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I started a GLP-1 in 2015. I was the first prescription my doctor ever wrote for one. Neither of us knew what we were walking into. It was a daily shot back then. Every morning, not once a week. My pharmacist had to call someone to ask how to store it. She kept apologizing while she was on hold. I was 43. I had been trying to lose the same 60 pounds since my second kid was born. There was no subreddit. No group chat. No videos of women my age showing you where to inject. f you wanted to know something, you read the paperwork in the box, and if it wasn't in the box, you didn't know it. My insurance denied me twice. The first appeal I wrote by hand. The second one I got right. And there was the pharmacy counter, where a tech once said the price out loud, twice, loud enough for the woman behind me to hear it. I still remember what she was wearing. That was what being early cost. Not the money. The being alone with it. So I did what I always do when I'm alone with something. I researched it until I couldn't research it anymore. I kept a notebook. A green one, the kind with the wire spiral that catches on everything in your bag. And in the front of it I made a list of every single thing this drug might do to me, so that nothing could happen to me that I hadn't already agreed to. ➡️ Nausea. ➡️ Constipation. ➡️ The sulfur burps nobody believes until they have them. ➡️ The gallbladder thing. ➡️ The loose skin. ➡️ The muscle you lose along with the fat if you aren't careful, which is why I forced down 90 grams of protein a day I didn't want. Every single one of them showed up. And I handled every single one, because I had signed up for them. I had written them down in my own handwriting. That was the deal I made and I was fine with the deal. I lost 68 pounds. Then, somewhere around month eight, I started finding hair. Not a lot at first. On the bathroom counter. On the back of my black cardigan, which is how I noticed at all. It wasn't on the list. I went back to the green notebook and checked, because I genuinely thought I must have written it down and forgotten. It wasn't there. It wasn't in the paperwork in the box either. I checked that too. It was the only thing that happened to me that I had not agreed to. So I went to my doctor. The one who'd written the first prescription. And she told me it was telogen effluvium, that it happens after rapid weight loss, that it's temporary, and that it grows back. Then I went to a dermatologist, who told me the same thing. Then, because I did not love the answer, I paid out of pocket to see an endocrinologist, who told me the same thing again. Telogen effluvium. Temporary. Be patient. Give it six to nine months. Three people. Three offices. The same sentence. And here is the thing I need you to understand, because it's why I waited: they were not being careless with me. They had been right about everything else. They were right about the nausea, right about the gallbladder, right about the protein. Every prediction those women made about my body had come true. So when they said be patient, I was patient. I had been patient about everything else. I waited nine months. It did not grow back. I waited past that, the way you do, telling yourself you'll give it one more season. By the time I stopped telling myself that, my part had gotten wide enough that I'd changed where I put it. Which is a thing you do quietly, without deciding to, and then one day you notice you've been doing it for a year. What finally got me an actual answer wasn't a doctor here. I had worked with a woman named Annika years before. She'd moved to Sweden with her husband and gone back to school at 38, and by then she was three years into a PhD in dermatology. Hair. That was the whole thing she studied. Hair. I sent her a long email I was embarrassed about. She called me the next morning. She said yes, it's telogen effluvium. Everyone had that part right. And then she said the part nobody here had said to me. Telogen effluvium is temporary. But temporary doesn't mean it goes away on a schedule. It means it stops when the thing that caused it stops. The thing that caused mine was the fat coming off my body. So mine would stop when the fat came back. That was the whole sentence. That was what "it grows back" had actually meant the entire time. Nobody had finished it. Then she explained the part I had to hear three times before it stuck, so I'll say it the way she said it to me. Your body makes a hormone called DHT. Everyone's does. It isn't new and it isn't a disease. What DHT does is shrink hair follicles. Slowly. A little smaller each cycle, until the hair coming out of them is so fine you can't really call it hair. Most women never notice, because estrogen sits in front of the follicle and keeps DHT off it. Like a screen door. And here's the part that stopped me cold. Body fat makes estrogen. Not all of it, but a real amount of it. That fat I hated, that I'd spent twenty years trying to get rid of, had been quietly making the thing that was protecting my hair. So when the fat left, some of that estrogen left with it. The screen door came off. I was never bringing that fat back. Not for anything. So there was no month where the shedding was going to end on its own, because the only thing that would end it was the one thing I would never do. And underneath all that shedding I was being patient about, the screen door was off, and the follicles were getting smaller. That part doesn't wait for you to make up your mind. Annika told me about women who did go back. Who came off the medication, let the weight return, and kept losing hair anyway. Because by the time they got there, it had already turned into the other kind. The kind that doesn't come back with the weight. It was never really about the weight. It was about how long you waited. Which means every month I spent being patient was a month I was losing something I wasn't going to get back. Being patient was the single worst thing I did in ten years on this medication. It was never something to wait out. It was something to defend against. From the first shot. Annika told me what she'd want her own mother taking, and it's Bloom & Bond, which is what I've taken every morning since. It's two things, and she was firm that they have to be together. Pumpkin Seed Oil & Saw Palmetto. The first one's job is to slow down how much DHT your body makes in the first place. That's pumpkin seed oil. Cold-pressed, 2,000 milligrams, which is more than any bottle I could find in a store. The second one's job is to keep DHT off the follicle, standing in for the estrogen that left with the weight. That's saw palmetto, as a real extract, 200 milligrams. One does nothing much without the other. That was the whole point she kept making. I want to be honest about what I tried before that, because I know you'll try them too. Biotin. I took it for a year. Biotin helps you if you're deficient in biotin, and almost nobody is. Collagen, which my hairdresser swore by, and which does nothing about DHT at all. Minoxidil, which I did use, and which I want to be careful about. It widens the blood vessels at the scalp. That's what it does. It doesn't touch the reason the follicles are shrinking, and if you stop it, you go back to wherever you would have been. I didn't want one more thing I could never stop taking. None of them were scams. They were just all answers to a shedding problem. I didn't have a shedding problem. I had a screen door problem. Here's what I want you to picture, because you're standing where I was standing. Two years from now you're the same size you are today. The shot worked. You kept it. You're in a fitting room somewhere and the light in there is bad the way it always is, and you look up and you're just looking at your face, not at your part. You take a picture and you don't check the top of your head first. You didn't win anything back. You just never lost it. That's the whole thing. That's all I wanted. I was the first prescription my doctor ever wrote, and I found this out four years too late, and I have written this out for you so you don't have to. You have something I didn't have. You have somebody who already went and looked. If you're on a GLP-1 and you still have your hair, this is the part where you protect it, not the part where you wait and see, start Bloom & Bond today. And if you've already started finding it on your cardigan, it's not too late, it's just not something to be patient about anymore. They give you 90 days. If you don't feel a difference, they take it back, no questions. I only wish somebody had handed me a link in 2015. https://trybloomandbond.com/products/pumpkin-seed-oil-softgels-home