So I’m pleased to be on medication, but of course I’d rather be on something natural that was working. And I know that something that I should’ve tried for a longer time was the diet approach. Because there’s a lot of stuff about, you know, the stuff that you eat basically triggering psoriasis. So like fatty stuff and dairy and processed foods. I found that really hard to try and like change my whole diet, but it’s definitely something that I want to pursue again. This like idea of testing what might be making it worse.

It’s difficult to do that when you’re actually on medication because, you know, you feel like if that’s already helping it, it’s hard to see what foods like, what foods are helping and what foods are making it worse. You’d have to sort of be on nothing to, to really test it. But I think it’s always worth like trying to exercise more and trying to eat well with psoriasis. I definitely think that when my psoriasis was at its worst and I didn’t want to do anything and I was less active and, you know, like was eating kind of like comfort eating it was like probably at its worse. And it is just a vicious cycle like that. You want to get out and exercise and eat well; when your skin’s better weirdly, you know, like you feel more in control of your life when your skin’s better. So it all seems to come together like a good lifestyle and good skin, and like a bad lifestyle and your skin’s bad. But I’ll be interested to see whether there are some foods that are making it bad.

The only main thing that I’ve always been told is like stress, and because when I was at high school, my first high school I went to, I didn’t really enjoy it which was why I had the IBS as well from the anxiety which then, they put that down to why it got worse as well, just being stressed out. And then when I saw the consultant this year they mentioned – , cos everyone’s really said about stress and she mentioned again, “What’s work like; how is it?” and I said, “look what I do is busy,” so they did mention the stress. And then she also mentioned about different foods that can be triggers, so she give me so many to eliminate – so I don’t eat beef, don’t eat tomatoes, don’t eat dairy and I don’t eat oranges. And although when I’ve cut them out pretty much completely for the first month and a half or so, because I was doing phototherapy I didn’t really see much of a difference, whereas now because obviously I have my food all cooked for me, I still eliminate it but every now and then I will have naughty days, and I will eat some of those foods and I’ll go have a burger, I’ll go drink proper milk, cos I drink goat’s milk.

And see, but I haven’t seen any effect that these, what I’m eating every now and then, it’s flaring up my skin so I’m just every now and then I eat it in smaller doses just in case.

Yeah. I went to India to try some herbal remedies from there. But they gave me a list of dietary requirements that I had to follow and I did follow it too, for about six months to a year, but then after, it just got too much and it was, I did notice it was helping, but it just got too much and I couldn’t continue doing that.

Could you tell me a bit about what those dietary requirements were?

Yeah, they told me not to eat anything spicy, anything with salt in it, certain, certain fruits like bananas mangoes, I can’t remember the others. Certain-, I think wheat, they said no. That’s all I remember so far.

That’s quite a lot of restrictions then.

So, it was difficult to I just basically lived on pasta [laughs].

[Laughs]

But, yeah, it got too much. Yeah, so I stopped that. But it didn’t come back after, straight away. Patches came back, but it didn’t-, I wasn’t where I was at the start.

And she sort of advised me to sort of speak to her speak to her homeopathic medicine man, so I went along one time and had a little chat, to see what he said like I said before about trying different creams and stuff I was quite open to any kind of suggestions and willing to hear anything. And I don’t eat badly but I could eat better kind of thing, like I know my housemates last year ate awfully, like really, really badly [laughs]. So in comparison I looked very, very good but in a wider comparison I’m probably more average. so went along to, to him and he said, after I explained sort of roughly what I ate and my diet and whatnot, it was dairy, too much dairy and too much yeast. Cos thinking back on it, it is quite easy to see that I do eat quite a lot of bread and so much stuff has yeast in it without you even realising it. So I tried a bit to reduce my dairy intake so I try and eat less cheese which is heart-breaking as it is, probably did help. I switched to an alternative dairy for milk and still have, kind of, when you go out for a, for a coffee or something like that obviously you have dairy milk and that’s fine and I don’t avoid it when I’m out but when I’m at home, I’ll have kind of like coconut milk or on cereal or something like that just an alternative. So I’ve cut back a lot on how much cheese I eat, how much milk I drink and I don’t eat yoghurts so much anymore. And I still eat bread but not nearly as much as I did before, it’s kind of like the occasional piece of toast when there’s nothing else in the house so I kind of use it as emergency food or when you get back after a night out and you need something to eat and you can’t be bothered to cook chips or anything like that, so I have like a toasties from the toastie machine. so I do still eat bread but it’s, I still eat all of them, the foods that he said I should cut out, but in vastly less quantities and it really does help.

