The Eczema Relief Diet & Cookbook: Short-Term Meal Plans to Identify Triggers and Soothe Flare-Ups

By Christa Biegler

No-itch kitchen: histamine-free meals to eat well and feel good
Whether you're newly diagnosed or interested in learning more about eczema for a family member or friend, The Eczema Relief Diet & Cookbook has what you're looking for. The straightforward recipes and easy-to-follow meal plans make understanding this condition more manageable than you thought.
This book features tons of delicious recipes, like Fluffy Waffles and Easy Pesto Pasta, with accessible ingredients that take different dietary requirements into consideration and help you ease eczema flares. There's also helpful information on what foods your body reacts to, topical support alternatives, and stress management routines so you can respond to the condition from all angles.
The Eczema Relief Diet & Cookbook includes:

- Mealtime relief—Use a comprehensive 4-week meal plan to facilitate your diet.
- 75 satisfying recipes—Enjoy various choices for the three main meals of the day, plus snacks, desserts, and popular side dishes.
- Get the facts—Learn about the causes of eczema and helpful ways to tackle it that go beyond diet.
Discover how to get soothing relief from eczema—one tasty meal at a time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 17, 2025
• ISBN: 9781646115167

Book preview

PART ONE

Identifying and Managing the Root Causes of Eczema

Rice, cucumber, lemons, herbs, oil, and spices.

1

UNDERSTANDING ECZEMA

Skin issues, as painful and annoying as they can be, are an opportunity for you to dig deeper and understand what your skin is trying to communicate. Eczema is an outward signal that something has gone wrong with the skin barrier or immune system.

Eczema 101

Eczema is a non-contagious, long-term, inflammatory skin condition characterized by itching, redness, oozing, and dry, scaly, or crusty patches of skin. The words dermatitis and eczema are used interchangeably in medicine, but there are many subtypes of eczema, including contact, hand, nummular, seborrheic, and more. One diagnosis encompasses many types of skin presentations.

There are several possible root causes to eczema, but I’ve boiled them down to a few categories:

♦Stress/adrenal stress

♦Gut stress

♦Liver stress

Most people are dealing with at least two or three root causes of their eczema. In this book, I will thoroughly cover food interventions but also give guidance around other root causes that might be showing up in your case.

With reference to food, the term diet simply means, what you are consuming now. The use of the word diet in this book is about more than just food. Your sleep, stress, mind-set, environment, and what you put on the end of your fork all contribute significantly to eczema outcomes.

I have outlined a short-term food experiment that accounts for all typical eczema food triggers at once. This means you don’t have to spend MONTHS chasing food restrictions. After a few weeks of the short-term Phase 1 experiment, there is guidance for adding foods to your diet to make up a long-term food landscape full of variety in Phase 2. There are scenarios where some people may choose to participate only in Phase 2, and that is okay.

To be clear, I am not recommending long-term, extreme food restrictions. Long-term restrictions of many food groups can cause more problems due to downstream effects creating nutrient deficiencies and altering the microbiome. We’ll discuss this more later, but let’s zoom out first.

I often coach people to look at things in triads—it can help categorize your eczema efforts into different areas. You can pick something from each category to work on, or just one category at a time. In the eczema triad, you categorize interventions into these three buckets:

1.Internal (food, supplements/nutrients, medications)

2.External (creams, oils, baths, medications)

3.Lifestyle (stress, sleep, mind-set, movement)

This book covers many aspects of the eczema triad. Part 1 is all about the root causes and triggers of eczema, and part 2 includes recipes to start and finish the food piece of eczema.

The eczema healing triad.

An External Problem? Topical Options for Eczema.

The skin is like a coat. It protects you from weather assaults and prevents bacteria and viruses from entering your body. Naturally, the skin barrier is a major player in eczema. In current eczema research, it’s thought that approximately 50 percent of people with dermatitis may have a genetic deficit for producing filaggrin, a type of skin protein that helps make up the skin barrier. Without enough filaggrin, it is thought that the skin barrier loses more water and makes it more susceptible to outside substances invading.

Regardless of your genetics, eczema compromises the skin barrier, which needs protection and support. Ongoing itching is especially concerning because it spreads topical staph infections. Please do not overlook this. Topical staph infections seem to hinder most efforts to improve the skin. You might suspect a topical staph infection if the skin is angry red, swollen, or has gotten much worse, and what normally helps calm it is no longer helping. There is a treatment option named after South African Dermatologist Richard Aron that compounds a highly diluted antibiotic and steroid in a moisturizer to quickly reduce topical staph flares. The treatment’s intention is to get you off this tailored cream as soon as possible. Discuss options with your provider if you suspect a topical staph infection.

Topical Options for Eczema Relief

After a bath, applying an oil-based cream or quick-absorbing oil can help seal in moisture. There are endless products on the market, but keep it simple. Use plain, antioxidant-rich oils, and rotate them over time. If you have been using the same oil to moisturize for 1 or 2 weeks, switch to another oil and continue to rotate. Doing so will allow you to see if one oil works better than others, and will decrease the possibility of you using an oil that is actually irritating to the skin. You may accidentally overlook irritation from a bath product when you change products daily (or almost daily). Try sticking to the same product for at least a few days before rotating so you can minimize variables to see how your skin responds.

To seal in moisture, pat the skin dry from the bath and immediately apply the oil or moisturizer.

Here is a list of oils that may be useful:

♦Apricot kernel oil

♦Beeswax

♦Emu oil

♦Jojoba oil

♦Olive oil

♦Sesame oil (virgin or untoasted, test first for allergy)

♦Shea butter (may be an issue when there is a nut allergy)

♦Tallow

Remember, babies and children absorb more of what is put on their skin than adults, due to the ratio of surface area to weight and a thinner skin barrier. For this reason alone, defaulting to simple, nutritive oils is a great option.

