NEW YEAR: An update and overview of my TSW

It's been nearly 7 years since I began this journey to rid my skin's addiction to topical steroids. My current state is manageable but not cured and highly dependent on season (winter is especially bad with heaters and such). There is eczema on half of my fingers as well as my neck and lower face. I sometimes wonder if the length of the process is because in April 2016, my strength and resolve wavered and I went on a 2 week course of topical steroids and antibiotics on the advice of a dermatologist. Though the skin predictably cleared up perfectly after this course, it returned to a flaring state right after to my chagrin and non-surprise. Through that experience, my resolve has strengthened and I've since been determined to allow my body to heal through time.

What is my skin currently like? It's dry and flaky and my fingers have cracks, but what I'm grateful to not have is red inflamed skin. I attribute this first to time, but also to my routine which includes:

• dead sea salt baths every 3ish days, which I have detailed here.
• no moisturizing which calms and dries down the skin, the process of which I detailed starting here.

Some notable changes to the above is that first, my skin is strong enough to allow me to rub flakes off during and after my dead sea salt bath; in fact, I'm now quite aggressive with scruffing off a layer of skin now. I'm also using a different shampoo -- Nioxin Scalp Recovery -- which is slightly more cost effective and slightly more gentle on the skin, though not perfect since they changed their formula.

I still get incredibly itchy later in the evening but I allow myself the glory of scratching because my skin is resilient enough to take it. 

I certainly do feel like my skin has been resolving itself under those flakes, because it almost feels like zone by zone, the flares are slowly resulting in cured skin underneath, albeit at a snail's pace. For example it took over half a year for the tops of my feet to heal, and my fingers' eczema seems to have persisted for several months now but moved from finger to finger. 

All in all, I'm disappointed that things have taken this long to heal but looking at the calendar, I can imagine that I probably had a major set back using the course of topical steroids in April of 2016. I can only hope that by staying the course now I'm close to healed. For now, the salt baths will have to do. 

I will also do a course of Whole30 AIP and see how it impacts my skin as I've been eating terribly (lots of bread and desserts) and I think that definitely adds some inflammation to my system. Fingers crossed conditions improve!