Part 5 -

Clean Water

OK so now we have covered how to reduce the amount of toxins (stress hormones) being created by your body through negative thinking and lack of sleep. Next is how to reduce the amount of toxins coming in to your body from outside sources, and what I believe was the biggest outside source of toxins was in the water I was drinking.

I am sure all of you have been told by someone, that to get rid of your acne you should drink 8-10 glasses of water a day.

This is completely true if you are talking about PURE water. But if the water you are drinking has something in it which is triggering your acne, then drinking 8-10 glasses of water a day is not only not the cure, but could be the CAUSE.

Now tap water where I live is considered ‘clean’, most people drink it, it is served at restaurants etc. But I believe this is only because most people are unaware of the toxic substances that have been found in ‘clean’ tap-water. Among the hundreds of toxic substances found in tap water are:

Chlorine and bromine – Chemical disinfectants that can cause anemia and stomach problems

Pesticides – which can increase the risk of hormonal imbalance, reproductive problems and cancers.

Heavy Metals - such as lead and mercury which can impair growth and brain development.

Pharmaceuticals – including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones have been found in the drinking water supplies of 24 major US metropolitan areas

Etc. etc.

Basically there is a whole lot of crap that is no good for your health in tap water and these substances were DEFINITELY a contributor to my cystic acne. They could also be the cause of much more serious diseases being suffered by people around the world.

Thinking about this makes me feel that people that suffer from acne are in a way very lucky. It is a relatively minor disease which quickly tells you something is up, so you need to change what you’re doing before something worse happens. I believe this is better than poisoning yourself and not having acne, which means you never change your lifestyle and your habits because on the surface everything seems to be going fine, and then 15 years down the track your hit with a BIG disease which is much harder to overcome and could end your life.

This reminds me of a story my Dad often tells me about him and his group of friends that would go out drinking nearly every night when they were younger. My Dad developed hepatitis at age 21 from this habit which put him in hospital and ended his drinking days early. His friends used to visit him in hospital and say things like ‘Oh poor guy, how unlucky to be struck with such a disease, now he can’t drink anymore!’. Of course at the time, my Dad wasn’t happy about his situation, when he went out he couldn’t drink and get wasted with all of his buddies, but now he tells me of how much of a blessing hepatitis was because it forced him to make a significant change to his lifestyle. His friends who never got an ‘early warning’ just kept drinking and today at age 69 my Dad tells me of how he watched his whole group of friends pass away one-by-one from alcohol related diseases, none of them lived past their 40’s.

So acne to me was kind of like hepatitis to my Dad. It was the warning sign which caused me to really look at how I was living and it told me to start making changes. It may sound funny that out of the bad influences that acne has steered me away from, such as drugs, excessive alcohol and bad diet, I would rate being moved away from drinking 8-10 glasses of toxic water as the biggest positive change to my physical health.

It is possible that if I never had severe acne that I would still be drinking water full of these poisons which could possibly have lead to cancer or some other serious disease later in my life.

So now I look back at all those years of my regimen of 10 glasses of toxic water a day, depositing toxic materials into my body and I just think ‘NO WONDERI HAD ACNE!’ To make things worse I was boiling my water before drinking it as I was falsely informed that boiling water ‘purified’ it by evaporating all of the ‘bad stuff’ when in fact I was CONCENTRATING the level of toxic content in my water. This is because although some bacteria and other living organisms are evaporated, chemicals which have a higher boiling point than water remain in the water.

OK so what should you do?

Well this is the easiest of all of my recommendations because you don’t need to form new habits, or learn anything new. You just need to go and buy a high-quality WATER FILTER. If you already have one then great, you can rest assured that all that water you are going to drink to get clear is going to help you (sufficient water IS a key part of getting clear).

I would definitely recommend getting a good filter, not one of those little 2 liter ones that only take 5 minutes to filter the 2 liters but a very thorough filter. The filter I have is a ‘mineralized and magnetically charged’ water filter by a company called ‘Alps’. It holds around 14 liters of water and would take over a day to filter that 14 liters through. The reason it takes so long is because it has 7 stages of filtration starting with a bulb-like ceramic filter at the top, after a week of passing tap water through it is covered in brown sludge, see below.

After that there is another filtering cartridge which contains natural sediments that removes chemicals like chlorine, unpleasant odours, trihalomethanes (THMs), lead and other heavy metals.

The water that comes out is BEAUTIFUL, it smells, tastes and feels….. CLEAN (I don’t really know how else to describe it)

Whenever I open the top section of the filter to add more tap water I am reminded of what I used to be putting into my body everyday, it not only can see it but I can smell it too….. IT STINKS! The sludge on the ceramic ball has this dull, dirty river smell that really puts me off.

Sometimes I am in a situation where I have to drink tap water and I can really taste the difference, actually before even tasting it I can tell if it’s tap water purely by the smell.

