Dairy – it’s everywhere. From cheese, milk, chocolate and yogurt; some of my favourite “treat” foods all fall into the dairy category. Making the swap to dairy-free has come with its challenges, I first made the decision due to my skin being extremely bad at the start of the year and for many years now I have suffered with really bad dry skin and blisters on my hands of which my dermatologist couldn’t pin point to one condition. So, like the majority of us I done a little research and an element of self-diagnosis, and the amount of information online about how dairy affects your skin was starting to become very interesting and most definitely kept grabbing my attention. Finding myself glued to my laptop screen night after night reading more about why we need dairy and in what quantities/capacity it became clear that it was only during infancy that our bodies crave dairy for steady development.
With that in mind, I focused my research around becoming dairy-free which had a lot of content to sift through, and work out what reasons were significant to the reasons why I was considering making the change.
There are actually a lot of benefits to being dairy-free and the most obvious one was the change I started seeing in my skin. My blemishes were clearing up and I had almost no blisters on my hands. A lot of research shows that our bodies have various tolerance levels to different foods which means they have various impacts on our bodies and the reactions they provoke.
My first dairy-free swap started with milk. Going from being the girl who drinks a pint of milk most nights to only having milk in tea, coffee or with cereal was a big change in my diet from the off. And to this day this remains the same. Looking at the basic foods that contain dairy cheese was for me the easiest food to cut out my diet, I’ve never been a lover of cheese and missing pizza night hasn’t proved to be that difficult, however, chocolate on the other hand has been my downfall.
Emma Louise Herbert 