1. Here�s a quick trick to see if this kind of diet will help your eczema, if yours is the same type as mine and responds similarly: for one day, eat nothing after lunch except for a handful of plain almonds for a snack around 3:00 in the afternoon. Yes, you will be going to bed a bit hungry. It won�t hurt you for one day. Drink some pure water, but nothing else. When I did this a few times, unintentionally initially � just from working late and forgetting to eat � I started noticing consistently that I slept better, didn�t wake up itching as much in the middle of the night, and my skin wasn�t as weepy and red the next morning. If this works for you, I would take it as a positive sign that a change of diet will help you.
2. How long will this take to heal completely? The short, general answer is: 3 months. The longer, more accurate answer is dependent on a few factors regarding your own personal situation, like: how long you�ve had eczema, your age, your overall level of health, your diet before this diet, other habits � you get the idea.
For me, I didn�t smoke or drink, and my diet was already pretty good, didn�t have any other serious health problems, and it took me 3 weeks to start seeing improvement in the redness, about 4 weeks for the itching an redness to go away, 6 weeks for the skin to be healed and have that �closed� feeling, for lack of a better term (as opposed to the open, porous feeling when the skin is in weepy, lymph-leaking mode), except for my hands and feet: the hand, especially the tips of my fingers where it looked like there was probably serious fungal infection around the fingernails that I never knew was there, took about 3 months total to heal; and the soles of my feet were the last holdout at 5 months. Now it�s 6 months and I just get the occasional light bumps or hives on major joints like my ankles, elbows and shoulders (that makes me suspect this kind of diet would also help rheumatoid arthritis). So I think that�s a fairly quick recovery considering I had this condition so long, and no cortisone or other skin treatment ever helped. I haven�t gone back to try my �old� diet yet though � no fruit yet, but I might try that in a couple more months.
You should also expect to see continuous improvement, week to week after about a month. I didn�t see it day to day, but definitely each week I would notice on the weekend that it wasn�t as painful and itchy as the previous week. The main exceptions were for a few days around my period and even ovulation: further indication to me that eczema is directly candida yeast related, as hormone fluctuations are apparently one of it main causes.
3. For babies and children with eczema: yes, I would try this diet for them � but with kids as for anyone, please check with your doctor first. (Just be prepared for minimal enthusiasm and encouragement from medial professionals regarding food�s effect on eczema: nothing against them, it�s just that they�re not trained or experienced in this � they�re trained in medicine, ie drugs). As long as your doctor doesn�t say �no, absolutely don�t do it�, then give it a try for at least 3 or 4 weeks, since it doesn�t seem to take as long to heal children as it does with adults who�ve had eczema longer. I wish I had been on this diet as a baby: it would�ve saved me almost 40 years of agony.
4. Bathing: during the diet, especially during the first month while my skin was still inflamed and kind of weeping, I took 2 baths a day and added about half a cup of hydrogen peroxide or a quarter cup of baking soda to the water. I had read that this counters the yeast infection on the skin, inhibits the weepy �wet� quality of the eczema, and makes any stinging less painful. It seemed to help, and definitely didn�t hurt (and both ingredients are very cheap and safe). Make sure you dry off thoroughly to cut the growth of yeast, and even use a hair dryer for between your toes and folds of skin that tend to stay moist.
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