Truth & Honesty

So then, in my introduction to Rosacea and me I said I was going to be honest and truthful…so I need to reflect on what I have said about being relatively healthy.

I have always been active, sports, swimming, aerobics classes, running, etc over the years and I’ve never really had a problem with eating a variety of fruit, veg, seeds and nuts.  But I will admit that I did smoke from the age of 14 on and off and quit up to about 4/5 years ago and this isn’t the only drug that I have dabbled in and I’m certainly not tea total.

I can’t see how the addictions could be a factor in Rosacea, simply because my mom has never smoked, certainly not done any drugs (apart from the ones I’ll mention in a minute) and very occasionally, and I mean very occasionally has a drink – literally a drink as she couldn’t handle any more than half a lager and black or a glass of cider or a small sherry.

One thing I think that may dynamically have had an impact is our relationship with food and here I will focus on the past.

For females the media and society are particuarly cruel when it comes to making us feel inferior for our body shape, weight and how we look.  During my teens I became a victim of this and either starved myself (skipped breakfast, drank 2 cans of diet coke for lunch and had as little as possible on an evening).  I like food and it seemed like the only thing I could control at one point and I developed bulemia and abused my body for several years in my teens to  twenties.

My mom hasn’t had a food disorder but she has certainly been a constant dieter, trying various diets from the Cambridge soup diet, Atkins Diet, Slimfast and taking tablets (the drugs I previously mentioned) which they used to prescribe and were then subsequently banned (they were basically amphetamine from what I can gather – black and whites).

For the last decade or a little longer I have eaten a healthy balanced diet, enjoying treats as I know that depriving my body doesn’t do it any good.  I even used to drink for many years lemon in hot water, not just in the morning but during the day instead of coffee and tea (not that I didn’t drink these on odd occasions).  It’s now considerably strange that one of my trigger foods is lemons and other citrus fruits – did I overload my body on them?

Have I damaged my stomach, internal organs  in someway or made them hypersensitive?  If it wasn’t Rosacea would it be stomach ulcers or another food/stress related condition?

You may or may not think that any of the above is relevant, but if we can link some similarities then perhaps questions that we all have can start to be answered.