Last week I wrote about how my acne was really getting to me and making me feel down. This week I have good news! I started the Bean Protocol last week and it drastically changed my skin. Basically the science behind the protocol is that the soluble fiber in the beans is the only vessel to carry out excess hormones in the body. So if you’re dealing with out of whack hormones (like mine … caused by coming off HBC cold turkey …) the beans will bind to the hormones in the bile circulating in your liver and carry it out in your poop.

The reason for doing this would be to balance hormones to try to get pregnant, reduce acne, help mood swings, bring back healthy periods, regulate gut function, and more. My reason for doing it was primarily because I was experiencing horrendous acne and hair loss.

I decided I would eat 1/4c of beans every 2 hours, 6 times a day. So with every meal and snack between when I woke up and dinnertime. The only catch I found with the protocol is that you can’t use more than one tbs of oil to cook your food in because the oil will bind to the soluble fiber and basically block it from binding to the hormones instead. For me this just meant no avocados until 1.5 hours after my last round of beans.

Because I’m on a budget, I didn’t hire Unique Hammond (who healed her Crohn’s Disease with this protocol and is one of the forefront teachers of the bean protocol) or the founder, Karen Hurd (she has online resources). I would love to learn more however and definitely recommend looking into their work! I figured I would just give it a whirl and see what happened because I had nothing to lose and feel confident trying new things now that my Crohn’s is healed and in remission.

The results:

Within one day my face stopped hurting. In my last blog I talked about how painful it was. By day two all the bumps had gone down and there were no new cysts. It’s now one week later and my skin is glowing, my teeth and eyes are whiter, and I have a lot more energy. I am also on day one of my period and I feel like it’s saying a lot that I have no new pimples! Everything came to the surface (sorry a bit gross), which is wild. If you have cystic pimples you know that just doesn’t ever happen.

I highly recommend looking into this protocol. I know it can be scary and that not a lot of people have a good relationship with beans. Listening to a ton of podcasts on how it works completely changed my view and I had no trouble despite having Crohn’s. It did regulate my gut function, but with no bad side effects personally. I just bought Jovial Food’s presoaked chickpeas and have been eating spoonfuls of those after I rinsed them. Super easy to pop into soups, omlets, and make into hummus!

PS Still too early for before and afters. I have a lot of redness and scarring, but the fact that they stopped forming and aren’t painful is so amazing to me!