Why Skin Flares After Illness with Christa Biegler, RD, LN

This week on The Less Stressed Life, I’m talking about relapse and why skin often flares after illness, food poisoning, antibiotics, or stressful events. Instead of viewing relapse as failure, I want you to see it as feedback and your body’s way of asking for deeper support.

I share a case study of a child whose skin cleared beautifully, only to flare again after back-to-back viruses and stress, and connect it to common patterns I see in practice. You will learn the physiological reasons relapse happens and how to respond strategically so you can support resilience instead of feeling defeated.

If you have ever felt frustrated by flare-ups that seem to undo your progress, this episode will help you understand why it happens and how to move forward with clarity and confidence.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Why skin flares are common after colds, food poisoning, or antibiotics
• How immune “soldiers” and gut health play a role in relapse
• The way stress impacts digestion, nutrient status, and flare frequency
• Why relapse is never failure but feedback from your body
• Practical strategies to support resilience including probiotics, bitters, and immunoglobulins

🗓️Book a Case Audit with Christa: https://www.christabiegler.com/momentum

❓Question for Christa? Submit it here: https://www.christabiegler.com/questions

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

SPONSOR:
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🍽️ Over restriction is dead
🥑 Whole food is soul food and fed is best
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❤️ Do your best and leave the rest

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Christa Biegler, RD, LN: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stress life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

Hey, welcome back to the Less Stressed Life. I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and in today's episode I'm gonna talk about something that has come across my desk a couple of times this week, and that's the concept of relapse or what if my skin is flaring after something happens? And so something I've become a bit more passionate about, probably a few years ago because of my own.

Story, which reminds me to do part two of my Health Story, which talks about relapse and other systems that I needed to support. Today I am talking about relapse in a slightly different manner, but in relationship to skin, and it's on my mind. I was just doing a case review for someone and it's so fresh in my mind, so I'll talk about this case.

It is a middle school age child, and the mother had worked with a health coach previously who helped this child who has a history of allergies, clear his skin in the past, so did some different things, had done some testing, found some different levels of imbalance and some fungal overgrowth and some different things, and then this kiddo had some.

Stressors, physical environment stressors. He had some dentist visits that had some additional, just some additional potential stressors on the body. And then he had, as mom described it, some food poisoning and some back to back. Stomach stuff. Stomach viruses. Alright, so this kind of red flags to me right away, and I'm gonna jump ahead outside of this case and talk about one of the most common places that I see relapse happening, which is after some kind of cold or a virus.

So the thing about this is that it can start immediately or up to two or three weeks later. And so there's a few different varieties of why this happens. It's not just bad luck. I wanna talk about why this actually makes perfect sense. So I want you to think about when you're having a cold, you're under a duress and you are down and out.

The body is saying, enough, I've gotta take care of this. You're literally trying to fight something off so your immune system soldiers are working really hard to fight something off. When we're talking about the concept of food poisoning, so I'm oscillating in and out a little bit, but when we're talking about that in general, I always think that food poisoning can happen, right?

If there's enough of this pathogen present. But if your immune system is low or there's poor resilience, or you have a depleted amount of immune system soldiers. Then it's more likely that this kind of stuff is gonna happen. And so I would say to you. Does this happen annually or even more than once a year?

If you're getting that kind of frequency, I would say that's a little bit suspicious. And I'd wanna dig a little bit deeper in how do we support that immune resilience overall, which is it's a system it's mostly lives in the gut. So supporting what's going on in the gut is very supportive in general.

But if I would go back to this other kiddos story. There were some other clues that kind of tell me maybe he's having some low nutrient status and other issues related to resilience. So I think about soil quality, right? So if you have great soil quality, maybe you're gonna grow beautiful grass or flowers or whatever, but if that soil is depleted in devoid of nutrients, you maybe are not gonna grow as beautiful, resilient, vibrant flowers or whatnot.

Or maybe they're not gonna be able to withstand harsh conditions as much. Our body is very similar. So going back to the common cold, there's overgrowth of bacteria going on when you're at the maximum point of that cold, right? That kind of lays you out for maybe a week. What I find with colds is that there's usually a really pronounced period for about one week, and then it just hangs on annoyingly for two weeks.

And you've probably heard me say this before, and one of the reasons I thought it was maybe relevant to record this episode now is we're coming into back to school and there seems to be two seasons in practice. Cold season and histamine season, so histamine season, usually in the spring. I may do a another histamine episode here coming up though, because for some places in some areas throughout the world and throughout the United States, there is another bloom that happens in the fall as well causing flares and symptoms.

