After Years of Struggling with Severe Eczema, Abby Tai Has Found Healing Through Helping Others ‘Conquer’ Theirs

Abby Tai had continuous painful, full-body eczema flare-ups throughout her entire childhood — an experience, she says, that robbed her of many aspects of her youth. She experienced severe eczema flare-ups into her teen and young adult years, which caused her to try to hide behind clothing or turn down social invitations out of embarrassment.

Tai attempted to treat the condition in every way imaginable, but when the flare-ups would return, she would also experience depression and suicidal thoughts, eventually finding herself facing enough challenges that she had to take a leave of absence from her advertising agency job. And then, she found reprieve. With changes to her diet, at-home products, stress reduction and more, Tai’s skin eventually cleared up. Along the way, she’s learned valuable lessons about self-acceptance and love and has armed herself with tools to get through painful recurrences of her flares (such as the ones that have occurred after she gave birth).

Her journey has ultimately inspired her to help others fight their own eczema battles, empowering them with her knowledge of the condition and the coping tools she’s developed. She founded Eczema Conquerors, where she works as an eczema nutritionist and coach, runs a free Facebook eczema support group, and hosts the Eczema Podcast.

And while everyone’s experience with eczema, an inflammatory skin condition that affects an estimated 30 percent of the country, is different, with no one-size fits all cure, Tai hopes to help others find hope within their own journeys.

Hear her story in her own words below.

“I felt like I was going to doctor after doctor every single week.”

Abby Tai at her high school prom.

Courtesy Abby Tai

My parents told me that I always had eczema, even as a baby, but it was very mild. And as I grew older, I had it on my fingers. I moved to Hong Kong when I was about 11 years old and then my skin started getting a bit worse. I started dating someone for the first time when I was about 15 years old. And after he broke up with me, that’s when my eczema flared up to the worst that it had ever been. It spread all over my body and it became very, very severe after that. I feel like a lot of the rejection and the self-hatred was turned towards my skin. And I think the way that I was feeling internally started showing up on my skin.

While I was in high school, my parents had brought me to many doctors, and I felt like I was going to doctor after doctor, every single week. We had tried different medications like steroids, topical steroids, oral steroids, and antihistamines, some of which came with a lot of side effects. I felt like I was just constantly on medication, and none were working. We had also tried things like using herbs or traditional Chinese medicine. We had tried many different routes, but my skin kept flaring back up.

A heavy physical and mental toll

Abby Tai during a flare-up. Showering was painful for her.

Courtesy Abby Tai

In Hong Kong, the summers are really hot. I would feel so embarrassed and I would have to cover myself with sweaters. I would try to wear really long dresses or really long socks to cover [the eczema]. I feel like it ruined my childhood because of it.

Other people were able to just do everyday activities and hang out with their friends, wear whatever they wanted to wear; I had the opposite experience, where putting on clothes was really hard. It was very uncomfortable having wounds all over your skin. It was hard to not only wear clothes, but also to take a shower. It hurt and it stung a lot.

Even moving my neck or walking was painful. Every day, I would wake up with blood on my shirt, on my fingernails from scratching, a lot of dead skin on my bed, and even blood on my bedsheets. It was just an incredibly hard time. I felt like I was trying to survive every single day. When other kids had a chance to thrive and play, I was basically very disabled. I missed a lot of school. And for me, just surviving one day was already an accomplishment. I had a lot of depression and I was also very suicidal because of how hard it was. When I went for university in Canada, my skin had gotten better. I’m not sure if it was because there’s less pollution, or the water was different, or the type of food — but my skin just naturally cleared up.

Shortly after, I started dating my boyfriend, who’s now my husband, when we had met in our 20s. For some reason my skin was stable up until that point, and then my skin just erupted again. I felt like I was going through the same thing as I had when I was in my teenage years where it was just covered in rashes. At one point, I think I was at least 95% with my whole body just covered in rashes — I [resembled] a burn victim.

I was supposed to do a mission trip in Uganda, and I had to cancel the trip because of the risk of infection and the risk of getting more open wounds and getting bacteria into the skin. It was definitely one of the hardest and scariest times because I couldn’t just move to another country just to help my skin get better. I had to figure out something to do. A lot of people were really worried for me. And I didn’t have any family nearby who lived with me since they all were back in Hong Kong. So, I mainly had to rely on my [now-husband] to help me get through it.It was hard for me to figure out what exactly was causing it; I think part of it was stress. I was working in an advertising agency and makeup couldn’t even cover the texture of my skin because it would still be so flaky. And just I remember every single morning when I woke up, there would be a lot of wounds on my skin. I would have to vacuum every morning because of all the dead skin flakes that fell off. It was just incredibly hard. Thankfully, my boss was really kind and she offered me unlimited work from home and unlimited sick days as well. 

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My journey to relief

Abby Tai shows her skin healing.

