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Eighteen months on a GLP-1, and my ex-husband forgot his girlfriend's name in front of me. I'm not proud of how good that felt. It was a Saturday. Our son had a soccer game, the eight-thirty one, the one nobody wants. I got there early because I always get there early. Folding chair, coffee, the good sideline. Dan showed up at the twelve minute mark with her. He didn't see me at first. He was doing the thing he does, scanning for people he knows, hand on her back. Then he saw me. And he did a double take so hard I heard his neck complain. He walked over. He had to. We only talk at pickup because that's the arrangement he set up when he left, and he left with one line, which I'll get to. He said, "Wow, you look..." And nothing came. He just stood there with his mouth slightly open like the second half of the sentence was going to arrive on its own. Another dad walked past and said hey, and Dan turned to introduce her, and he said, "This is..." Nothing came for that one either. Her smile went a little strange. I gave him half a smile and got back to the sideline. Here's what he thinks he saw. He thinks he saw the weight. He's about half right. Rewind a year. I was six months into the shot and it was working the way it works, which is that the scale keeps telling you that you're winning. The scale was saying winning. My shower drain was saying something else. I want to be honest about this because nobody was honest with me about it. It didn't come in slowly. One morning I ran my hands through it in the shower and what came out did not look like a normal amount of anything. Then it was the pillow. Then it was my part, which I started checking in the car with the visor mirror because the light in there is unforgiving and I wanted the truth. Then it was the hair tie, which had gone from two loops to four. I was down forty pounds and I was crying in a parking lot about my hair. Dan watched that happen for about six weeks. He watched me cry. He watched me start wearing the bun. And then he sat me down on our own couch and gave me a speech he had clearly written somewhere first, because it had a structure to it. The part I remember is this. "I miss the woman I married. And babe, she had hair." The door didn't even slam when he left. It clicked. I want to tell you the next part properly because it's the part I'm least proud of and it's probably the part you need. I tried the gummies. The ones everyone's aunt is selling. Three months, nothing except expensive urine. I tried the rosemary oil. It smelled like a roast chicken and it washed straight off. I tried the scalp massager, the silk pillowcase, the shampoo with the ridiculous name. And then I did the thing I really don't tell people. I quit the shot. Six weeks off it, because somewhere in my head I had decided this was a trade and if I gave the weight back I'd get the hair back. The weight came back. The hair did not. So I sat there having lost both, and I picked up my phone and I called my ex-husband and I asked him if we could try again. And he said, "Call me when you're her again." That's the sentence. That's the one that's been living rent free in me ever since. I didn't cry after that call. Something else happened instead. Something harder. What changed it was my friend Renee, who is a doctor, and who caught me hiding in a bun at her kitchen table and would not let it go. She said, "Nobody warns the women on these shots. Not one of them gets warned." She explained it in about ninety seconds. When the weight drops fast, estrogen drops with it. Estrogen is part of what keeps DHT off your follicles. Estrogen goes down, DHT moves in, and the follicle starts shrinking on a timeline nobody mentions when they hand you the pen. Then she said the thing about the supplement aisle. She said, "Half that aisle is candy." And she wrote a name on a napkin. Bloom & Bond. Pumpkin seed oil, which works on DHT at the source rather than sitting on top of your scalp. Saw palmetto for what slips past it. Two ingredients doing one job, in a softgel, taken with the coffee I was already drinking. That's the whole protocol. There wasn't a system. There wasn't a routine. I want to be clear about that because I did not have the energy for a routine. Three weeks in, the shedding slowed. That was the first thing. Not growth. Just less coming out, which after that year felt like someone had turned the volume down on the panic. Around month three I got the baby hairs. A whole crown of them, standing straight up, ridiculous, and I stood in the bathroom and cried at those too. Month six I put it in a high ponytail for the first time since the couch conversation. I went back on the shot somewhere in there, at the right dose, with none of the dread. Which brings us back to the sideline. That night my phone lit up at 10:52 with his name on it. "Seeing you today did something. Maybe I was wrong." Well, sweetheart. I'm her again. And that's exactly why I'm not calling. Here's the part I actually want you to hear, and then I'll stop. If you're on the shot and it's working, you are probably somewhere in the window I was in and don't know it yet. Mine started at month six. Some women it's four. Some it's nine. There isn't a warning shot. There's a drain. You do not have to choose between the body you've worked for and the hair you've had your whole life. That choice is fake. I know because I took it, and I lost both. You don't have to lose eighteen months figuring that out. Bloom & Bond is ninety days, money back, no argument. Keep the shot. Keep your hair. Link below.