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I lost 43 pounds on a GLP-1 in 9 months and put 51 back on myself, on purpose, in 5, and I would do it again tomorrow. I want to do the math out loud because people always think I am rounding for effect. I started at 214. I got down to 171. Then I went all the way back up to 222. So I did not just undo it. I ended up 8 pounds heavier than the day I gave myself the first shot. And I did that to myself on purpose, fully awake, knowing exactly what I was doing while I did it. I am 46. I have been on some kind of plan since I was 24. Weight Watchers three separate times. Keto for a year and a half. A trainer I paid $240 a month for two years who got me strong and did not move the scale one pound. I sat in a surgeon's office and got approved for the sleeve and then called and canceled two days before, because I could not stop thinking about the word permanent. Then the shot. And I know how this sounds, but the thing that got me was not the weight. It was that the noise stopped. There is a channel that runs in the back of your head all day about what you ate and what you are going to eat and whether you are allowed to have it. Mine had been on since high school. One Sunday morning I gave myself a shot, and about ten days later I noticed the house was quiet. I would have paid almost anything for that. And I did pay. I was not naive going in. I knew what I was signing up for. I paid $1,100 a month with a coupon. I threw up in the parking lot at work twice. There were four days where I could not be near anything that smelled like cooked meat. My face went hollow in a way my sister noticed before I did and did not have the manners not to mention. I lost muscle I am still trying to get back. My mother-in-law does not know and will never know. I told my whole office I cut out sugar. None of that made me quit. I had a list in my head of what I was willing to trade, and every one of those things was on it. Fair price, I thought. I would have paid it again. Around month six I started doing things I did not tell anybody about. I started getting up about twenty minutes before my husband. Not for any reason I could have explained out loud. I just wanted to be downstairs by myself first. I started changing my pillowcase every single morning before he was up. We have a Mexican place we go to and there is a booth in the middle with a light right over it, and I had always liked that booth, and I started asking for the corner instead. My husband thought I had gotten weird with the waitress. And I started taking a photo of myself in the same spot in our bathroom, standing the same way, in the same light. I took four of them over about three weeks. I did not look at them for a while. Then one night I did, and I put my phone face down on the counter and sat on the edge of the tub for a minute. I called the clinic three times over the next few months. The first time, a nurse told me it usually settles. The second time, a different nurse told me it usually settles. The third time I got a woman who sounded kind and busy at the same time, and she told me it usually settles down and to make sure I was getting my protein. Notice that nobody ever finished that sentence for me. Settles into what. Settles when. Nobody said. And I did not push, because I was 43 pounds down and I did not want to be the difficult patient. So I made the decision by myself, in my kitchen, on a Tuesday night. I quit. My hair was falling out. That is what all of it was. The early mornings, the pillowcase, the corner booth, the four photos. It was in the shower and it was on my shirt and it was in the sink and it was in the drain and I was pulling it off the back of the couch. I had thick hair my whole life. It was the one thing about my body that never gave me any trouble. And it was coming out and coming out and coming out and it did not stop. I quit the shot because it was the only thing I could think of to do It was the only lever anybody had put in my hand. Take away the cause and the problem goes away. That is not stupid. That is how everything else in your life works. The weight came back faster than I have ever seen weight come back. Nine months to take 43 pounds off. Five months to put 51 on. I went out to the garage and got the tote that says WINTER on the side in marker, which has not had winter clothes in it since 2019, and I did not have to dig, because I knew exactly which jeans were on top. And here is the part I still have trouble saying. It did not stop. Slower. But it did not stop. I gave back every pound and then some, and I stood in that same spot in that same bathroom in that same light, and it was still happening to me. I had paid the whole bill and gotten nothing. People ask why I say I would do it again, and I understand why that sounds insane. Because quitting is the only reason I found out. If I had stayed on and kept telling myself it usually settles, I would have spent another year being reasonable and patient while it kept going. Quitting is what made it undeniable. Quitting is what sent me to