In typical fashion, it’s the season to resolve, repair & re-evaluate our health plans for ourselves, but how many of you also do this for your hair?

Diets can help lose the weight gained over the festive period, but if you lose too much too quickly your hair will bear the brunt of this excessive weight loss, so here are a few tips to ensure your hair keeps healthy as you ‘yourself’ attain the goals you want.

Your hair needs everything!..Carbs, fats and most importantly protein, if you exclude these in any severe form of dieting your hair can suffer.

 

You can be a vegetarian or a vegan and still get all the proteins you need, but you have to ensure you get all the amino-acids your body needs every day as plant-based proteins are not as complete as animal-based ones. The most important to hair are the ‘Sulphur based amino acids’ (Cystine, Cysteine and Methionine) these are the things the hair really needs to grow to its optimum level.

If you look at your diet and think you are low in protein (the average person needs between 0.7-1.3g of protein per kg of body weight) you may need to rethink your diet or use a supplement (such as Hairjelly) to ensure your hair gets the proteins it needs to grow normally.
Don’t cut calories to the point of starvation, scientists have proved time and time again there is no such thing as a detox diet, by removing everything for several days and relying on exclusive ‘supplementation’ to the detriment of actual food, will make you lose muscle mass (as well as fat) but whilst it does this it will starve the things your body does not need of energy (such as your hair follicles).

 

Cutting calories to less than 1000 per day may cause a starvation mode and may trigger excessive hair shedding. There are loads of websites that will give you an indication of how many calories you need to maintain the weight you are at present, to safely reduce your weight, reduce this number by 500 per day.
Hair loss in the majority of cases can be either corrected or medicated against to maintain density, for this to happen you need to know ‘why’ it is happening, the bottle of ‘whatever’ or the supplements for ‘hair loss/hair growth’ are going to do you no good if you don’t know why your hair is thinning.

 

Visit your GP first, they can rule out many of the more serious issues such as anemia and hypothyroidism, but just because they said you are not ill, does not mean to say you are 100% well, hair is a very sensitive barometer of health and if you are low in particular vitamins or minerals this may not show as a ‘deficiency’ on your blood test results.

Genetic hair loss is not classed as an illness by the doctors and so you will get little help from the usual medical route. If you get the all clear from the GP, come and visit us (or another registered Trichologist) to work through the minor details of the issues and come to a more solid diagnosis for the issue.

 

I hope this helps some of you! we are always happy to answer general questions if we haven’t covered something in this post… (but cannot comment on specific cases until a consultation has been performed)

 

Iain & The Hairmedic Team.