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My nine-year-old drew what Wegovy was doing to me before I noticed. It came home in her backpack on a Tuesday. I'd been on Wegovy for seven months when I found it. Folded once. Stuck to the bottom of her green folder under a juice box that had leaked sometime during the week. Let me back up. I'm 41. I have been on every diet a woman can be on. Weight Watchers four times. Keto twice. The intermittent fasting one where you eat in a window. The one where you don't eat carbs after three. A nutritionist I paid eighty dollars a session for almost two years. A trainer named Megan who told me with a straight face that I "just didn't want it bad enough." In 2024 I sat in a bariatric surgeon's office and listened to him explain how he was going to reroute my intestines. I scheduled the consult. I canceled the consult. I scheduled it again. I canceled it again. My husband held me in the parking garage while I cried. I started Wegovy in September. Thirty-two pounds came off by April. The food noise, that constant background channel that had been playing in my head since I was twelve, went quiet for the first time in my adult life. My wedding ring started spinning on my finger. I pulled a pair of jeans out of the back of my closet that I'd been keeping "for emotional reasons" since 2017 and they fit. I sat on the closet floor and I didn't cry. I laughed. I was finally becoming the version of myself I'd been picturing in my head for two decades. I told my husband. I told one friend, Lena, who I knew would not make it about her. I did not tell my mother-in-law. I did not tell my sister, who has opinions. I did not tell anyone at work, when people asked I said I'd "cut out sugar" and started walking, which is the universal lie women on GLP-1s tell. I did not tell my daughter. She is nine. There was no version of that conversation that didn't end with her asking what the drug was for, and I was not going to be the mom who explained "for being smaller" to a fourth-grader. I hid the pen in the back of the freezer drawer behind a bag of frozen spinach my husband would never touch. I weighed myself every Sunday morning before my injection. I took a photo of myself in the same gray tank top in the same bathroom mirror every Sunday after my shower. I had a folder on my phone called Sundays that I scrolled through on bad days. I was watching myself. I was watching myself the way you watch a stove you forgot whether you turned off. The scale, the photo, the mirror, the jeans, the rings, the back of my arms, the line of my jaw. I had been doing this for seven months and nothing had snuck past me. Then I found the drawing. Her school had assigned a family project the week before. Draw a family member doing something they love. I didn't see the prompt because the worksheet stayed in her backpack until Tuesday I never saw what she drew before she turned it in. It came home in the graded folder along with a sticker and a note from her teacher that said beautiful, Sophia. I unfolded it on the kitchen island. She drew me at the kitchen sink. From behind. In a ponytail. Doing the dishes. there was a yellow plate in my hand and a kid's lunchbox on the counter to my right. She drew the coffee mug I use every morning. She drew the tile pattern on the backsplash. She drew the window above the sink with the yard outside and our neighbor's dog in the corner. She drew me from behind because that is how she sees me most. Standing at the sink, doing the thing I love. Which is being her mom in a kitchen. I almost cried. Then I saw it. The part. She'd drawn the part down the back of my head. And she'd drawn it wider than it should have been. She'd drawn the strip of scalp under it in a slightly lighter color than the hair on either side. She had drawn. without knowing she was drawing it, the thing I had not yet noticed in any Sunday photo, in any mirror, in any angle I had been checking obsessively for seven months. I went into my bathroom. I held my phone at arm's length above the back of my head and angled the bathroom mirror until I could see what the camera was seeing. I took the picture. I lowered the phone. I looked at the picture. She was right. She had been right for I don't know how long. I had been watching the front of myself. She had been watching the back. That night after she went to bed I sat on the bathroom floor and counted the hairs on my pillow. There were forty-seven. I counted the hairs on the bathmat. I counted the hairs in the shower drain I started a note on my phone called count and I logged the number every morning. For three weeks my mood was decided by the count. I told my husband I had a sinus infection so I could go to the doctor without him asking questions. My GP ran a full panel. Iron, ferritin, thyroid, B12, the works. Everything came back normal. She told me, very kindly, that this kind of shedding is "incredibly common in women in their