Hi all,
I’m starting week two of lazy keto, my skin is terrible, its never been great to be fair, but its so so oily and I’ve had huge breakouts that cant be covered because my make up wont stay! Will it settle and how do I know when I’m ‘In Ketosis’ ?
My head hurts…
Keto requires a lot of water to start off. I never drink enough. It might help.
K
I am drinking lots- About 3-4 litres a day, sometimes more.I sit right next to the water machine at work!
A lot of people report improvement in skin but its a bit early for you to see results. Sometimes, your skin my get a bit worse before getting better. As you continue to eat low carb and lose weight, the toxins that are stored in body fat are released and that can cause some skin issues or worsen skin issues you may have. Stick with it (keep calm and keto on) and see how your skin is in a few months. For your head hurting, it could be lack of electrolytes. Make sure you get plenty of salt because when you eat low carb, your body releases water and along with that goes the salt. Some people like to drink pickle juice. I personally put salt directly on my tongue then wash it down with water after a few minutes.
Slightly non keto related, but after going keto I continued to explore “alternative” health and wellness practices and started oil cleansing. I wash my face with avocado oil in the mornings and witch hazel in the evenings. My skin has never looked nicer
My skin went through the exact same thing, I think its detoxing itself? I used to have moderate acne and it BLEW UP after my first week of keto - I also was dry as a desert but now I’m an oily mess, even my hair gets oily 100% faster than it did before. Finally a month and a half later my skin is starting to noticeably clear up, so give it some time and don’t let up on your skincare routine!
I’m 48, I started Keto in March of 2017 & my lifelong hormonal acne cleared up completely within one month. I was elated! Then it came right back & is the same old same old. I am crushed. I’m really hoping that once the majority of my fat burning is done (in 20-30 more pounds) my hormones might settle down again???
It’s got nothing to do with what I put on the outside of my face, it’s totally internal. I take DIM to try metabolizing any extra estrogen being released from fat stores. I take milk thistle to support my liver. I take Yeast Fend to help with any potential candida issues. Trying to reduce dairy a bit & see if that helps. It’s very demoralizing, tho so I feel for anyone suffering with bad skin.
Liz, many folks find a strong link between dairy and acne. Have you ever tried cutting dairy out completely?
I have! I went dairy free for just that reason when I tried Paleo for a few years. But I saw no improvement. When I went Keto I let dairy back in, but I’m willing to forego it for a few months & see if it helps.
To my understanding acne usually has something to do with hormones. When we were living off sugar, our hormone, insulin, was always really high. So having it in near nonexistent levels may very well be another mitigating factor. I’m no doctor, but I’m willing to bet that insulin interacts with other hormones in someways. So when it’s suddenly absent, at least in its previous high quantity, perhaps other hormones are reacting to this. I would think if that’s the case, after a few weeks (my opinion) things may settle down a bit?
Most definitely, Robert. There are 6 or 7 other hormones that affect blood sugar levels, to start with - so insulin levels will be having an effect there. There is also a whole pantheon of interactions with hormones outside the blood sugar realm - human knowledge is in its infancy here, in my opinion, with new information appearing rapidly and with a long way to go. Quite a complicated dance our endocrine system does.
I steady away from dairy because for me it causes constipation and zits. I recently had a flare -up with no dairy and the only thing I’d changed was I began eating tomatoes and salsa. I don’t know if it’s coincidental or causation, but I did some research and read that tomatoes are a big contributor to acne.
That’s what I was thinking. I worked as a technician at a nanofiber factory. They were experimenting with new techniques to make their nanofiber. All other manufacturers of nano fibers were making it in dozens of grams per day. We were making it dozens of grams per second!
I mention this because I was running the line, and maintaining the heaters. Literally hundreds of feet of brass bricks with heaters in them to heat the plastic as it flowed through pipes inside the brass bricks. I manage it through a computer interface that showed me each of the 150 or so separate heaters. What their temps were, what they should be (pushing 300 Celsius). There was a problem. If one heater were to suddenly cool down (insulation might come off, and it loses a lot of heat) then the liquid polymer flowing through it would cool off as well, and that cooled the next heater down, and we get a cascade effect. Then, the heaters attempt to compensate, heat rises, and that cascades through the system. To mediate that problem with the temperature going wacko like that, the heaters were controlled by PID controllers. The way these things worked is that they would detect the fall of temperature instantly, and turn in the heater to compensate as the temp fell. The faster the temp fell, the more power put into the heater to reverse it. The same thing when it got to hot. I was hired to help because of my background with electronics and computers. I studied their problem and showed them how to properly program the PIDs.
How it relates to hormones now 
. Imagine a large, long tub of water. If you shove one end really hard, all that water makes a wave. That wave then oscillates back and forth in the tub. Basically the PIDs detect the wave coming, and add a little force the opposite way, increasing as the wave increases, and lowering as the wave is less intense. Each time that wave goes back and forth the PIDs Force it to lose a lot of magnitude. By itself it would slosh back and forth for maybe a half hour or so until settled. But the PIDs would have it settled down in less than a minute.
Now hormones interacting with each other are going to be much more complicated than that. When one is to high, others need to compensate to get their job done. Which effects other hormones that now don’t actually need to go out, which effects other hormones to come out in higher amounts or longer periods of time. Getting this balancing act to level out will take a lot of time. So when the big one, insulin is mostly out of play sudddenly, the wash tub in my example is not only having waves from end to end, but side to side, up and down, some that are stationary, some that simply add to the wave, others that only reduce the wave, and they are all looking for different ques now that insulin isn’t giving orders.
Sorry to make that sound more complicated than it needed to be.
Tomatoes!? Thanks for posting that. Im going to start tracking any tomato-pimple pattern.
cheers!
Good stuff, Robert, and it is complicated. I’m somewhat familiar with such things - have run mobile chemical processing rigs (working mostly on electrical transformer oil, destroying PCBs, etc., for 33 years). We use metallic sodium and there are many down-the-line chemical reactions, one of them being the formation of polyphenylene polymer from what used to be PCB molecules.
We heat the oil to around 140 Celsius, and there are the same type of feedback loops in operation that you describe, and the heaters and the PID controllers at work.
One simple analogy for me is my decades of excessive eating, often gratuitously so, while my poor body attempted to adjust and compensate. The best controller for me is really limiting carbohydrates, and having that nasty old insulin resistance finally start declining.
4 liters of water equals 17 glasses of water. That’s too much! You’re going to flush out all of your electrolytes and there is a danger of damaging your kidneys. There’s no need to drink so much water. Only drink when you are thirsty.
What You Need to Know About Bone Broth Skin Benefits “…2. Bone Broth Promotes Fewer Breakouts…”
Note: eat on an empty stomach or the collagen might not be absorbed!
https://blog.kettleandfire.com/bone-broth-skin-benefits/
Mineral water (regular water flushes out trace minerals, elements & vitamins and is not being replaced?)
Interesting. I will try this. My skin was fabulous for a time, but recently, has had some flair-ups. I’m wondering if it’s reaction to eggs (and hoping it’s not since I have backyard, free range chickens and I eat many eggs!) I’ve been cutting the dairy and even cut macadamia nuts because I was overeating on those. I understand that you can develop a sensitivity to foods if eating them too often/too much and wondering if that has translated to my skin. I’m on a n=1 experiment now to get rid of the flair-up and will try your skin routine! Thanks for sharing!
You skin will need sometime to get used to it, it may flare up the first week, but after that it clears up
Timely. Just came across the video again not too long ago
Informative!
Hope this helps