eczema inspired experimentation

There seems to be some force in the universe pushing me to examine every aspect of my diet. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, my baby girl developed eczema over a large percentage of her body, while exclusively breastfeeding. (Poor girl!) This is in spite of the fact that I didn’t eat wheat, eggs, soy, very little dairy (grass fed butter only), nuts and corn only occasionally… My first thought was, that I do (did) eat A LOT of 88% dark chocolate. (About half a bar a day, but it is strong stuff.)  So I cut out chocolate for close to 3 weeks (no visible change), and did a super binge test (about a bar and a half of chocolate in one day)…. I didn’t notice any difference in her skin, but I felt terrible! I didn’t touch chocolate for another week after that.  The experience helped me break the chocolate addiction, and get to a place of eating it as an occasional treat rather than a main source of fuel (basically a caffeine boost). I then completely eliminated the butter, and nuts for a couple weeks. Also no noticeable improvement.  Now I’m turning to our household environment. Planning a carpet cleaning with vinegar (when I can find a day to move all the furniture and be out of the house long enough for it to dry). I also considered giving up fruit after reading this post about the paleo auto-immune protocol. I got pretty depressed about how restrictive my diet was becoming, and reading about illnesses this diet could treat. I had to take a step back and realize that I don’t have an auto-immune disease, and I’m doing this to achieve sparkly good health.  And after about a month a very clean eating I lost another 5 pounds. Down to 136!! I don’t remember the last time I was this weight, but it was probably when I was still growing (in height).  Up coming tweaks: considering doing 1 vegetarian day per week for spiritual reasons (not because I think it would be good for my health.) Going to look into WAPF methods for fermenting grains and legumes. Or maybe I’ll just eat tempeh and veggies and think of it as a sort of fast day.  Considering Mark Sisson’s 80/20 rule, I could eat anything 1 day out of 5, if the other 4 were perfect. This seems insane, but makes me feel better about deviating for 1 day a week.