My Skin And Pressure

As a kid I suffered from eczema, and I’d suffered from flares now and again for most of my life.

I got to a point where my skin was as clean as a whistle. All my blemishes had gone, scars from scratching were very faint — you wouldn’t tell that I’d suffered from eczema so badly at all.

Then all of a sudden I started to flare up.

I couldn’t understand why it had come back with a vengeance after all this time, so I started to analyse what I was eating, cutting things out here, cutting things out there. No real process, just seeing what happened as I went along.

My skin got to a point where it looked really good. I’d had an underlying feeling that it was heavily processed foods causing it, and yeast, but I wasn’t strict on the matter.

I had a Thai curry paste stir-in thing and my skin flared. The next day I had beer battered cod — flared again.

They shared the same ingredient.

Yeast.

Today my daughter wanted to make bacon, sausage and egg sandwiches. My son was going to the shop, and he’d said earlier that he didn’t want any “silly bread” — lately I’ve only been getting sourdough.

I gave him some money and told him he was forbidden — and I emphasise the word forbidden — to get any white or brown bread with my money. (He bought a baguette with his own money instead.)

The idea of having anything with yeast in or over processed just makes me feel disgusted, and yeast is in so much. Once you see what effect it has on the body, you can’t unsee it.

I was trying to explain to my kids that before, with excessive training — Thai boxing or always being in the gym — I had put stress on my body. On top of that I had lots of other external stress.

(I used my own techniques to come out of stress, and when I train now I listen to my body and train to capacity without putting stress on myself.)

When the body is under stress it kind of blocks your body’s signals on what is good and what is not good for you.

Now that my body and brain are wired correctly again, signals are working clearly.

Pressure is a silent killer in more ways than one. It changes behaviour, how you think, how you show up for others, and it also lowers your standards on what you eat.

Once your body and mind are operating properly, standards change.

I am not saying I eat perfectly — I like a nice rice cake and I enjoy eating out now and again — but I am very selective with what I eat, checking ingredients.

People are blindsided by things in store.

Little things like oat milk — for the last year I’ve had oat milk on my oats and I’ve enjoyed it. The other day I looked on the back. It only has 10% oats, the rest is water and other ingredients.

I was bordering mortified. I felt so tricked.

Surely oat milk should be majority oats, right?

I couldn’t bring myself to buy it and have no intention of purchasing it again, because once you see it…

you can’t unsee it.