Anyway, back to illnesses. When you've got this cold, you've got an increased amount of bacteria, and as that starts to dissipate, as your body starts to support yourself in clearing that out, there can be a little bit of residual or some leftovers going on and something we generally agree about.

I would say that skin issues can be from any kind of imbalances happening in the body, but one of the ones that we do agree about no matter what kind of practitioner you are worldwide is we do agree. That those with eczema specifically have a higher incidence of staph aria on the skin topically. So where do you think that comes from?

Skin grows from the inside out. That's, you know how I see this playing out all over the time. And so if you have a little bit of residual of overgrowth of bacteria after this illness, it is possible that you're seeing this grow from the inside out up to a few weeks later. So this is something I learned from myself and my own healing journey and started to witness with other clients as well.

And so the, what I want to tell you is when something happens, this takes a lot of practice. It's not something we get to immediately, but if you see some skin irritation popping up after something that has happened. Illness and we're not always a great historian. Sometimes we forget about things. So just look back at that entire last month.

Our first instinct is usually to panic, maybe to just depending on where our nervous system state is in the first place. So we might wanna blame a new food or cut things from the diet or. Or slather on creams and or just throw up your arms and feel like everything stopped working.

These are all normal responses I see from people at different times, different places, and there are more nervous system responses than logical responses. But what I implore you to do, what I plead for you to do is something pops up, just pause. The flare isn't failure, it's never failure. It's always feedback.

It's always your body telling you something. It's not telling you to restrict harder, it's just telling you to support differently, to support deeper. So what does that look like? A little bit. So you might wanna support how your body is clearing waste, clearing toxins. So the thing about having overgrowth of different bacteria, et cetera, is that they're gonna.

Eat up nutrients. It's just like having weeds. They're gonna eat up nutrients and they're gonna give off their waist, and so that can show up on the skin. So what can you do in the diet? You can eat some bile loving foods. We use beet powder in our house a lot and throw it into smoothies. It's pretty palatable.

I just got done eating some arugula which is some bitter greens, which kind of support the body. We have all the, we have. We know we have over, I think it's over 200 bitter receptors in the body. So even though bitters are great for stimulating digestive enzymes, et cetera, they're also really good at triggering other other processes in the body, probably more than we really understand.

Making sure your nutrients are onboard. So I love to hydrate with trace minerals, with electrolytes, et cetera, and then fill in the gap with something broad spectrum to fill in nutrients. 

Christa Biegler, RD, LN: It is hot weather season and there is probably no better time than now to make electrolytes part of your daily routine. Electrolytes help you make energy and help get hydration into the cell so you aren't just peeing out what you put in. I've been drinking electrolytes for at least five years and I'm always looking for a great tasting, high quality powder just to change up the flavors.

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Christa Biegler, RD, LN: Also, I wanna just take a peek at, do I have a little bit of imbalance that I might need to correct? Overall, how do I wanna do that?

Logically, strategically, intelligently. One of the things I like to do when trying to support against relapse, so the tricky thing is that. We tend to not be very proactive As humans, we tend to be a bit reactive, understandably. 'cause until something looks bad or goes wrong, we just don't even really think about it right out of sight outta mind.

So it can take a while to learn this lesson that maybe I should be supportive. It's oh, my body is under attack. Maybe I should actually be supportive. Proactively when you're supportive proactively, sometimes I think you can avoid having some of these things show up later. No problem. They're all learning experiences.

I think the more learning experiences we have, the greater the skill we develop to do this on our own. But one thing you can do is you can support. The gut with whatever gut supportive products you have. Now, that means a lot of things to a lot of people. This episode isn't necessarily about that, but you could put probiotics down the hatch, right?

You could throw grass seed, on the landscape and move things in the right direction. Lactobacillus root eye. LGG there's many strains that are supportive. If you take one and you feel like you're not really sure if it's working, you might look up histamine producing strains. That one might cause a little insult to injury too soon.

What else? The, when we're talking about immune system soldiers that on testing, I think of immune system soldiers as secretary, IGA kind of immune system status within the gut. And so when I think about what we. Can support the immune system sold. How do we support immune system soldiers? There's a few different nutrients.

