14: The big 3 of hair loss

Hair loss isn’t a symptom that I’ve had to endure, but I have complete and utter empathy for anyone that has.

It’s devastating, and in my experience has a similar impact on a woman’s life as those struggling to conceive.

If you’re struggling with hair loss there are three steps that you need to go through:

What’s causing your hair loss? 

Firstly we want to make sure that it’s definitely PCOS that’s causing your hair loss.  I’ve worked with many women who thought that their PCOS was causing their hair loss, only to discover that they also had hypothyroidism and that was actually the main cause.  So I give you some tips on how to tell the difference.

Is it hypothyroidism?

If it’s hypothyroidism, then we need to know if it is pure Hypothyroidism or the autoimmune version Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Reason being, the treatments differ and if you have the autoimmune version, you may be at more risk of developing autoimmune alopecia.

What’s driving your high male (androgen) hormones?

If it’s PCOS, then what’s happening is your ‘male’ hormones (testosterone and DHEAS) are being converted into the more potent form, DHT which is then killing your hair follicles, making the strands fall out. So, as always, we need to find out why your body is making too much of these ‘male’ hormones. Is it:

• Insulin
• Adrenal
• Inflammation

Then, just like the last couple of episodes on acne, I also dive into some of the common medications and topical treatments for hair loss that you can talk to your doctor about, and what the pros and cons of those are.

Then we also dive into the research on some natural treatments for hair loss (which there is some promising research on too). 

As per the acne episodes, I’ve also compiled those natural treatments into a handy downloadable PDF for you too, so you don’t have to remember all the details.

P.S If you’ve said to yourself while listening to the podcast, “hot damn, that program sounds exactly what I need!”, here’s all the info.

As a quick summary, it’s an 8-week module program that we deliver to you over 12 weeks to make sure that you have time to implement it all. We start by identifying what’s likely contributing to your PCOS i.e. ‘root cause’  then we give you the most important changes you can make to what you eat, and how you live to fix that ‘root cause’.

Any questions? Flick us an email at hello@thepcosnutritionist.com, we’re more than happy to help.