I stopped eating bread in August of last year because I discovered I may have celiac. My primary symptom: blistering hands. Basically it's this intense form of eczema localized only on my fingers. It slowly spreads wider and wider and it itches harder and harder.
I had gotten used to the itch somewhat, but it crossed the line of itch to pain. My fingers were so bloated I couldn't bend my fingers. They were constantly blistering and oozing, if not bleeding outright. I couldn't do anything with my hands, and although I had no digestive symptoms of celiac I decided that doing something is better than nothing.
After about 3 days I noticed a difference. Not just in my hands, because they were still itchy but they didn't get worse than before, but in my overall energy level. That's when I remembered a recent book I had read called Crave, how it talked about our modern bodies are constantly inflamed due to stress and diet.
Now, I'm a guy who's fairly confident about not being too stressed than the average person. But when it comes to diet I admit that I hadn't been doing that great of a job, although I did become vegetarian last year. I realized bread and sweets were extremely inflaming foods by nature, and just by not eating them I felt drastically different.
While the initial bump of recovery was good, I found myself on the slower end of recovery again. It didn't help that I did a contact sport that required gripping a lot of fabric. I switched completely from gi jiujitsu to no-gi jiujitsu so I could train without bleeding hands.
What confused me was, if I'm not having any inflammatory foods then why are my hands still bleeding after every training session?
While I woke up without new blisters, which is good, why is it that I still can't wash my hands with soap? Why is it that I still can't wet my hands for too long in the shower? I'm not doing anything to actively worsen it, then why is it not healing?
This is when I coincidentally discovered the concept of skin barriers. Basically, when we get a small cut or some abrasions our skin can heal because of the skin barrier. It's like a small sub-system of the skin responsible for recovery. My problem was that my skin barrier was completely gone, so ANY kind of external stress would just rupture it. When I accidentally had some cross-contamination with gluten the skin would immediately blister again because the barrier wasn't there to protect it.
So I researched how I can repair the skin barrier, and it turns out probiotics are great at that. This makes sense because when my dog used to suffer from incessant paw licking due to itch probiotics worked well for him as well. By the way, he had 3 teeth removed yesterday. :( But he did turn 14 this week! :)
Probiotics along with anti-inflammatory supplements did wonders for my skin, but there was still a random spike of eczema I couldn't explain. Again, I was definitely making remarkable progress. But now that I got that feeling of playing around with the knobs of my body, I felt like I could go one step further.
When did my flare-ups get worse, and when didn't they? I realized that they mostly get worsened when I'm at my desk. Then what's at my desk? I tried bringing a humidifier and an air purifier into the room but that didn't help much. What am I missing?
Then I noticed some things around my desk that I hadn't looked in a while: my mouse pad and my foot rest. Both were fabric and I hadn't cleaned them in forever because my mouse pad was buried under a mountain of paperwork and my foot rest was underneath the desk so I didn't really take time out of my day to examine it. I discarded my mouse pad and washed the outer cover of my foot rest and voila, no more inflammations at my desk.
Now I was finally at the point there were no more threats to my skin barrier. This made sense; the skin got worse in France partly because of the bread but also the bedding wasn't ours and we didn't wash it during our stay due to limitations in laundry options. I had a flare-up in Seattle because during my Buddhist training I can't really shower often so my clothes accumulate sweat and dust. My primary allergen were sweat and dust, or perhaps dust mites.
After a few weeks my hands were back to normal. I finally have fingerprints again! Now that my skin barrier was back, I could wash my hands with soap and do the dishes for a short time with my hands. Now it was time for the ultimate test: could I have bread again without my hands blistering? Because the last time I checked, it did.
I went to my local cafe with my wife and picked out a mushroom quiche and an almond croissant. I went the conservative way and tried the mushroom quiche first. The taste of puff pastry was heavenly, I hadn't had it in such a long time. I woke up the next day and made a fist in bed, hey good news! The fingers aren't swollen. The entire next day I saw zero blisters. I think it was time. I took a giant bite out of the almond croissant and I think I was briefly in heaven. Even better than that: no blisters.
I had eczema for so long, I kinda forgot that I had it. But in preparation for writing this I tried to look back at some old photos I took of my fingers, and I found that the hands were in pretty bad shape in 2020.
Pretty bad in 2023:
At their worst:
And... Today!
I'd say that's pretty good progress. I won't necessarily go crazy with bread again and stay gluten free as much as possible, but oh man would it be nice to bite down on a jambon-beurre in Paris. :)
The greater lesson behind this writing is this. The mechanism of skin healing doesn't look that different from the mechanism of mind healing. Our mind has a mechanism called resilience and as long as the resilience factor is intact, we can bounce back from occasional misfortunes.
The problem is when something critical happens or prolonged exposure to stress happens. The resilience factor is compromised and at that point even the smallest of mishaps can cause you to break down in tears. I know what that feels like, because for the longest time I had inflicted suffering on to myself.
Many people try to find relief from their suffering in this state. But many times relief and self development comes with stress because "healing" requires you to do something other than what you'd do normally. Then you have coaches with my style, who push hard and talk to you about radical concepts like complete liberation from suffering.
In Launch Pad this is something we will take a deep interest in. All the concepts we will talk about in week 1 along with the ongoing practices are designed to respect your resilience. I will work with you individually to assess whether you're trying to push too far out of scarcity or you're genuinely ready for the next step. I will also work with you to find out whether you're genuinely in need of recovery or a gentle nudge to move forward.
Take a look at the agenda for Launch Pad. The program starts on January 17th and registration closes on the 15th. Want to see if Launch Pad is right for you? Feel free to book some time with me and I'll walk you through the information you need.