But also being a male student, beer as well is a big contribution of yeast and once I’d sort of spoken to him and had this conversation it made a lot of sense and I did start to see a difference and there’d be times last year if, perhaps I, I don’t go out sort of every night I’m not one of those people but I do like to go out occasionally and stuff. And of a week perhaps where you go out once or twice, I went out twice and our sort of my staple drink was, would be kind of beer. I could see it over the next couple of day’s I’d wake up and I could see like the beginnings of a patch and maybe it was because I was more sensitive to it in terms of I was watching more what I ate. Because previously I’ve had quite a fast metabolism, I do quite a lot of sport and I’m quite active so I don’t, I’ve never really watched what I ate and my weights never really fluctuated I think I’ve been the same weight for about five or six years and I’ve never really paid much attention to it so it could just be the fact that I was now slightly more sensitive to what I was putting into my system but I’m convinced now if I have a couple of nights out in a row or a couple of late nights in a row with maybe a night out with drinking interspersed in that, I can see it in my hands. just either in the beginnings of kind of a dry spot or something and so again it’s a little bit of a kick to drink some more water, have a few nights off, get some early nights, try and eat some good food over the next few days and to start moisturising again. And invariably that kind of keeps it at bay. the only thing that doesn’t at that point is sort of stress is the only other input that I can’t really have too much, well I can but at the same time I can’t, have too much of an influence on because there just seems to be so much going on all the time.

So how ever early a night, however well you eat and whatnot there’s only so much it can do cos I’m one of those people that can’t really say no to doing stuff so I still run around like an idiot, trying to do everything that I can but I wouldn’t have it any other way I’d take a little bit of dry skin to kind of enjoy my university experience a bit more.

With the methotrexate cos I was given loads of information about it cos it’s such a strong drug, when I first started. And, with psoriasis it’s used in very low doses. But in higher doses it can be used for chemotherapy treatments and things like that. Which scared me a bit. But then I spoke to my dermatologist and he said, you know, It’s in very low doses and because it can affect your liver. I had to have blood tests every two weeks. So they were very, very good at monitoring the effect on me. But, I was in my final year of university and had final exams and essays and stuff. And, it made me feel sickly. I took it once a week. And I think I took it on a Monday and the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I always felt really, really sickly and headache-y as well, which was strange. But things like going out for a meal. I’d go out for a meal with my boyfriend. I can remember one particular time, we went to this lovely Indian and I couldn’t eat anything. I had this sort of starter and I felt really sick and I love Indian food. And, so just, it affected me like that. And it was, it was a shame, really, cos my skin, I felt the best I felt, like I felt like I looked normal, you know what I mean? And but yet, I was feeling so sick and headache-y and quite tired, I think. And it just, it got to the point, I was on it for a good few months, and it got to the point where I thought, I’d rather have a bit, a bit of psoriasis and keep it under control with topical things maybe, than feel like this all the time. And like I say, it affected my social life as well. And I know it shouldn’t. It really shouldn’t have, cos you do not need alcohol to be sociable. But I think it’s [coughs] it’s quite a big aspect of uni life and things. And I did still go out and not drink and had a nice time. But I felt that my friends were thinking, oh, she’s been boring, she’s not drinking’ and didn’t really understand how serious the medicine was, where you can’t drink on it, cos it can really affect your liver. So, it did come with, with a lot of problems in my experience. And unless it got very, very, very bad, I probably wouldn’t like to go on it again.