My "detox" from YAZ. The good, the sad and the ugly.

This post is related to health and wellness, so I consider it fair game.  If talk of things related to hormones makes you squeamish, you have been fairly warned!
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I have always been one to avoid medicines and things that I considered not medically necessary.  However, I as entered my late teens and early 20s, I started having problems with mild to moderate acne.  Not horribly disfiguring, just annoying enough to cause me stress and to force me to always wear a bit of concealer to cover up the spots.

I tried the following:  dietary changes, drinking more water, vitamins, naturopathic supplements, elimination diets, expensive cosmed skincare lines, chemical peels, microdermabrasion, Proactive and topical prescription medications (Differein, benzoyl peroxide and Retin-A).  Out of breath from reading that sentence?  Nothing really helped significantly.  I was seeing an awesome dermatologist and he said that based upon everything that I had tried, he thought I should consider trying YAZ for a few months.  I waited it out for a few months, not wanting to put additional hormones into my body.  After a crazy breakout cycle, I decided to give it 30 days.

From talking to many friends and family members, I have learned that YAZ (and its generics) is a love it or hate it kind of medicine.  It ended up being a LOVE IT medicine for me.  Within 2 weeks, my skin was the clearest that it had been in years.  I did start having headaches when I took the 4 inert pills in each pack.  I was told to skip those and take it 365 days a year.

I took it for almost 4 years and to the greatest extent, I never had any complaints.  However, I recently decided that I wanted to consider going off of it to see how my body would respond.  I have several friends or friends-of-friends that have estrogen-fed forms of breast cancer.  I started to get paranoid taking a medication that could increase my cancer risk.  This came along with another worry ... I hated the thought of dealing with my face breaking out.  I figured that I would once again give it 30 days to see how my body responded without the medication.

"Detox" has better than I expected in terms of breakouts!  In over 70 days, I have only had 2 real pimples on my face and 2 on my back (yuck).  Honestly, the biggest annoyance has been with my skin and scalp.  I feel like my skin and scalp are twice as oily as they were on YAZ.  I am always blotting with oil sheets and have to wash my hair more frequently.  The other annoyance is that I have to shave more often!  On YAZ, I shaved maybe once a week.  Now I need to shave every other day.  My chest size has also gone down a cup size (that is the SAD part!).  However, I can't pin that on YAZ alone, as I have been exercising like crazy so it is probably a mix of both things.  Funny how what you fail to consider as a negative outcome often ends up being more annoying than what you actually worried about.

At this point, I am going to take it month-by-month to see how my body continues to readjust.  I have talked with many of you about YAZ, acne, hormones and their effect on weight-loss or weigh-gain.  I thought you might gain something from my personal experience.