There is a fellow member on cavemanforum.com under the user name cavemanbob and he tells his eczema story and his current progress towards an eczema cure. Just take a look at those gorgeous photos and you judge if he is on the right track. Note that cavemanbob is posting in the cooked paleo diet forum so he must be on cooked food, however cavemanbob does that cooking. So yes, you can get a lot of progress even if your paleo diet is cooked. It is a gluten free / wheat free diet and all those allergenic non-original foods are not consumed. It’s working! I will let cavemanbob’s testimony take over:
When I first joined about 4 months ago, my eczema was horrendous. Socially crippling – I was afraid and ashamed to go outside.
Paleo did not seem to be helping for quite some time – then I started learning about the alkaline diet and started transitioning from a 60% meat 40% fruit/veggie diet to the opposite, more veggies than fruit, and less (but still plenty!) of meat.
I still have relative eczema problems but now I am convinced that when I am relatively stress free that all of my eczema symptoms stem from diet.
I still drink beer (I’m a college student, come on!) and occasionally have a cup of coffee. I still have a bit of a sweet tooth for chocolate as well. These are my vices and I need them to stay sane – but I maintain that the paleo diet has 90% *solved* my eczema problems.
Over the summer when I first joined I had a horrible rash all over my chest. I promise you, the included pictures do not do it justice – it was NASTY. I would scratch myself to the point of bleeding every night, and wouldn’t be able to sleep till 4 or 5 in the morning, then wake up itching at 10 or 11, toss and turn in bed for another hour, then sulk in misery the rest of the day. The only solace I found was exercising, playing basketball till I was ready to collapse so I didn’t have the energy to be angry anymore. For those of you who have suffered with eczema, you know that sweating only makes it worse! The only thing that made me happy simultaneously made my eczema much worse! Talk about a catch-22. I was ignoring my friends and my girlfriend – who was incredibly understanding – but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to see them, or for them to see me.
Not only was it on my neck (pictured), but also my shoulders, my arms (front & back), my wrists, my fingers, backs of my knees, my calves, my scalp, my ankles, tops of my feet, almost everywhere except my stomach. My eczema was absolutely ruining my life. I was depressed and I was miserable.
……four months later…..
Now, my skin is great! My allergies are much improved (though I still take 5 mg of Zyrtec (half a regular pill)) every morning. I can wear contacts without my eyes feeling so itchy that it feels like they are about to bleed. I can exercise without wanting to rip my skin apart. I tend not to shower unless I must, but I can shower now without worrying about drying my skin out to leather-like conditions.
Here is one set of before/after pics. I promise the pictures don’t do it justice, but they’ll give you a general idea about my journey.
Follow cavemanbob’s eczema update discussin on cavemanforum.com. Click here.
Cavemanbob adds:
Mine got slowly better, but a big change happened when I started reading about Alkaline balancing.
I’m not sure how many people subscribe to it on this site, but it basically says if you are eating a very heavy meat diet that your body’s pH level may be too acidic. To balance, eat a lot more greens. I started eating a lot more salads. I would and still do make huge salads with a ton of stuff (meat included) in them. Throw in onions, carrots, brocolli, bacon, egg plant, rutabaga, anything “planty”. Eat a lot more fruit – I like to buy big bags of apples, big bushels of bananas, and cartons of cantaloupe. Not really on the cartons of cantaloupe, I just wanted the alliteration. But seriously, cantaloupe is really great for you, and delicious.
The alkaline diet is still 100% paleo, it just tells you to eat more plants. Plants are good.
Did you read what cavemanbob just added? He moved to a more RAW Paleo Diet… a more alkaline paleo diet.
The lesson here is you need to be persistent with your eczema cure journey. We know paleo diet is the right way towards an eczema cure. You have to adjust your life and live the natural human diet every single day to make this work. Raw paleo diet is even way better. And forums help immensely because I cannot be there beside you to teach you how to live your life every single day. The forums help if you take pictures of what you are eating and list them all down in a journal. You be truthful and include everything so people can help you. Don’t be ashamed if you gave in to the usual junk, this is a learning process and we were all once sick just like you.
It’s amazing what a little change in your diet can do to your skin. When it comes to persistence, I agree. You’ll never cure anything without staying on top of it at all times. Awesome results BTW!
What a wonderful natural approach. It’s quite another dimension to the treatment of eczema. In addition to this approach, recognizing the situations when scratching is most likely to occur may also help for quick intervention so as to make the herbs work efficaciously. As for many patients that find that they scratch more when they are idle. Structured activity that keeps their hands occupied may prevent further damage to the skin. Occupational counseling also may be helpful to identify or change career goals if a job involves contact with irritants or involves frequent hand washing, such as kitchen work or auto mechanics.
Furthermore, people with atopic eczema, as well as their families, can leave healthy, normal lives by:
• Avoiding soaps, bubble baths, etc, when bathing. These can dry out the skin and make it more prone to irritation. Instead, use a soap substitute plus a bath/shower emollient.
• Wearing cotton clothes next to the skin rather than irritating fabrics such as wool. However, it is probably the smoothness of the material rather than the type of the material, which helps. Some smooth man-made fabrics are probably just as good as cotton.
• Avoiding getting too hot or too cold as extremes of temperature can irritate the skin.
• Rinsing clothes well after washing them with detergent. Some ‘biological’ detergents are said by some people to be irritating. But there is little proof that commonly used detergents, which are used in the normal way make eczema worse.
• Reducing the number of dust mites in their homes by regularly cleaning and vacuuming with particular attention to bedrooms, mattress, and bedclothes.