Dana. Dana has cut my hair for eleven years. She has had her hands on my head every six weeks for over a decade, which means she has better information about my head than any doctor I have ever seen. And when I told her I quit the shot and it was still happening, she did not act surprised. She said she had been waiting for me to bring it up. Then she told me the thing nobody at that clinic told me in three phone calls. Every hair on your head sits in a little sleeve under the skin. When you lose weight that fast, a lot of hairs get pushed into their resting stage all at once, and a few months later they all let go together. That is the flood. That is the shower and the pillowcase. And that one does have a clock on it. It empties the sleeves, the sleeves fill back in, and it works itself out on its own. That part is true. That is what those nurses were telling me. But a sleeve can also get narrower. And when it narrows, the hair that grows out of it comes in thinner. Then finer. Then it is barely anything. Then the sleeve closes and there is nothing left to fill. That one does not have a clock on it. Nothing about it is waiting to settle. Two different things started in me at the same time, and I had only been told about one of them. The flood is loud and it is temporary. The narrowing is quiet and it is not. What narrows the sleeve is DHT. It is a hormone every woman already makes, and when you drop fat that fast you also drop some of what was keeping it in check, so it goes to work on the follicles that were already sensitive to it. That is why my hair kept thinning after the weight came back. I took away the trigger. I never touched the thing the trigger woke up. Dana is the one who told me about Bloom & Bond. It is two plants. That is it. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto, and that is the entire label, which mattered to me because I wanted to be able to read the bottle and actually know what I was putting in my body. One slows down how much DHT gets made. The other one gets in the way of it grabbing onto the follicle. Two plants, two jobs. Saw palmetto is a scrubby little palm that grows wild all over Florida and people have used the berries for a very long time. The pumpkin seed oil is the good Austrian kind, the dark green stuff they have been pressing over there for hundreds of years. None of this is invented in a lab. That was a big part of it for me. I did not want another prescription. I did not want to put a chemical on my scalp every night for the rest of my life. Dana said there are only two things to check, because most of what her clients bring in fails on one of them. The oil has to be cold-pressed, because heat wrecks the part that does the work. And the saw palmetto has to be a real concentrated extract and not dried berry powder. She told me not to grab the cheap bottle off Amazon, because you are mostly paying for filler and you will decide the whole idea does not work when really you just bought a bad version of it. I took it for four weeks and nothing happened. I want to say that, because I almost stopped. Nothing happened and I told Dana nothing was happening, and she said give it the full stretch, hair does not move fast. Somewhere around week seven I was standing in the shower and I realized I had not looked down. That was the whole moment. I had gotten so used to checking the drain that not checking it was the thing I noticed. Now I do this thing where I run my hand down to the end and pull a little. I used to get a few strands every single time. I did it this morning and nothing came. My nails have also gotten ridiculous, which I did not sign up for and am not complaining about. I am back on the shot. I have been for a while now, and I take the softgels right alongside it. I am 168, which is lower than I ever got the first time around, and I put my hair up the other day and it actually felt like a ponytail again. That list I had in my head, the one where I decided what I was willing to trade. This was never on it. Nobody put it on there. It got added quietly, and it was the only thing on the whole invoice that does not come off when you stop paying. So if you are on it right now. If you are down 20 or 40 or 60 and it is working and the noise in your head is finally quiet. If you have started getting up a little earlier than everybody else, or standing a certain way in a certain light, or doing some small thing in the morning that you have not mentioned to your husband. You do not have to find out the way I found out. You do not have to hand back a single pound to learn whether quitting fixes it. I can tell you what quitting cost me and I can tell you what it fixed, and those are not the same number. Get ahead of the quiet one while you still have the loud one to warn you. https://thebloomandbond.com/products/new-pumpkin-seed-oil-softgels P.S. If I could go back and stand in my own kitchen on that Tuesday night, I would not tell myself the shot was fine or that it was all in my head. I would tell myself there are two things happening, and I am about to solve the wrong one.