Unfortunately I can’t find the ‘ALPS’ website, or any information on the company to show you the exact filter that I own but I have found a near identical product from a company called ‘ADYA’ which you can learn more about on the following link:

Adya Minerals Water Filtration System

So what do you do once you have your filter?

Now you can drink your daily 8-10 glasses of water! And you can have peace of mind knowing that each glass really is contributing to your goal of achieving clear skin. =)

So that is end of PART 5, drink CLEAN water, by what ever means.

Back soon with more!

Peace,

The Anonymous Guru

©2010 TheAnonymousGuru. All Rights Reserved.

Part 1 -

My war with ACNE

In this first series I am going to share my knowledge on one of the toughest challenges I have overcome in my life:

ACNE!

In total, it took me 12 years of constant struggle to overcome acne, and as any other acne sufferer knows acne is not a minor problem, it is a serious, debilitating and frustrating disease.

The type of acne I suffered was quite severe, it wasn’t just a bunch of little dots on my face, they were large, swollen, bumps covering almost every part of my face and neck. This kind of acne is often referred to as ‘cystic acne’ or ’severe acne’ and just one ‘bump’ would often take months to completely clear. At it’s most severe I would have had close to 30 of these cysts on my face and neck, so yeah, as you can imagine life wasn’t much fun.

During those 12 years, acne was literally the first thing on my mind when I woke up and the last thing when I went to bed. Every morning the first thing I would do is wake up and check for new spots, and I would monitor their progress throughout the day, constantly surveying my face from all angles in the mirror.

When I went out (which was extremely rare), I felt like everyone I met was looking at my acne and not me, I would hate doing anything that would involve people getting close to me, getting a haircut was especially uncomfortable as I just knew my hairdresser would have to get real close to my face and would be disgusted at the sight of my horrible skin.

Cystic acne was truly a cruel and debilitating disease, it crushed my self-esteem, made me feel hopeless and it frustrated the crap out of me! It affected every aspect of my life, my social life, family life, study… basically whatever I was doing, acne was in the back of my mind, no actually it was at the front of my mind!

To make it worse, everyone claimed to know the reason and the cure, everyone from my sister to my friend’s friend’s Mum’s hairdresser.

For a long time I was led to believe that the reason that I had severe acne was because of the ‘germs’ living on my face, people would tell me things like ‘oh you can’t touch your face or you will spread the germs and your skin will get worse’, ‘put wet teabags on your face, the anti-oxidants will kill the germs that are giving you pimples’, ‘don’t sleep face down, the germs from your pillow will get onto your face and your skin will get worse’ etc. etc. Of course by this time I had also already tried nearly every cream, peel and scrub I could find in the supermarket and drug store.

When none of these things worked I decided to see a dermatologist ( I ended up seeing 3 different derms ), but unfortunately they also didn’t have a clue as to what caused severe acne either (or they made too much money selling me drugs to tell me what actually caused it), so I ended up just as mis-informed and miserable as before.

After seeing the ‘professionals’ I believed that the reason I had cystic acne was because my skin produced too much oil but I had small pores! So the oil would get ’stuck’ trying to squeeze out of my under-sized pores causing acne. ‘Wow! That’s a big problem, how do you fix that doctor?’, ‘Well we have to give you drugs that will make your face stop producing oil of course!’ At the time that made absolute sense, ‘Yeah of course! No oil, no acne! What a simple solution!’ But of course that wasn’t the problem, so the solution wasn’t a solution at all.

Looking back, some of the things I tried to get rid of my cystic acne are quite ridiculous, but at the time I remember being full of hope and excitement that the next ‘cure’ was finally going to release me from my hell. Luckily I can laugh at it a little now =)

Some of the things which I tried to cure cystic acne which DID NOT work were:

1. Minomycin (AKA Tetracycline – I did several courses of this drug)

2. Roaccutane (This cleared me up for a couple of years but then the acne came back even worse)

3. Sticking potter’s clay on my face

4. Massaging castor oil on my face every night

5. Leaving my face covered in tea bags for 1 hour every day

6. Plastering my face in toothpaste

7. Caking my face in Benzoyl Peroxide

8. Various Antibiotics

9. Basically every commercial skin product on the market.

I’m sure alot of you fellow cystic acne sufferers have had some experience with these methods. It may be possible that some people have had success with these techniques but I personally didn’t and I know many other people who didn’t either. I believe that for most people suffering from severe acne, trying to get clear in these ways will only keep you going round in circles.

Anyway, enough negative talk I’m here to enlighten you not bring you down with all these sad stories =) From my next post onwards everything will be positive as I share with you the steps I took to finally achieving permanent, clear skin!

Peace,

The Anonymous Guru.

©2010 TheAnonymousGuru. All Rights Reserved.