Friday 3 February 2012

Diet As A Natural Acne Treatment

When you think of a natural acne treatment, what is the first thing to cross your mind? Is it an herbal detoxifying product, a homemade facial mask, a bottle of vitamin supplements or a bowl of fruits and vegetables waiting for you to devour them?

If you are like many other acne sufferers, chances are that the bowl of veggies and fruits will be at the end of the list. To be honest, how many people actually associate their skin problems with the food diet they adopt? And how could they do it since most dermatologists are trying to convince them that there is no such link and that they should focus on other ways to treat acne?

Leaving aside the fact that the main reason for their attitude would be two unsupportive studies of these theories, dating back from the ’60s and ‘70s, which are nowadays considered to lack the scientific rigor, another explanation may be their intention of giving you prescription drugs for your pimples. If you are not so enthusiast about taking synthetic drugs to cure acne, you should go on reading this article about diet as a natural acne treatment to change your vision a little bit and find out what else is left for you in there.

Considering that acne can be often triggered by internal inflammation, hormonal or blood sugar imbalances or an inappropriate hygiene, it is easy to assume that most medications with active ingredients will only focus on approaching your problem from the outside, leaving untreated the internal causes, which are more serious and potentially more dangerous.

If there are foods that can keep your sugar levels under control, reduce inflammation, bring lower fat amounts, improve digestion and metabolism, give you the vitamins, fatty acids and antioxidants you need so much and reduce inflammations, why would you not accept diet as an efficient natural acne treatment?

Natural is pretty much everything that does not contains chemicals or synthesized ingredients. Even practicing a sport is considered a natural approach of acne. However, turning back to the foods we eat daily, you should understand how these aliments can have an effect on acne.

To put things simple, our bodies contain lots of bacteria, some of them helpful, others harmful. While the helpful ones, known as probiotic bacteria, aid with the absorption of nutrients from foods, the harmful ones make food ferment and putrefy while sitting in the colon. The more dangerous bacteria develop in your colon, the higher will be the chances for these to surface the colon lining and enter into the blood flow. And this normally happens as you eat foods that have low fiber content and cannot be properly and easily expelled from colon.

Fruits and vegetables are easy to digest and, as you can imagine, help your body regain its rhythm after long periods when you have been eating junks. Yogurts, should you not suffer from a hidden dairy allergy, can also improve your digestion with helpful bacteria. However, if you have ever considered trying a natural acne treatment involving honey, lemon juice, aloe Vera, tea tree oil or other things that can be easily ingested, you should try eating them as well instead of just applying them on the acne breakouts. The most efficient cures involve both internal and external medication so keep this in mind the next time you set up a strategy.

As a final thought, do your best to combine a dietary natural acne treatment with lots of water, a vital ingredient required in all the body processes and mandatory for the health of your skin.

Know Your Options In Terms Of Acne Treatments


Whenever you discover one or two pimples on your face, you are definitely tempted to pop them out, to use a concealer and lots of makeup to hide them or, if you have the time and the mood, to use some ingredients you normally have in the house, such as baking soda, toothpaste, lemon juice, honey, aloe Vera juice and who knows what else in order to put those annoying zits on hold.

However, if their number increases from one day to another, you will start thinking about a treatment. Most likely, at this stage, you will not feel like seeing not even your family doctor, not to mention a dermatologist, and some over the counter acne treatments to choose from are definitely more tempting.

On this chapter, there are the natural solutions and the synthetic medications that normally rely on a certain compound, called active ingredient. Depending on formulations and the concentration of synthetics, these medications have their efficiency, yet most of them are recommended for mild acne.

From this category you can experience acne treatments as gels, creams, ointments, cleansers, toners, teas, facial masks and so far. It obviously matter the type of acne breakouts you have – as you cannot use an astringent cleanser on a sensitive skin with lots of whiteheads – together with the body part that is affected and your skin type.

If you do not take into consideration the above mentioned aspects, you risk making your pimples worse, in which case seeing a specialist and receiving prescription acne treatments become mandatory.