Retinol vitamin A, which is usually not my first go-to Sacro Bilar, which is a probiotic yeast and immunoglobulins, which are usually in the form of colostrum, obo, bovine immunoglobulins. And I would say that immunoglobulins tend to be my first go-to. I usually use those, but I wanna tell you that there's not just nutrients and specific nutrients and physiological things that can support those immune system soldiers.

Any kind of reduction on stress also supports it. Because the thing that depletes the soldiers in general are gonna be generally pathogens and stress. So the opposite of that can be supportive and helping those kind of repopulate and come back online. The conversation isn't just really treating the flare, it's stepping back, asking yourself, does this make sense?

That's always my first thing when I'm assessing any case or any story is, does this make sense? And if it's making sense, then all lights tend to be green. It's cool. Now we just need to put in the protocol or the process to clear this situation based on the exact context that we're seeing.

If it doesn't make sense, we might have to dig a little bit deeper. Sometimes dig more into the story, really question is this, is this story all the way true or is there some missing details? Are there some other factors? Where, even toxic burden could have gotten filled. That toxic burden bucket could have gotten filled.

I feel like there's a really big loose, open Canon one as well that can create some relapse things. The other thing is. And this will not surprise you and you might wanna throw tomatoes at your phone, but stress in general is gonna be a self-limiting factor that's going to make us go backwards more quickly.

So stress as a reminder, suppresses those immune system soldiers, which allows illnesses. Take shape. In general, no failure. If we have some illness, it's just. Part, it can be part of life, right? So many different pieces to that. The other thing it does is it de depletes how we digest. So it when we're under stress, digestion is the first thing that gets checked out.

And once digestion checks out, we're not going to be digesting the food we're eating and that food may look like an invader. And so it might look like a food sensitivity. It may not be. The foods fall, but how we're digesting and processing that food because we really haven't been supporting how we're digesting it in general.

So those are a couple just super basic things. And the other big one that I think of all the time with stress is that it depletes nutrients and we don't have nutrients. Those are the workers that make all the systems in the body work what else? Even my own child was dealing with my adult child. As we try to support our children to make the best decisions, we try to educate them as best as possible.

And none of us don't, we all don't know what we don't know. I think we learned the most through experiences. She also had come down with something recently and so we troubleshooted through all of that. But just like I would tell. Any of you? I encourage her to, she ended up going on antibiotics because it was the right choice for her, and I really highly suggested she repopulate after she take those antibiotics.

So that's the other little tiny nuance or factor with an illness. If you end up going on antibiotics or if your child goes on antibiotics, there's a couple things that can happen as well. Fungus can have a party because you're killing all the good and the bad bacteria. So we already have a biome.

We already have a a staph or a congregation of fungus and bacteria in our body, and there can be an imbalance of. Opportunistic or not so friendly bacteria and fungus and there is like the stuff that's supposed to be there, the commensals. And so when we're killing all the good and the bad bacteria, the fungus can have a party.

So things can show up there. We can end up with yeast infections or other things. I'm sure that you've been a little bit familiar with. You can have like increase of itchy ears, et cetera. And so it can be so important to be supporting, to repopulate, to restore. After taking antibiotics, usually as a rule of thumb, at least three times as long as you took the antibiotics, even though we know antibiotics can affect the microbiome for maybe even up to two years in some literature, I like to choose a formula that has promised these belardi second time.

I've mentioned that in this episode already, right? It supports that secretary iga, a, the immune system soldiers, as well as being, having some antifungal properties, this came up a couple times this week, this little food poisoning conversation, but I'm not necessarily saying food poisoning necessarily causes relapse.

It's just an obvious imbalance in the gut. And so how do we bring that back to balance so we don't have residual issues later on, ongoing later? And I always think it's amazing if people can track that information back over the last. 1, 3, 6 months, one year. All of that is really beautiful information to make the case make sense overall.

So I hope that you find this helpful as you navigate things on your own and hopefully do not have relapses after the common cold or some kind of issue or stressor to the body. But it does happen, and I want you to know. That it is pretty common actually, and there's lots of things you can do to support it and it does make sense.

And when things make sense, there's a lot you can do about it. If you need any help reviewing your case or getting a second set of eyes or understanding any gaps to make your case make sense so you know what to do. I am currently open for case audits. You can go to krista bigler.com/momentum and book a case audit right there.

You'll submit all of your history to me, any kind of pictures, documentation, labs if you want. And I'll go over that and fill in the gaps and offer you some feedback and timeline and suggestions and opportunities. So thank you for listening today. I want to remind you that your skin is talking to you and you can learn how to listen to it.

Have a great day.