Re: A plan to cure our Exfoliative Cheilitis - A realistic approach to the 'leave it alone' method

Allow me now to give a little more explanation as to what gives me confidence in this strategy.

I am unsure which parts of your lips have been affected by EC, but essentially all of the inner halves of both my top and bottom lip is affected.

But they aren't affected in an identical way. As I said before, some are 'stronger' than others, and some, an area because of its proximity I neglected, are real 'weak'.

To make it easier to illustrate to you how each part of my lip is affected, let's split each lip into five sections. The centre, and the left and right of the centre split into halves. So taking the top lip, the part of mine which is by far the strongest, particularly I believe because I exclusively worked on it (because of its strength at the time) last year during April/May and then again later, is the first section to the right of the centre section, in particular the top half.
To make it easier to visualise, take your finger and touch your top centre lip, literally do it, then move one step to the right. Where your finger is now, I have worked on the top half of the affected area the most.

Now the weakest part of lips is, or let me say it this way actually. As you move more and more to the left and right edges away from the centre of both the top and bottom lips, the strength generally decreases. This isn't a perfect description, as as I said, the strongest part is NOT in the centre, but this very nicely describes the weakest parts. They are weak because they were so easy to neglect; i.e. they take up negligible height and do not swell so much upon peeling or look ugly, so I didn't care. I pay the price now because I am working on them now, taking time away from improving the rest of my lips (which might explain to you Daniel why after 6 months I'm not further).

The part which is next weakest is actually the centre of my top lip, which I am currently working on. To be honest I could make an entire post or thread to describe the development of my lips, but that isn't the purpose of this post so I'll stop before I do.


My point and a piece of logic I base my confidence in the strategy is this. Different parts of mine, and probably yours, (want to) shed at different rates. Some take 2 days before they destroy me socially, and others are still going strong and the strongest becoming unbearable after i don't even remember when (because I haven't given it attention in so long and peel it prematurely/before it is ready).

This leads me to ask some questions. Why does each part shed at a different rate, why is it not uniform? Is this because the bacteria which caused EC affected different areas of the lip some more and some less? Or is it because we peeled different areas of our lips, and left different areas of our lips, different amounts and for different lengths?

Reread and think about that last question for a second again. If that is true what are the implications? If it is true that some of mine peel quicker because I didn't leave them alone as I did a lot of other parts, what does this mean?

This is what it means. It gives credence to the above posted strategy. The longer I leave my lips alone, the longer they 'survive'.

@Daniel; The main reason why I haven't seen more progress Daniel is a couple of things. In no particular order,
because I didn't illustrate to myself the strategy as I have now in the format of someone studying or working; what I essentially was doing was keeping them unpeeled as long as I could before a social situation or event came up. <<< This was VERY detrimental as it had no structure and allowed me to be disrupted by events or reasons to go out very easily. Anyone following my method, I really encourage you to structure your weeks and make sure you can evaluate your progress of the strategy systematically.

because friends coming back during holiday breaks disrupted my unordered plan.

because I decided to focus on the most visibly ugly/when peeled most swollen parts instead of following as I am now ALL of my lips.

I would say the main reasons are because I only came up with this structure recently, and that I neglected parts of my lips.

For example, think about it this way. If I focused on that strongest part of my lip I could probably keep unpeeled for between 5 and 7 days, and improve it to 8, 9, 10 days etc. Meanwhile, I'm focusing on parts that turn white and flaky when I laugh and talk to people after a day and a half to two days.

I was hesitant about saying that this HAS worked for me as a sort of disclaimer. I don't have photographic, with detailed data in excel, evidence. I feel and am sure it has improved, but I have already forgotten how they were before. For instance at one point I decided to improve most of my bottom lip which is affected quite uniformly (apart from the very very edge), and I'm certain I did. But it's difficult for me to tell you without the hesitation since because it was so long ago, I don't have photographic evidence, and because it improved only by a day or so.


I write too much ^^