Why I Stopped Treating My Skin and Started Treating My Water

I've dealt with skin problems my whole life. Eczema first, then a damaged skin barrier, then acne. Safe to say I've become extremely particular about what goes on it - and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise the skin stuff was never really a skin problem.

Skin is primarily an internal dance.

The elimination years.

For a long time, cutting out felt like the answer. Dairy, gluten, sugar - the usual. I approached it without a proper understanding of holistic health, so restriction felt like logic. If the body's reacting, remove the offender.

Sad to say I spent a good few years doing this without it fully working.

What actually shifted things was moving away from elimination and toward something more primal - high quality, organic, well-sourced, actually nourishing the body rather than policing it. Moderation. That's where the skin started to follow. Not overnight, but it followed.

Then I started thinking about water.

More specifically: what's in it, what's been stripped from it, what my cells are actually receiving.

I recently invested in a reverse osmosis filter. RO filtration removes heavy metals, chlorine, fluoride, microplastics - genuinely clean water. The thing nobody tells you: it also strips minerals. Calcium, magnesium, potassium. The trace elements your cells use. So you're left with water that's chemically pure but nutritionally empty.

Filtered out the bad. Accidentally filtered out the good.

So how do you remineralise?

Electrolytes are one answer. But the one I keep coming back to goes further than that.

H2Tab. Backed by human biologist Gary Brecka - one of the most followed names in performance and longevity wellness - it's a tablet you drop into a glass of water. It dissolves, releases molecular hydrogen - H2 - and you drink it immediately, because hydrogen is the fastest-escaping gas there is. That's the whole protocol.

What it does at the cellular level is why people like Brecka rate it so highly.

A 2007 Nature Medicine paper established that molecular hydrogen is a selective antioxidant - one that targets only the hydroxyl radical, the most destructive free radical your body produces, the one no enzyme can neutralise - and leaves everything else alone. This matters because high-dose antioxidants often disappoint: they hit indiscriminately, including the free radicals your body uses intentionally as signals. Hydrogen doesn't do that.

Beyond the antioxidant effect: hydrogen is the smallest, lightest molecule in existence. Small enough to pass straight through cell membranes, cross the blood-brain barrier, and reach the mitochondria - where your cells make energy, and where most oxidative damage builds up. Vitamin C and E can't get there. Hydrogen just walks in.

The magnesium that drives the reaction does double work: it powers the hydrogen release and remineralises the water you just cleaned out. You're not just adding hydrogen. You're putting back what filtration takes.

On what it actually feels like.

It's one of those changes that doesn't announce itself. It compounds quietly - the kind of shift you only notice looking back, once it's been consistent enough to see. Most people notice something between weeks three and six. Not a product rush. More like a baseline shifting.

I'm hydrated in a way that feels different. Fluid, like genuinely. Less I've drunk enough water and more the water is doing something.

The skin thing I didn't expect: it's calmer. Less reactive, less prone to flaring. After years of a barrier that needed constant managing - it's just quieter now.

Before you buy - a few things worth knowing.

• H2Tab isn't a commitment to start — Healf offers a free sample, one tablet, which is exactly the right way to try it
• Start with the unflavoured — cleaner to stack and easier to assess how it actually feels
• Drop one tablet into 350–470ml of water and drink immediately — hydrogen escapes fast, so timing matters
• Works out at £1 per tablet — less than a coffee, for something every cell in your body interacts with daily
• Most people notice a shift between weeks 3–6 of consistent use