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Hair Loss on KETO (What is the Real Story?)
So you started the keto diet, you’re losing weight, things are going great, you’re getting used to your new diet, you’re enjoying all the fatty meat that you get to eat, enjoy now, but then your hair starts to fall out, WTF. That’s what this article is about. Hair loss on Keto (What’s the Real Story)
I want to reassure you and educate you so that you can stop worrying about the short-term thing and get on with improving your health if you know someone curious to try keto but has heard the terrible rumors out there that keto will make your hair fall out.
Therefore, they’re like, yeah, never mind, I kind of like my hair. Please consider sharing this article with them. You can share this on your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, email them, and say, hey, it’s OK, you can do keto.
Now, here’s the thing about hair loss. And this is well known in medical circles, in the medical literature. This has been known and reported for decades. OK, any stress will make your hair fall out, whether it’s a death in the family, whether you lost both of your jobs, you got a divorce, you had surgery, you had a child, or you’re starting to lose a substantial amount of weight. Any of those things will cause this temporary hair loss that you may be experiencing right now.
Corporate Food (Lies For Hair loss on Keto)
There are two reasons that you hear so much about hair loss with keto. Number one, so many people have fantastic weight loss success with the ketogenic way of eating. You hear that they’re not hungry all the time. They’re not starving. And so they’re able to sustain this way of eating, and they’re losing substantial amounts of weight. Because when you eat a ketogenic diet full of natural whole one ingredient foods, you don’t buy all the cardboard boxes of crap in the middle of the store anymore.
You buy real food, and ample food doesn’t make nearly as much profit off the grocery’s outer aisle as it does of those metal shelves. Hint that’s why they put that stuff in the middle of the store. So Corporate food has tasked their mouthpiece: television news, television shows, magazine articles, radio ads, to say that keto causes’ hair loss. Therefore, it must be unhealthy. What they’re not telling you is, is that any doctor who’s ever dealt with substantial amounts of weight loss or potent stressors in a patient’s life knows that this is known. This is called Telogen effluvium. And I’m going to talk about the stages of hair growth, development, transition, and then resting and then falling out here.
Triggers of Hair Loss On Keto
But any doctor knows this. If you lose a ton of weight after bariatric surgery, you’re going to lose hair. Also, when you lose weight after you do the starvation metaphase diet, you’re going to lose hair; When you lose a lot of weight doing the HCG diet and the starvation that goes along with that, you’re going to lose a lot of hair. Hair loss is well known. If you don’t believe what I’m saying, you can Google bariatric surgery, hair loss, Medifast diet, hair loss, or just weight loss, hair loss. And you’ll see that there are thousands and thousands of articles on bariatric surgeons’ websites. They say, oh, you’re going to lose some hair.
Up to 40 or 50 percent of people lose a substantial amount of hair, but it’ll all grow back. This is not some new thing with the keto diet. This is not some secret, mysterious thing that the keto diet does. When you lose a substantial amount of body weight, your body interprets that as a stressful situation. Your hair is the least useful of the protein and energy that your body spins.
Hair Regrowth
If all your hair fell out today, you could still live and be just fine, although you wouldn’t like that. My point is your body will reject that protein when it perceives that it’s in a stressful situation. Whether that’s postpartum or post-op or post-starting any substantial weight loss diet, your body will interpret that as stress, and it’s going to stop putting all the energy into hair growth and stop putting all the protein into the hair.
It’s going to use that energy and protein in other places. So it kind of causes hair growth, and you’ll understand why hair loss happens here. And second, when I go through the stages, there are either three or four stages. Herge Life-cycle, depending on which expert you read.
Phases of Hair growth
Antigen Phase
The first phase is the Antigen phase, and this is roughly what you could think of this as the growth phase. This phase can last for years, and it is happening right now; if you went and looked in the mirror, 85 to 90 percent of the hair on your head right now is in the antigen or growth phase.
Catagen Phase
OK, next is the Catagen Phase. And this is kind of a transition where the hair follicle starts to shrink, and the hair growth slows down, you may start to notice your hair takes longer to grow, and that’s a very short phase.
Teligent Phase
Then you enter the Teligent phase, the resting phase; anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the hairs on your head right now are in Teligent or the resting phase. And then some authorities talk about a difficult phase, and some don’t. But that just that’s just the phase where your hair falls out.
Initial Stress of Weight Loss.
So during the stress of weight loss, the problematic step comes quicker, so the tools phase, which is usually months long, the exciting phase, shortens down considerably, so you can lose those. Remember, there’s 10 to 15 percent of your hair in the Teligent phase at any given time.
You can lose that hair if your body perceives a stressful situation because when you’re losing weight, think about it. Your body doesn’t know what’s going on. It doesn’t know if there’s a famine. It doesn’t know if you fell down a well, and you can’t get out. But it’s not going to waste energy and protein growing hair if you’re in a life or death situation.
So as you are enjoying the substantial weight loss that you’re going to experience on a ketogenic diet for the first one to three months, you’re going to have some Teligent effluvium or some early hair loss of hair that was in the resting phase.
Temporary Hair Loss
Hair loss is temporary. There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with the keto diet. If you had lost this amount of weight on the Weight Watchers diet, you probably never did. You would have hair loss as well. This hair loss is more noticeable, it happens to a greater degree in some people than in others. Typically, this is not nearly as noticeable in men who are doing the keto diet.
More Noticeable In Women
Usually, it’s more noticeable in women, and we’re not sure if that’s a hormonal difference or if it’s just that women pay more attention to the hair on their head and the hair that shows up on their hairbrush and in the shower drain, we don’t know. But some people will go, keto, and they don’t lose much hair at all. Perceivable other people go on keto, and they’ll lose up to 15 percent of their hair temporarily. So take a deep breath and relax. You are not going to go bald. That’s not going to happen. Hair loss that you experience on keto is not permanent.
Eat Lots Of Protein
Indeed, if you eat a ketogenic diet full of fatty meat, whether that’s seafood, poultry, or red meat, and you’re eating some veg. You’re getting all your vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids; you’re going to regrow a fantastic, glorious head of hair, I promise. That is unless you’re on a medication that can lead to hair loss. As you transition into the ketogenic way of eating, make sure you’re eating plenty of protein. I don’t care if you get this from seafood, from mollusks, from shellfish, from poultry, from wild game, from red meat protein.
It would be best if you had lots of protein. Don’t be afraid of protein proteins. Not bad for your kidneys. Just relax, eat the proper human diet, which is lots of fatty meat and maybe a little of veg. Human hair, on average, grows about one-half inch per month. So it’s only going to take a few months on your nutrient-dense ketogenic diet to regrow the hair that you’ve always dreamed about.