my dairy-free adventure

One of my goals from the 52 Things in 52 Weeks challenge is to refrain from consuming dairy for one month.  I've read several blogs and articles that tout a dairy-free diet as being better for your skin, and I have skin that's as clear and beautiful as the skin of a 14-year-old boy, so I decided to give it a try. What could it hurt?

Turns out it was a lot more complicated and difficult than I had anticipated--tons of foods have dairy ("dairy") in them. Most commercially prepared breads, rolls, and buns have milk in them (I should've known that, but I just didn't think about it). Lots of chocolate products contain milk, and so do many other packaged foods. Who knew?

I sure didn't. I ended up starting and re-starting my month of no dairy several times, so I finally had to sit down and come up with some actual rules for my experiment:

• No cow's milk, yogurt, ice cream, cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, or any kind of cream in their regular forms, including anything that has been cooked or baked using any of these products.
• Products that had been cooked or baked using butter were allowed sparingly. (Butter has only trace amounts of lactose in it, so I figured this was okay.)
• No food that contains any kind of milk or cheese product on the ingredient list. (I tried really hard to follow this, but I was not perfect at it.)

So here's how it went.

#4: Don't eat dairy for one month.

No milk: not very difficult (except when it came to hidden milk ingredients and cream).

No yogurt: not too hard.

No ice cream: a little harder.

No cheesy things: the hardest. No pizza. Or cheeseburgers. Or Italian food. Or anything delicious.

I know you're dying to find out if it helped my skin. And I will tell you—I think it did.

Results

I did an embarrassing thing and took a picture of my makeup-free face at the beginning of doing no dairy. I'm sorry if you're easily grossed out, because this is gross.

No idea why I felt the need to close my eyes. More dramatic?

And here's my no-makeup face after a full month of following my no-dairy rules.

Conclusion

I think a lot of the improvement shown in the pictures would have happened just with time passing; a month and a half would've allowed my breakout to go away on its own without any treatment or intervention. However, during a typical six-week period, my face would've broken out a least twice, so it seems possible that cutting out dairy kept my breakouts at bay. Another difference I detected was that blemishes that popped up seemed to heal and disappear much faster than they usually do.

I can't say I'm a huge fan of being the person who has weird dietary restrictions, especially since this is in no way medically necessary. But since I have definitely seen improvement, I'm going to continue eating as little dairy as possible. I can't say I'll be able to stay away from pizza much longer though...