I just wanted to share as I had been dealing with moderate cystic acne since I was about 12/13 years old. I had tried every single thing, all the topicals out there, antibiotics, other pills... even went on accurate which only made it worse. I used to cut out all kinds of foods from my diet because I feared they would make me break out. I wouldn't eat chocolate, anything with sugar in it (even fruit), dairy, bread, any processed foods. I just wanted nothing else than to get rid of my acne.
I am very active and weight lift about 5-7 times a week and just last year competed in my first bodybuilding (npc bikini) show. This summer, I worked at an internship where I was sitting in a desk all day. People in my office would keep the worst snacks in the lunch room for us, and the only way to keep myself from eating all that crap was to not eat at all so I ended up not eating until I got home. To my surprise, it wasn't even that hard as I was just sitting at a desk all day. I would also stop on my way home from work and train fasted. Then I remembered one of my former co-workers from a past job told me he did intermittent fasting and I realized that that is what I had been doing. After about a month doing IF, I noticed my skin for the first time had cleared up. Nothing else had changed.
Reading into a lot of studies posted online, I found out just how powerful IF is for decreasing inflammation. While you give your body a break from food, it can spend all its time and energy on repairing other things, like for me, fighting inflammation. I've also been able to slowly add back in foods that I crave from time to time, and don't have to be as crazy strict and restrict myself from any and everything that used to make me break out. I feel like even if I do consume dairy, which was my biggest fear before, giving my body those extra hours to repair itself, any inflammation the dairy may have caused doesn't seem to cause an impact on my skin anymore.
What are your experiences with IF?
