Confession: The Biggest Mistake I Made About My Health

I’ve always had “problem” skin. Red, painful cystic pustule acne plagued me until my late 20s. After years of anti-acne face washes, toners, topical antibiotics and astringent creams, I had it under control enough to hide my problem areas with just a little concealer.

When I was in my early 30’s, my acne changed from cystic to a plethora of small red papules on my forehead, cheeks, and chin. My dermatologist prescribed retinols and steroidal creams to reduce the inflammation. They worked a little, but my skin was still red, irritated, and bumpy. The texture of it made me very self-conscious as there’s no way to hide bumps with everyday makeup!

At the same time, in my early 30’s, I started waking up in the middle of the night like clockwork. It was always 1am when severe abdominal cramps roused me from sleep. Dripping with sweat, I would sit in the bathroom not pooping or passing gas, but just breathing and waiting for the pain to pass. The cramping would usually stop within 20 minutes.

After a few weeks, I made an appointment with my primary care physician. She ordered a CT scan of my pelvis, which revealed nothing. She recommended taking an osmotic laxative once a day to ensure the cramping wasn’t caused by constipation (full disclosure: it wasn’t).

Flash forward another two years, and I was in my first year of graduate school for Chinese Medicine. I was receiving almost daily acupuncture treatments from my teachers and classmates. My chief complaint was chronic acne.

One of my teachers observed out loud in class that the redness and papules on my face provided a visual map of the Stomach meridian. That’s when a light bulb went on in my brain that illuminated everything… food was the cause of it!

I quickly purchased a copy of Robb Wolf’s book, The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet and devoured it in one day. The next day, I purged all processed foods and gluten from our family’s kitchen and started the Paleo lifestyle. As Robb recommended, I ate Paleo for 30 days.  A few amazing things happened:

• By day 2, I wasn’t waking up in the middle of the night with abdominal cramps.
• By days 5-6, my skin was clearing up.
• By day 7, I was thinking more clearly, almost as if a fog had lifted from my brain.
• By Day 14, I had lost 10 pounds, but was eating more. More real food.
• By Day 29, my entire face was clear and I knew I could never resume my old ways of eating a bowl of shredded wheat for breakfast and a sandwich on whole-wheat bread for lunch.

If you’ve read this far, then it’s time to acknowledge the biggest mistake I made about my health…

My biggest mistake was not listening to my body, when it was very clearly telling what was wrong! 

If I had listened, I would have saved myself years of unnecessary pain, sleepless nights, worry, stress, and embarrassment about my appearance. And money. I would have saved a LOT of money by not trying every acne treatment program I could find.

​My so-called healthy vegetarian diet was making me sick. Really sick. I had completely ignored all of my body’s warning signs. Even worse, I hadn’t realized the root of the problem… gluten-intolerance. I had eaten gluten all of my life, so why was there suddenly a problem now?

But the truth was, there were signs all along, I just chose to ignore them or call them something else.
​Like mistaking a face rash for acne.

Side note: If I eat gluten now (always by accident), I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with those terrible abdominal cramps and wear a face rash for 3-5 days.

The biggest takeaway from my story is that the human body is smart. Smarter than we typically give it credit for.  If something is wrong, physically or emotionally, it’s going to show up as what Western medicine calls a sign or symptom.

Be observant because the longer a sign or symptom is ignored, the louder(!) your body will demand your attention.

So, is your body trying to tell you something? Sometimes we all need an outside perspective to uncover the truth, the root of our health problems. Let’s work together to get to the root of solving your health mysteries.