Other topical therapies that may support eczema healing include wet wrapping to lock in moisture, light or phototherapy, and infrared sauna. It is thought that the use of topical corticosteroids under wet wraps can increase absorption and negatively affect the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) or stress hormone axis. Assault to the HPA axis could affect speed of healing.

Causes and Triggers

Topical agents are useful and necessary to improve a damaged skin barrier and stop irritation to the mucosa beneath the skin. Over-the-counter and prescription steroid creams are the most common eczema treatment because they offer short-term relief. Whew! You deserve some relief. But you also deserve to know what is happening under the surface so you can fix it for long-term eczema relief.

Using only topical steroids for eczema has been compared to taking the batteries out of a fire alarm but not looking for the fire.

There are several genetic variables and possible triggers at the root of eczema flares. It’s not usually one trigger causing a skin rash, but at least two or three underlying root causes.

Dr. Alessio Fasano, chief of pediatric gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital, has pioneered research around intestinal permeability and autoimmunity. Certain types of eczema fit under the autoimmune umbrella. Fasano outlines three issues that lead to autoimmunity: genetic tendency, gut problems (such as in the case of intestinal permeability or leaky gut), and a trigger or exposure like food, environment, medication, etc.

Symptoms that appear above the surface may have several root causes below the surface

Symptoms that appear above the surface may have several root causes below the surface.

STRESS AND ADRENAL STRESS

Stress, whether perceived, real, physical, emotional, or otherwise, is a huge trigger for any health flare. I cannot think of an eczema case where stress didn’t play a role, and often it’s not obvious until some healing progress is made and then stress induces a flare. Stress is any increased level of stress hormones and messengers.

Your body always tries to protect you from increased stress hormones. These hormones are blunted by serine, a nutrient critical for mood and sleep. They dump magnesium, a key mineral in more than 300 enzyme processes, including support of detoxification, gut health, and sleep. Chronically elevated stress hormones also compromise vitamin B5 (also known as pantothenic acid), which is sometimes nicknamed the stress vitamin. It’s implicated in gray hair and cell membrane structure, which is critical for beautiful skin. No one wins with runaway stress.

Creating a Stress Management Routine

If stress is a big issue for you, create a stress management plan. Brainstorm all the things you do that make you happy or that you enjoy. Find ways to include those in your day. You might categorize your action plan by day, week, and month. Here’s how I personally handle stress management and coach clients to work on stress:

Daily:

There is no better exercise to improve stress response systems than breath work.

♦Try box breathing: Inhale for 4 counts, hold for 4 counts, exhale for 4 counts, hold for 4 counts—Google it!

♦Download a meditation app that coaches you on diaphragmatic breathing to improve heart rate variability.

♦See the sun and get fresh air daily. There is some new research about how being in nature for an extended period of time can also improve stress resilience for a short period after you return to normal life.

Weekly:

♦Get away from work and the stress norm on weekends. Turn off e-mails and social media if they are sources of stress.

♦Check YouTube for free yoga classes, paying attention to those that coach on breathing technique.

Monthly:

Consider scheduling a me day, when you do things you enjoy or that promote healing. When I had a significant flare all over my face and neck, I scheduled a monthly massage, read, and went to an infrared sauna. I put aside all the to-do lists.

Make a Plan:

Create your own day, but be sure to schedule it or it won’t happen.

GUT STRESS

It’s important to talk about what is happening in the gastrointestinal tract when we’re talking about any possible symptoms from food. Our body is supposed to tolerate a wide variety of nourishing foods. What if the eczema problem is not necessarily about the food, but about what your body does with the food once it enters your body? That’s where permeability and imbalance enter the picture. Foods eaten for a long time (or a lack of variety in the diet) can start to cause sensitivities in the form of gut permeability, and in gut imbalances you might see fermentable foods or certain carbohydrates causing symptoms or skin flares. If this is the case, the food should not be the long-term culprit. It can, however, assist in reducing acute inflammation while you repair the underlying gut stress.

Gut Permeability

Searching the term intestinal permeability (leaky gut) returns thousands of research papers in the National Institutes of Health database. It can take an average of 15 to 20 years before research becomes medical practice, and the validity of intestinal permeability has now been established for decades. So, what causes it and what does it look like? First, your gut is full of little doors called tight gap junctions that should remain closed. These little doors are semipermeable, like a pair of nylons. Nutrients that the body extracts from digesting food should cross this gut lining and be carried off to do various jobs around the body. When the gut is permeable, or the little doors in the gut are open, undigested food particles can cross through the doors and wreak havoc on the other side of the immune system. The immune system throws inflammation at normally healthy foods and, over time, creates chronic, annoying symptoms like skin issues, fatigue, pain, headaches, sinus congestion, throat clearing, digestive issues, and more.

I hear this manifesting in people when they say, I used to be fine with X food but now it causes Y symptom. Intestinal permeability can be a root cause of food issues, and sometimes food causes the permeability issue.

Gut permeability can be caused by genetic predisposition, chronic stress, gut infections, smoking cigarettes, environmental toxins, lack of fiber, poor food choices, overuse of NSAIDS (pain relievers), medications, and excess alcohol use.

Intestinal permeability has become so prevalent (and talked about) that people trying DIY intestinal permeability fixes don’t always see results because they haven’t addressed the next trigger—gut imbalances.

Infections and Gastrointestinal (Gut) Imbalances

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