At that point, your condition is moderate and over the counter medication is not effective. Chances are you are suffering from a hormonal imbalance or other internal acne cause that needs a different and more powerful approach. Topical creams with antibiotics, a higher concentration of active ingredients like salicylic acid, benzoyl peroxide or thousands milligrams of vitamin A can be prescribed individually or combined, depending on what the dermatologist considers.

If your condition experiences no improvements whatsoever, but on the contrary, pimples are bigger, more painful and deeper into the skin, looking like pustules or cysts, oral acne treatments are recommended. Severe acne, like your situation is, requires a combination of methods, including aggressive medication and major lifestyle changes in terms of diet, exercising, rest and stress reduction.

Now can you picture anything else more radical than what was already suggested to you? Because professionals can also subject you to comedone extractions, chemical peels, microdermabrasion procedures, phototherapy or corticosteroid injections.

Easy to guess, if you only have some blackheads and a few whiteheads from place to place, considering the last mentioned acne treatments would be an exaggeration. However, there are people who prefer to make no efforts of adopting a skin care routine and using certain maintenance skin products, going every now and then on a cosmetic cabinet to undergo a microdermabrasion or a laser therapy.

Whatever would be your situation, make no mistake about taking things one at a time. Pimples, even though they all became visible over night, did not formed under your epidermis in such a short time, and they will not go away that fast either. This is why you need to find a cause before drying the poor pimples. If you do not treat the cause, they will keep coming back on the surface of the skin, bigger and bigger, potentially leaving you scars. Know your options in terms of acne treatments and your life will become much easier.

Why Is Your Acne Treatment Not Working

You all of a sudden discovered you suffer from acne, spent a while to identify the most suitable acne treatment for your condition or maybe you spent too little, and then there you were, in front of the mirror, frenetically looking for a positive change, even the slightest one, yet without success. Are you wondering why is your acne medication not working?

Here is one obvious reason that may as well make you leave the mirror alone, full of shame: it is too early. No one denies the sufferance and frustration that this skin disorder causes, yet patience is one key feature that a patient should have in order to successfully overcome the problem. And no matter what promises were made to you together with the acne treatment you bought, miracles are not going to happen. Your pimples need at least a few days, even a week to start drying out and even this symptom alone is not necessarily a sign that your acne is cured.

Now if you have done some research on the field, you must have heard that sometimes even the most efficient medications will not bring the expected results to the people who use them, particularly because each one is unique and his or her condition has individual causes. Considering the lifestyle, the stress levels, the food habits, the skin type, the genetic predispositions and a few other factors, a certain product can make things worse, better or even make nothing to your acne.

If you have chosen the cure on your own, without getting your blood tested to identify potential hormonal imbalances or without being consulted by a professional, chances are you have made a wrong choice. You either have a good acne treatment for your problem, yet the concentration of active ingredient is not the right one, or you are actually treating the wrong cause.

Researchers all over the world constantly come up with new theories to explain the way that acne develops and potential healing strategies precisely because setting straight these things is not easy at all. Therefore, you thinking that you can make zits go away overnight is probably not the best judgment.

And if it is not the wrong medication, it can still be the wrong approach. Supposing you have a very oily skin and you have decided to stick with a benzoyl peroxide cream to dry acne breakouts. They seem better for a while, but then your nightmare starts all over again. It means that even though the excessive sebum was giving you pimples, you must be looking for what makes your skin generate too much oil. With other words, you may need more than a single acne treatment.

The final tip can most likely be applied to no matter what medication or approach in terms of acne, be it right or wrong. If you only rely on one product to do all the hard work for you, you cannot expect for your skin lesions to fade away. The battle you are starting is going to take a long time and require all sorts of strategies. An acne cream, a few antibiotics, tons of tea or complicated cosmetic procedures will not clear your body from the inside when individually taken and will not help you regain a certain balance of your overall body functions.

As acne is a condition reflecting serious internal problems, once that pimples burst on the skin is a little late to think that a cream or a cleanser will bring things back the way they were. So focus on both the acne treatment and the lifestyle changes that are now more necessary than ever.