The Acne Of Middle Age

I've been coming home for lunches instead of eating at restaurants for about a week and a half. Part of it is that my usual lunch buddies are busy elsewhere, part is a desire to conserve financial resources. I didn't do it expecting to effect a significant drop in caloric intake. However, that seems to have happened. When we're out somewhere, lunch will often be something like a pasta dish, a Mexican entree, or a hot sandwich. Typically these days I heat up a can of soup and make a small salad, which is a somewhat smaller lunch than I would eat while out.

I may have lost a pound or two this way, I can't be entirely sure. My complaint is that this shift in eating habits seems to have produced a blossom of acne. Like the acne of puberty, middle-age acne seems to blossom while one sleeps, resulting in unsightly skin appearing in the morning. But unlike the acne of puberty, middle-age acne strikes all over the body instead of just around the face. It's annoying and unsightly.

There must be something in the soup or the salad dressing, which I'm eating more of, that is giving me this reaction. It probably isn't salt or MSG; I would expect that to be prevalent in restaurant food too. I wondered if it might be canola oil -- I'm eating a lot of salad dressing and that's the based of most dressings one buys in the store. But I would eat a fair amount of salads from restaurants too, and I have to imagine their dressings are also based on canola oil, since they come from foodservice providers who are functionally the same as the manufacturers of retail food products.