For years, my skin was in pieces. I developed deep, painful cystic acne at an age when teenage breakouts should have been behind me. After a brief stretch of gloriously clear skin through my late teens and mid-twenties, I was entering what were otherwise some of the most aesthetically-pleasing years of my life. Sadly, at the same time, my skin became something I had to contend with every time I went out.
It grew much worse during the year I spent abroad in the UK. I was a college latecomer, living largely on frozen foods and sweets, with little time between studies or much knowledge of how to cook. I had no idea what had changed. But all of a sudden my once-clear skin began getting progressively worse.
When I returned home and began living fully on my own, I bought whatever I wanted: frozen meals, chocolate, any cheap and convenient thing that required very little effort as once again time to prepare food was a luxury. My skin grew worse still. The inflammation seemed to compound the longer it went on, until makeup just couldn’t hide it. People would become visibly distracted while talking to me. And I stayed indoors whenever I could.
There is a particular humiliation in having something so painful and so conspicuous on your face. I still had to go out, meet people, and carry on with my life while feeling disfigured. Only a few years earlier, my skin had been fine pored and satiny. And I had expected to enjoy being young and looking my best, but instead I was spending those years trying to work out where I had gone wrong.
I visited dermatologists. I was prescribed oral medications and topical medications. I tried patches, Oxy pads, pore strips, and washing my face more and more. There was always yet another product I hoped would work, and I kept trying. But nothing gave me the clear skin I so desperately wanted.
The first substantial change finally came when I tried a keto diet. My skin suddenly became perfectly clear, and I assumed carbohydrates had been the problem. After years of disappointing appointments and medications, here was a blessed improvement I could see almost immediately on my face.
While eating keto, my meals had been meat, vegetables, and cheese. And like the food I later cooked and baked at home, they left out the additives and preservatives in the packaged foods I had been eating.
Once my foray into keto ended, I began eating simple carbohydrates again. This time I was cooking and baking at home to avoid UPF, and my own cooking omitted the additives and preservatives in the packaged foods I had relied on before. I braced myself for the worst, but to my shock, my skin stayed perfectly clear. I was delighted, but also puzzled: if carbohydrates had been responsible, why hadn’t the acne returned?
My eventual departure from living in terror of carbohydrates deserves an article of its own. For this story, the important discovery was that I could eat them and still have clear skin. When I eventually began eating processed pre-packaged foods again, however, the deep, painful breakouts came back.
I began thinking about what was different between the things I had baked at home, the food I had eaten while keto, and the food I bought in packages. What ingredients were manufacturers adding that I wasn’t using in my kitchen? That question narrowed my search considerably.
I started by reading about chocolate and breakouts, and about ingredients in particular foods that people associated with changes in their skin. Soy lecithin came up as one possibility. It was seemingly everywhere from chocolates to the frozen meals I had relied upon. And it very quickly became the ingredient I watched for. Over the years that followed, I repeatedly noticed the same pattern: clear skin while avoiding it, and renewed breakouts after eating something that contained it.
Nearly a decade later, that remains my experience. When I avoid soy lecithin, my skin stays as clear as unblemished porcelain. And after accidentally eating something containing it, I will inevitably notice a deep, painful blemish - or several - within hours.
There have been occasions when my skin was the reason we went back to examine an ingredient list. My husband or I had forgotten to check a label, and only after I broke out had we discovered that what I had eaten contained soy lecithin.
Some of those episodes have been particularly strange. The places where my glasses rest against my face became especially prone to blemishes. At times, I have even had what looked like a ring of them around my eyes, including my eyelids and the sides of my nose - areas which are slow to heal.
My husband on the other hand can eat soy lecithin without experiencing anything remotely like this. Sunflower lecithin hasn’t seemed to produce the same pattern for me, either. Soy lecithin is the sole ingredient we look to avoid when we shop and cook.
I have been fortunate in how my skin has healed with very little visible scarring. Those years of breakouts haven’t left the normal pitted scars on me that one might have expected.
I still eat carbohydrates. I still bake. Checking labels has become an ordinary part of our life, and occasionally we still miss something and I am reminded again why we do it.
For years, I gave my skin an enormous amount of attention because I had to. Every painful breakout demanded it. Clear skin has given me the pleasure of being able to forget about it—to get dressed, put on my glasses, and go out without worrying about how others will react to my skin.