forties" and is usually stress. She suggested magnesium before bed She suggested lighting candles. She suggested I "make space for myself." I nodded. I left with a printout about adaptogens. I did not tell her about the Wegovy. I did not tell her because the moment I did, I would become the kind of woman who would inject herself to be smaller, and I was not handing a stranger that information. Not for adaptogen advice. I went home and I Googled. I Googled until 2 a.m. for nine nights in a row I diagnosed myself with PCOS. I diagnosed myself with thyroid disease. I diagnosed myself with an autoimmune thing whose name I can no longer remember. I was on Reddit at three in the morning reading a thread by a woman who had been to two dermatologists, a PCP, a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, and two integrative medicine doctors, and had been told by one of them to go to TJ Maxx and buy candles. I read her post twice. I closed my laptop. I sat in the dark. That's when I understood the medical system was not going to help me with this. Lena was the one who told me about the trichologist. I had never heard the word trichologist before. I thought it was someone who did eyelash extensions. Dr. Reyna Patel has an office in a strip mall next to a juice place. She wore reading glasses on a chain. She asked me to sit down. She asked me, before anything else, what medications I was on. I told her. I told her the way you tell someone something you've been holding for a long time. The Wegovy. The seven months. The thirty-two pounds. The drawing. The count. The Sundays. All of it… She didn't react. She just wrote it down. Then she took a small camera attached to a metal handle, she called it a dermascope, and she ran it slowly across my scalp. I watched the live feed on her monitor. Magnified hundreds of times, my scalp looked like a forest after a fire. Some hair shafts were thick and dark. Others were thin, pale, growing out of follicles that had visibly shrunk. She turned to me. She said: There are two things happening to you. Not one. Two. She said the first was telogen effluvium, what my GP had told me. Rapid weight loss puts the body under stress. The body responds by pushing more hair into a resting phase. Two to four months later, that hair sheds all at once. This is real. This is temporary. This was what I was experiencing in volume. It would resolve. Then she said: That's not the part that worries me. She drew me a diagram on the back of an intake form. She told me about a hormone called DHT. She said DHT had been in my body my entire life. She said the reason I had not lost my hair to it before, the reason most women don't lose their hair until much later in life, is that estrogen is the shield. Estrogen sits around each follicle and physically blocks DHT from attaching to it. Then she said the thing I have not stopped thinking about. She said: Your fat cells produce and store a significant portion of your estrogen. When you lose fat rapidly, thirty-two pounds in seven months is rapid, you don't just lose weight. You lose stored estrogen. Quickly. The shield comes down. DHT, which had been kept off my follicles my entire life by estrogen I didn't know I was carrying, suddenly had access. It was attaching to the receptors. It was shrinking the follicles. It was producing, from those shrunken follicles, hair that was thinner and weaker than the hair before. And the part of my scalp where this was most visible, because it has the highest density of those receptors, was the part down the back of my head. The exact part my daughter had drawn. I cried in her chair. Not because of the diagnosis. Because somebody had finally looked. She told me that "wait it out" was wrong advice for the second problem. The shedding will slow. The follicle damage from DHT will not. Every week DHT goes unblocked, follicles continue to miniaturize. Miniaturized follicles do not always come back. The window for protecting them is open, but it doesn't stay open. She said when women on GLP-1s come into her office at month ten, twelve, fourteen, having waited patiently because their GP told them to, the damage they have to recover from is significantly worse. She said: You are early. You are very early. That's good. Then she told me what most women try, and why most of it doesn't work. Biotin doesn't block DHT. Collagen doesn't block DHT. Protein doesn't block DHT. Nutrafol is mostly biotin and saw palmetto at a sub-therapeutic dose. Minoxidil stimulates growth but does nothing about the hormone shrinking the follicle in the first place, she said it's like watering a plant while someone is pouring weed killer on the roots. The two things that do address it, she said, only work when used together. Pumpkin seed oil contains compounds called phytosterols that inhibit the enzyme that converts testosterone into DHT. Less enzyme activity, less new DHT being made. Clinical research shows up to a 40% increase in hair