Does anyone else feel like their skin hygiene routine means nothing when their diet is a mess?
I used to be really consistent with my hygiene routine. Washed my face properly morning and night, changed pillowcases regularly, never slept with anything on my face, kept my hands away from my skin throughout the day. All the things you are supposed to do. And my skin was still breaking out constantly in the same spots on a pretty predictable cycle regardless of how careful I was externally.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to connect it to what I was eating. I think because hygiene and diet feel like completely separate categories in your head. One is about what touches your skin from the outside and the other is just food. The idea that a packet of something I had been eating casually for years was undermining everything I was doing externally just never crossed my mind seriously until I started paying proper attention.
What actually made me look at it was noticing that my skin was consistently worse after certain weeks without any obvious external reason. Same routine, same products, same everything. The only variable was what I had been eating. Once I started tracking that properly the pattern was pretty hard to ignore.
I went through my regular groceries properly for the first time and actually read what was in them. Used a couple of tools to help make sense of the ingredient lists because doing it manually is genuinely confusing without some context. What I found in things I had eaten without question for years was surprising enough that I started making gradual swaps.
The combination of keeping my external routine consistent while also cleaning up what I was eating internally made more difference than either one had done separately. My skin has been consistently calm for about five months now which is the longest stretch in probably three years.
I guess my point is that hygiene from the outside only goes so far if what is happening on the inside is working against it. Has anyone else here found that diet had a bigger impact on their skin hygiene results than they expected?