feedback and your lovely messages. I had a couple of people get in touch saying they were going to pass it onto a friend to read, thinking it could help them. This meant so much to me and that’s what it’s really about. Of course it boosts you when you see how many views it has – I’m not fully altruistic! But please continue to share when you come across someone who is potentially suffering with their skin.

In this post, I want to go a little further into what’s really helped my skin in the last year; The amazing probiotic that is goat’s milk kefir.

“Food can be the greatest form of medicine, or the slowest form of poison.” I learned this only in my late 20’s and for me and my body, it is entirely true.

Throughout the years – the last 6 more specifically - I’ve been through periods where my skin has been great on the odd occasions, and then right back to suffering… sometimes sleepless nights of itching and literally tearing through my skin. Everyone knows what it’s like to feel an itch, and then the sweet relief of scratching it. It’s amazing. However, having eczema, you’ll never be fully satisfied after the scratch, and that’s where it becomes a dangerous spiral of not being able to stop even as someone grabs your hand to make you. It’s what I imagine taking hard drugs is like. There’s a bit of ecstasy when it feels so good doing it, but the ‘come down’ is awful. Once you’re done scratching and feeling slightly alleviated, the aftermath of broken skin has often brought me to tears. I’m not looking for sympathy here, but just want to create an awareness to those who haven’t been through this.

But until recently, I never had more than a few days of good skin. I’m talking 3 or 4… it would literally be that short a time before it would get worse again. In March 2017, I tried out the Whole30. It’s a 30-day non-diet diet, where you basically eat paleo, cutting out sugar, wheat, dairy, grains and alcohol for a full 30 days in an attempt to re-set your body. After the 30 days, you re-introduce certain food groups to see how your body reacts to them. This way you can pin point what’s causing the problems, whatever those problems might be. This helped to a certain extent (I already knew I was allergic to dairy and wheat so hardly ever ate them anyway) and cutting out sugar really helped with my acne, but the eczema was still rearing its ugly head.

In May 2017 I met up with some friends for a lovely spring walk/climb at Brimham Rocks, and got chatting to someone about all my allergies and eczema. He suggested I try goat’s milk kefir, as it really helped with his skin (and IBS too). At this point I thought I had tried EVERYTHING under the sun, and was willing to try anything else that could help.

I went to ChucklingGoat and basically read the whole website. The reviews were amazing and when you can see before and after photos, what more evidence do you need? I watched the short video on the website, and downloaded the e-book the founder (Shann Nix Jones) had written called ‘The Good Skin Solution’. Then I placed my order for the kefir. I felt really positive about this, and I think that’s really useful from the off – if you’re half-hearted in whatever you do, you’re kinda setting yourself up for failure.

I won’t go too much into how the kefir works as you can look into that on the website if you want to, but it’s all to do with the gut. In your gut there are billions of bacteria that make up your immune system. You need the good bacteria in there. Amongst many things, antibiotics wipe out the bad bacteria – that’s what they’re used for when you really need it to get rid of infections. But unfortunately they also wipe out the good, and that’s where our problem lies. Live goat’s milk kefir is a PRObiotic, and puts more of the good bacteria back into your gut. Many ‘probiotics’ don’t work as they are not strong enough to survive the digestive process and your stomach acid. As the kefir is live and unpasteurised it can survive digestion, and with it being goat’s milk, it’s not as harsh as cow’s milk – which a lot of people have allergies/intolerances to.

There’s one main point you should know if you try kefir – avoid sugar. It kills the good bacteria and the kefir won’t work. Use alternatives like stevia. If you really need to make a change, giving up sugar should be worth the sacrifice for the benefits you’ll see after taking the kefir. The website says if you have really bad skin, you should do a minimum of 9 weeks (170ml every day), and it was actually around the 9 week mark that I noticed a big difference in my skin. It wasn’t reacting as much as it normally would and it felt and looked so much better. I carried on taking the kefir for around 7 months, and finally stopped in January 2018.

I still do some things to keep my gut strong including other probiotics like Kombucha, which I make at home. It literally costs pennies, unlike the store-bought versions which are so expensive! Kombucha is a fermented tea, which you do actually have to make with sugar, but the bacteria feed off that during the fermenting process and there’s a minimal amount when it’s ready. Miso, kimchi and sauerkraut are also probiotic.. you only need a little bit each day to help replenish the bacteria in your gut.

Vegans and vegetarian - cover your eyes now. Bone broth is amazing. The collagen helps to heal the walls/lining of your intestines and helps prevent or repair a leaky gut. Your intestines let nutrients pass through the walls, but when you have leaky gut, other things can pass through too, such as undigested food, bacteria and waste. This can cause allergic reactions when these things enter your blood stream, causing you to react to things you might never have been allergic to. However, if the bone broth makes you feel a bit queasy, you can buy collegen powder and add that to smoothies. It does contain gelatine so it’s not vegetarian/vegan friendly unfortunately.

Pre-biotics help to feed the good bacteria that already exists in your gut, so eating more of these foods is also really beneficial. These include bananas, onions, garlic, oats, apples and flaxseeds to name a few.

Bacteria is not only in your gut; it’s also on your skin. Your skin absorbs everything you put on it, so in theory you should only put on what you’d be willing to eat. I take this with a pinch of salt as contrary to popular opinion coconut oil cannot be used for everything. I use the sensitive soap and moisturiser from the Chuckling Goat range.

If you’re interested here are some links to the other products I use:

Eye cream/gel

Argan oil

Shampoo and conditioner bars from here. With the added benefit of no packaging!

And I order other various natural/chemical free products from Pure Nuff Stuff.

And then coconut oil to remove eye makeup… and that’s all. Aldi sell it for about £2.50.. so cheap!

I really try to avoid too many chemicals in the products I use… we don’t really know the long term effects of these so going as natural as you possibly can is best for your skin and health. SLS is in a lot of products, especially shampoos, and it helps to make the product foam up when using it so you feel like it’s doing a better job of cleaning. However it’s actually what they use in labs to cause an irritation, to then test a product on how it affects that irritation. How mad is that!

Finally, hydration is key. Both moisturising after bathing/showering and drinking lots of water every day helps me so much. There’s only so much you can do topically, but the big difference you’ll notice is when you change what you eat and drink.

I hope this has been useful for anyone who needs it, and please do get in touch if you want to ask any questions.

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