No More Shampoo, No More Carbs

2016-09-07 Ken

Have you ever thought about your health?

I never did, not until recently.

Why didn’t I care? I can summarize the reasons in three bullet points:

I wasn’t fat so I didn’t have to care right?
My skin is clean compared to guys my age. That means I’m healthy right?
I’ve never been sick. That should mean I’m healthy right?

I wasn’t fat so I didn’t have to care right?

I’m 170 ㎝ weighing 54 ㎏ so by no means am I fat (remember, I’m almost 40).
I’ve never gained weight before and I’ve never given any thought about what I ate.
When asked what the secret was to stay skinny, I told them “the secret is to eat what you wanna eat”.

To practice what I preached, I would go out for ramen three times a week and would gobble up a bottle of Coke (the red one, needless to say) afterwards to wash down the oil from the ramen.
It was the moment I felt ultimate happiness in life.

My favorite foods were donburi and noodles (soba, udon, ramen) and all the talk that I kept hearing about carbs being bad for you sounded gibberish to me.

My skin is clean compared to guys my age. That means I’m healthy right?

Have you heard the saying “Your skin is the mirror of your health”?
Well I took it literally and was confident that I was healthy because I had better skin than guys my age.

Growing up as a child, it was my parents policy to use organic shampoos and other skin care products.
I am pretty picky about this stuff for a guy and I had thought I was doing everything good for my skin.

I’ve never been sick. That should mean I’m healthy right?

Rarely do I even catch I cold.
I used to have light symptoms of hay fever but that has gotten better in recent years.

My former job required working long hours into the night and was really stressful.
Because I was able to maintain good health conditions in spite of that, I never gave health much thought.

That is until I quit my job.

The Catalyst

Vacation in Vietnam

One thing that I wanted to do after I quit my job was to go on a vacation.
So I went to Vietnam for about a week in July.

I went to the resort area, Danang during my stay and because I wanted to get a nice tan to show off to my friends how much I was enjoying my unemployed life, I didn’t put on any sunblock.
I never do anyway.

The sun was very strong in Danang and I got a nasty sunburn.
The kind that really hurts.

I was thinking “Oh shoot! This is going to peel!” so I got some after-tan cream and was applying it constantly to my skin.

Despite my efforts, my skin started peeling after I got back to Japan, about a week after getting sunburned.

The peeling was really bad and I was dropping skin everywhere.

The upper body and legs had it worse.
You can see how bad it was in the pictures. Don’t look at it while eating cause its gross.

My face and arms were OK, which was a relief

When I would shower, water would sink in from where the skin peeled and my skin would blow up like a balloon and rip.
Applying Nivea cream or any kind of cream didn’t help at all.

To make things worse, the areas where the skin peeled started smelling really bad and red rashes started to show.

What was interesting was that it all followed the same sequence:

skin peel => bad smell => rash

After a day or two, the rash would go away and I could tell that the sunburn was finally heeling.
In hindsight, I think the rash was sun allergy.

Learning about sunburns was the catalyst

I got a little worried when the rashes started showing so I searched the web for how to treat nasty sunburns.
What I was looking for was a way to recover my skin, ASAP.

While I was doing my research, I came across a piece of information that was saying “do not disinfect wounds”.

The reason behind the idea was,

disinfectants are toxic to cells and will actually slow the healing of wounds.

So then what do you do? You apply Vaseline and wrap it with plastic wrap.

The method is called the “moist would healing method“.

This is the opposite of the traditional way of applying disinfectants and letting the wound dry.
This reminded me of the new type of band-aid that J&J came out with a few years ago.

Some thing like this:

It probably is based on the same concept.

This wasn’t directly related to the treatment of sunburns but was a revelation for me.

I threw out all the disinfectants I had at home and immediately stocked up on Plus Moist which is said to be the best band-aid out there and also got some Hydrocolloid bandages for wrapping.
I couldn’t find these on Amazon US so the links are going to take you to Amazon Japan.

Going back to what I was saying.

I learned that Doctor Makoto Natsui was an advocate on moist wound healing and I also found out about his book on the topic called:

“Do not disinfect wounds”.

(That’s just my English translation of the Japanese title. The book is in Japanese)

I bought it on the spot and recommend it to everyone.
The book goes into the details of how moist healing works and what to do in case you get hurt.

What? Shampoo is bad for you?

The rationale behind, “do not disinfect wounds” was that the disinfectants would kill the good cells too.

The same thing could be said for shampoos and body soaps.

Shampoos and body soaps contain surfactants which kill cells that actually protect the skin. This leads to skin trouble.

So then what do you do?

Easy, don’t use shampoo or body soap.

The book that talks about this is “Stop Shampooing and You’ll Grow More Hair”.
(This book is also in Japanese)

As I wrote above, I was really picky about my shampoos.
I used expensive ones that were organic and had all the good stuff in it.
What I learned from reading the book was that no matter how organic the shampoo was, it would contain surfactants.

The real meaning of “Carbs are bad for you”

After I got interested in the book “Do not disinfect wounds”, it was just natural for me to buy the book “Carbs will Destroy Humans” by the same author.
(This book is in Japanese)

The book was again a shocker to me.

Whenever I heard the term “carbohydrate restriction”, I would associate it with some sort of diet.
For me it was something fat people did in order to lose weight.

I learned from the book that I was wrong.

Taking excess carbs will lead to weight gain but it is also not good for your health.

What’s wrong with carbs? It: