Some of you may know me from the Facebook group "McDougall Friends" where I post as Christian Zielinski or from my website
http://www.plantbasedchristian.com. So some of you may also know that I suffered and continue to suffer from acne, even though it's so much better now.
For roughly the past five to six years, I’ve been suffering from acne and tried just about everything: pills, potions, peelings. I even did something called “Green Peel”, where a mix of herbs and acids is scrubbed onto your skin which then begins to peel after a few days. I can’t even begin to tell you how terrible I felt physically and emotionally. I felt ugly, not good enough and I eventually ended up having very low self-esteem, as I was literally “ashamed” of how I looked.
Nothing really changed much when I went vegan in October 2011, initially for ethical reasons only. I still remember the first time that I heard about an oil-free vegan diet. A vegan teacher at my school and I were chit-chatting when he told me about delicious “Chocolate Zucchini Muffins” by the “Happy Herbivore”. I was intrigued (and not only because chocolate and zucchini sounded so… weird) and spent some hours researching this whole WFPB-thing online.
I cannot tell you how much sense it all made, especially the aspect about avoiding free oils. But initially I found it very hard to do that- I had always cooked with oil, all the processed vegan junk food I consumed contained oil, so what was I going to eat? But as time went on, I began incorporating more and more unprocessed food into my diet and I felt terrific. And now for about seven months, I’ve been 99% oil-free (the 1% being times when eating out etc.).
And here’s what the diet did to my acne:
It’s still not gone completely, but every single time I eat high fat foods, I’ve got at least five new pimples the next day. And when I switch back to a low fat diet, they’re gone within less than a week. I cannot say that my acne has gone completely, but it’s so much better that it’s a victory for me already!