Your cure will not come in the form of a pill, and it will not be quick. Your cure will take diligence, commitment, rest, and an open mind. Treating is easy, curing is hard.
Before I delve into how I got folliculitis and how I am very close to kicking it's ass, I want to just start with a basis of why you probably have a chronic skin disease.
It starts with one of two things:
1.) You are immunocompromised - this can be for ANY reason. Let it be poor nutrition, lack of sleep, stress, autoimmunity (which goes only with many other things and comes from alot of nutritional issues which I will touch on in this blog), environment, etc.
2.) You have chronic inflammation - again, is can be caused by diet, stress, etc.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that before you got this chronic skin disorder you were not 100% healthy, maybe not even 75%. Even if you think you were. If it is infectious, you could of been healthy, but something happened and your new poor health allowed it to become chronic.
Healthy people do not have chronic diseases. If you have a chronic skin disorder, your probably not healthy. So you should take another look at your wholewheat bread, Kashi cereal, lean chicken breast and peanut butter and consider never eating them again...
Yes, never eating bread, or peanut butter, or cereal. Basically, no more grains or legumes of any kind.
If you haven't heard, you have been reading the USDA Food Pyramid too much, or you read the back of too many 'healthy' Cereal boxes, Grains are not healthy. Especially not for the immunocompromised. Neither is your vegetable oil, your nuts (not good at all for inflammation), your pasturized (dead) dairy, your protein bars or your juice.
Instead of fully explaining what has already been explained 100% better than I ever could, I am going to turn your over to some of the more educated professionals for their excellent explanations on why Grains, Omega 6 fats (found in nuts, vegetable oils), and the others mentioned above are zapping your health and killing your body slowly (or quickly).
Before I introduce these fellas, the sum of this is: Sugar, Omega 6, Grains, and Pasturized Dairy are pretty much evil. They want nothing but to take away one of the rights you truly have from birth, and that is your health.
First up, we have Mark Sission, who is responsible for the beginning of my jounrey into realizing that diet was KEY in healing my chronic folliculitis, as well as a host of other issues I was having, however minor.
Mark is an long distance ex-runner (like myself, although I do still do a couple 3 miler's a week at fast pace as I believe in the benefits still). He suffered from injuries which opened the door for him into the world of The Primal Diet and Exercise. Fast foreward a few years and he now runs probably the most successful and mainstraim of all the "Paleo" type blogs out there, and his blog is a great way to start your journey to greater health and healing.
I hope your in the mood to read.
Mark also has some great posts on Omega 6, but I like to spread the love around, and Matt Stone is another guy that really opened my eyes, especially as of late.
Note: Alot of these guys differ on macronutrient content of your diet (i.e high carb, low fat, high fat, low carb), but the takeaway message here is always whole foods, no grains, low omega 6, no refined sugar.
Pasturized Dairy is in my opinion, evil. But it's also a stupid, dead food. Raw Dairy, in my opinion, is a perfect food and incredibly healing. I will touch on my insane 6 week raw milk diet soon, as recommend by M.D's Charles Porter and Bernard McFadden, and Michael of Physical and Nutritional Regeneration.
Unfortunately raw dairy is not easy to come by if you don't live in California where we have the awesome Organic Pastures and Claravale Farm Raw Milk sold in retail stores, as well as tons of local suppliers of different raw milks. BUT, they can be found if you dig, and I will also provide a link to locating raw milk near yoiu.
Here is Ann Marie, author of Cheeseslave, another great blog, on why you should drink raw dairy, and not pasturized.
To find your local raw milk
Now, I don't really feel the need to tell you why sugar of all forms are bad, yes, even your raw cane sugar, but here we go, back to Mark Sisson on why you should cut sugar out of your diet.
So alot of this probably went against what you have been taught for years about diet and nutrition. I suggest you dig through the various other posts on the blogs if you need more convincing. Yes, it is very time consuming to read all this, but it is all worth it and knowledge is an important component of healing.
To sum it all up, you skin problems are chronic because you are either dealing with constant inflammation or a battered immune system, or both. To end this nasty cycle and prevent your condition from worsening, and maybe even heal your condition if it is relatively minor or not strong, you should begin making adjusments to your diet by
1.) Cutting out grains, sugar, omega 6, pasturized dairy, and anything that is processed or boxed.
2.) Begin consuming organic grass fed meats, eggs, raw dairy, potatoes and other starchy tubers, vegetables,fermented foods (such as raw milk kefir, saurkraut, kimchee, kombucha tea) healthy fats such as butter, coconut oil, beef tallow, ghee and perhaps some limited fruits such as berries if your condition does not worsen with them in your diet (some find it is better to cut them out temporarily, or limited them).
As I said before, the macronutrient composition of the diet should be based on how your body responds. I recommend moderate carb, moderate fat, and low protein. something like 50% carb, 30% fat and 20% protein. If you do better on low carbs, then lower them and up your fats.
Do not go below 50grams of carbs, maybe even 100grams. Definitely do not go zero carb. You may find that your condition gets better the lower in carbs you go. I certainly found this at one point but it is very temporary I found. I went Zero Carb and strictly carnivore for a brief stint and didn't really get anything out of it. It is not a good road to go down. Eat plenty of potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams with butter and coconut oil, raw milk, some meats and vegetables, sea salt and eggs. Thats a great, healthy diet right there. Not to mention tasty. Who doesn't love a meat and potato diet. No, this doesn't mean a hamburger and fries. Unless you loose the bun and fry your french fries in beef tallow or coconut oil.