count over twenty-four weeks. But pumpkin seed oil only stops new DHT. It does nothing about the DHT already attached to the follicle right now. That's where saw palmetto comes in. Saw palmetto blocks the existing DHT from binding to the receptor. It occupies the site. The DHT can't attach. She said: Pumpkin seed oil turns down the factory. Saw palmetto locks the door. You need both. At dose. Together. She told me not to bother with the Amazon versions. Most pumpkin seed oil supplements are raw seed powder with a fraction of the phytosterol content of an actual extract. Most standalone saw palmetto is a prostate formula in a pink bottle, dosed for men. She said women on GLP-1s come into her office having spent four months on a stack of cheap supplements, seeing nothing change, and concluding that natural solutions don't work. She said: They do work. The formulation has to be right. She wrote two words on a Post-it. Bloom & Bond. She told me it was the only formulation she had found that combined both pumpkin seed oil at concentrated extract dose and saw palmetto calibrated for women, in one supplement. 2,000mg of concentrated PSO extract. Saw palmetto at a dose for follicle protection, not prostate. No biotin filler. No collagen padding. Just the two ingredients that address the actual problem. I ordered it from her parking lot. Four weeks in, my count went from forty-seven to twelve. Six weeks in, I pulled my hairbrush through my hair after a shower and there was almost nothing in it. I stood in the bathroom holding the brush for a long time. Eight weeks in, I took the Sunday back-of-head photo and I could see, along the part, the beginning of new hair. Short. Soft. Not yet long enough to lay flat. But there. Real. Three months in, my husband said something he hadn't said in a year. He said your hair looks good. He said it the way men say things when they've been noticing something for a while and finally decide it's safe to say it out loud. I have not taken the drawing off the fridge. It is going to live there for a long time. Possibly forever. My daughter walks past it every morning while she eats her cereal. She has no idea what it represents to me. She has no idea that the version of me she drew, from behind, with the wider part, was the version I was about to become and didn't know I was becoming. She drew the future I almost didn't get to interrupt. If I hadn't looked at that drawing twice, if I'd just smiled and stuck it on the fridge and gone to bed, here is what would have happened. The shedding would have slowed. I would have told myself the worst was over. Six months later my daughter would have drawn me again. Same kitchen. Same dishes. Same yellow plate. The part down the back of my head would have been wider. The strip of scalp would have been bigger. She would not have asked why because nine-year-olds don't ask why their mothers' bodies are changing. She would have just drawn it. And it would have been on the fridge. And I would have walked past it every morning while she ate her cereal. If you're reading this and you're on a GLP-1, Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro, Zepbound, any of them, please understand what I didn't understand until a woman in a strip mall office drew it for me on the back of an intake form. There are two things happening, not one. The first one stops on its own. The second one doesn't. If you are still in your first few months and your hair is still intact, start now. The window the trichologist talked about is open. Use it. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto, dual-action, at dose, before the damage starts. If you are at month four and the drain is starting to look wrong, start tonight. The shedding from telogen effluvium will resolve. The DHT damage compounding underneath it will not. If you are past the shedding, your weight has stabilized, and your hair has not come back the way you were told it would, that is the second problem. That is what is still happening. Nothing else is going to fix it because nothing else is touching the hormone that's actually causing it. 👉 https://bloomandbonds.com/products/new-pumpkin-seed-oil-softgels Bloom & Bond is what Dr. Patel recommended. It is what I take. It is what I would have wanted to know about the day I filled my Wegovy script, not the day my nine-year-old put a drawing in front of me that I could not unsee. And to my daughter, who isn't going to read this for a long time: You drew the part of me I couldn't see. The part that was getting wider every week. The part I was missing because I'd been checking the front of myself for seven months and you were the only one watching the back. I'm sorry it took you to make me look. I'm not going to take the drawing down. It's going to be on the fridge while you grow up, and one day you're going to ask why, and I'm going to tell you everything. For now, just keep drawing me at the sink. I'll keep showing up. I love you, kid.