Courtesy Abby Tai

It took me a long time to figure things out. There was someone who I knew that also went through eczema as well. She had asked me if I wanted to do an elimination diet with her, because she said that she heard that it helped. I really didn’t believe that food could make a difference at all, but I still agreed to do it.

For two months, my skin flared up so badly; it just kept getting a lot worse. It was pretty scary. It had never gotten like that. But after the two months was up, my skin somehow took a turn, and it was almost like everything that had to come out of my body did, and my body was finally able to heal itself. I finally saw my body start to get better. And my skin started clearing up. Those two months of being on that diet helped my skin so much more than any medication that I had ever been on before. 

Being able to give my body a break from all the allergenic foods really helped. I cut out a lot of junk food, processed foods, sugary food, wheat, and dairy. I worked with a naturopath who helped me figure out that my digestion was very off. And he also helped me figure out that I couldn’t digest fats properly. Whenever I would eat fats, my body would tend to flare. So, he helped me work on my digestion, which also helped with my gut health, too. I added in supplements like omega-3s and collagen and a few other things, had some testing done and really gave my immune system and my body a break.

I also switched from conventional to clean products; I changed the shampoos, lotions and laundry detergent I use to ones that had less irritants and less harsh preservatives in them.

Working on my mindset also helped. It’s been a journey where I used to go through a lot of trauma with my skin, just being afraid of what others thought. It’s been a long journey of developing more self-love and learning what it means to love my skin and love myself, even though it’s been hard to start to get used to really feeling comfortable in my skin. Eventually, all the redness, the inflammation, the rashes finally had a chance to calm down. My face didn’t look as disfigured anymore. At one point, my body was so inflamed that whenever I would put the wrong food in my body, my tongue would tingle, and my fingers would tingle as well. But eventually, I was able to add foods back in and be able to eat things normally again.

One thing that made me realize that my skin was healing was when I didn’t have to constantly moisturize throughout the day. Going from having to moisturize every single hour or several times an hour, to being able to go a full day without having to moisturize again and again, was really a big sign that my skin started to heal.

I remember one day my doctor looked at me and said, “Abby, I have been working with you for two months now. And it’s the first time that I can start to finally see what your normal face looks like.” Just because my face was so red, so disfigured and I was pretty much very disabled.

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A new chapter

Abby Tai emphasizes “progress not perfection”.

Courtesy Abby Tai

Now that I’m back to eating everything, [my experience] actually inspired me to become a nutritionist — to learn more about food and apply what I learned to healing and helping others heal as well.

My goal and my mission is to help others be able to be set free from their skin flares. It’s very rewarding to be able to now use what I’ve learned to be able to help others. We work with them on the mindset portion. We hold their hand and offer that support to them. We teach them how to eat and to help support their mindset in a way that’s beneficial to their bodies, in a way where they learn to love and accept themselves despite the flares that they’ve gone through. So, it’s been incredibly rewarding to see people healing and to see them get better as well. I called my business Eczema Conquerors because I truly believe that we can conquer any flare that comes our way. And so, I just want to remind anyone who’s going through this that if you have the determination, and you don’t give up and you have a good practitioner helping you, and you have good support near you, you can conquer anything that comes your way.

An ongoing journey

Abby Tai shares a before and after photo.

Courtesy Abby Tai

Now, I find that every time that I flare, the healing is almost like an onion. Every time I see my practitioners, we are peeling layers of an onion, and getting deeper and deeper into the root and the root issue. Every time we’re just peeling back layers of things that we have to work on. And I find that every time we do my skin gets better.

As an example, after I gave birth, my skin flared up incredibly severely, almost like how it was before, which was very traumatic. But we found my thyroid levels were out of balance, which can contribute to the dry skin and the eczema as well. So, as we started working on that — and my stress as well — my skin started getting better as well. It took a few years, but using what I had learned from before, it cleared up about 80 to 90% … and then I had my second kid. It took some time for my body to rebound back to normal. But I will say right now I’m back to about 80 to 90% better. I know that it takes time. But I know that every day that as I make progress that my skin will continue to get better. 

Leaving my stressful job helped a lot. When I worked there, I actually had to take short term disability from it at one point because it was causing so much stress, and whenever I would take a break come from work, and start to do things that I love, I found that my skin started to get better.

These days, what really helps is journaling. Doing a brain dump really helps to let everything out. Meditation and prayer really help. I find that visualizing myself healed and just being able to relax my body really helps. And doing regular workouts helps let out a lot of anxiety and stress and helps my body cope better.

I grew up with low self-esteem because of my flares, and a lot of just worrying what others thought about me. And as I started working with a therapist to help me get through it, and also addressing a lot of childhood trauma, and a lot of trauma that came out because of my skin, it started to really change my mentality, and change the way that I saw myself as well. 

It’s been important to change my mentality and start to do things that I love … I never want anyone to go through the same thing that I went through, suffering so much, and having to hide from others and not go out and missing a lot of family events. I never want anyone to have those precious moments stolen away from them.

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Source: HIS Education