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I started the shot in the fall and last week my husband texted me from his office to say he couldn't think straight after Saturday night. He is forty-three and a senior partner at a firm. He does not send texts like that. I am not going to pretend to be embarrassed. But I have to back up, because Saturday started with a cardigan and ended on the bathroom floor of the Four Seasons in Charleston, and the floor is the part you actually need to hear. I'm 41. Married 15 years. Two kids in middle school. And until last September, 22 years at war with my own body. I tried everything. Weight Watchers four times. Keto. Whole30. The fasting thing where you only eat between noon and eight. A trainer in town I drove to twice a week for two years and built a back I could see in the mirror but a number on the scale that wouldn't move. I went to one bariatric consult, scheduled the surgery, and canceled it three days before the date because I read a Reddit thread about people who threw up bile for the rest of their lives, and I couldn't. Nothing stuck. Or it would stick for a season, twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty pounds, the kind that gets you to ask for the photo at your sister's birthday, and then by Easter, gone. Plus three. The thing nobody who hasn't been here understands is that it isn't really about the body. It's about the radio. There was a radio in my head that had been playing since I was nineteen. What I'd eaten. What I was about to eat. What I should have eaten instead. What I was going to do tomorrow to make up for what I'd eaten today. It was the soundtrack of my entire adult life. I planned a wedding around it. I had two children with it. I built a career with it on in the background, twenty-four hours a day, like a station with no DJ that I couldn't turn off. In September, I asked my doctor about Wegovy. She prescribed it without lecturing me. I cried in the parking lot. Twenty-two years and someone had finally said yes to the easy thing. The first injection went into my left thigh on a Sunday night at 9:14pm. I know because I took a photo of the empty pen on my nightstand. I was pretty sure something was going to go wrong, the way every other thing had gone wrong, and I wanted a record. Three weeks in, I was in a meeting at work, and a coworker brought in a box of those black-and-white cookies, and I ate half of one and put the rest down on a napkin and didn't think about it again for the rest of the meeting. That was the day the radio stopped. It wasn't quieter. It wasn't a lower volume. It was OFF. There was silence inside my skull where there had been a station playing for twenty-two years. I cried in the bathroom of the office. I kept going back to check if it was still off. It was. By Christmas I was down nineteen pounds. By February I was down twenty-eight. The wedding ring my husband proposed with started spinning on my finger sometime around Valentine's Day, and I had to take it off before I lost it on a beach in Florida. I started doing this thing on Sunday mornings… I'd put on the same plain black tank top and the same gray leggings and stand in the same spot in our bedroom against the same wall and take a photo. Same morning, same light. I had a folder on my phone called "Journey. It got to thirty-one photos. And my husband…God, my husband. I won't pretend our marriage was bad. It wasn't. He's a good man. He'd been a good man through three miscarriages and my mother's funeral and eight years of me crying in the closet because I couldn't fit into a dress for someone's wedding. He never made me feel ugly. He's not that kind of man. But there is a difference between a man who loves you, and a man who watches you walk past the kitchen island. There is a difference between a man who reaches for you in bed, and a man who can't sleep because he's too aware of you in bed. There is a difference between being loved and being wanted. Around month five, my husband started watching me from the kitchen island. The backless dress had been in the back of my closet for twelve years. I bought it in 2013 at a Saks for three hundred and ten dollars on sale because I had a fantasy of wearing it to a black-tie thing with my husband. I never wore it to anything. By 2015 I couldn't zip it past my hips. In April I put it on for the first time in twelve years. It zipped. I'd booked Charleston for our anniversary. I packed the dress. I'm trying to slow down here because I want you to feel what I felt last Saturday night, walking into Hank's Seafood at seven o'clock in that dress, with my husband behind me, with his hand on the small of my back, and the way the host looked at me when I gave my name Like I was a person who had a right to be in a room that nice. The way my husband ordered for me without asking, the way he used to when we were dating in 2007 and we were both broke and in love and I didn't have a body I had to apologize for yet. We got back to the room at nine. He undressed me himself. The zipper. He'd never done that before, not in fifteen years. He always waited for me to do it. That night he didn't. I had to do my hair before bed. I always do. I take it out of whatever it's been in all day and brush it out and braid it loosely so I don't wake up with a knot. I went into the bathroom of the Four Seasons in Charleston, the marble bathroom with the heated floor and the towels that weighed nine pounds each, and I sat down at the vanity in my husband's robe and started brushing. The brush came out full. Not "more than usual." Full. A wad the size of a small mouse. I remember not breathing for a second. I remember reaching to the brush and pulling out the wad and holding it in my hand under the vanity light and turning it over because I needed to make sure it was actually mine. It was actually mine. I was just thinking…okay, get rid of it, throw it in the trash, do the rest of the brushing carefully, get into bed…when I looked up and saw my husband standing in the doorway behind me. He'd been there a while. I caught his face in the mirror before he had time to fix it. He'd known. He'd been seeing this for months. The hairs on the bathroom counter when I left for work. The wads in the shower drain. The strands on the back of his shirt after I'd hugged him. The thinning at the back of my head when I leaned over to load the dishwasher and he was sitting at the kitchen island looking up. He had been watching me for months and he had not said a single word, because he could see how happy I was, and he was going to let me have this if it killed him. He sat down on the edge of the tub. I sat down on the bathroom floor. We didn't talk for a long time. He didn't say "it'll grow back" because he isn't stupid and he doesn't lie to me. I didn't ask him "is it really that bad" because I'd just been holding it in my hand. What I finally said was, "How long have you known?" He said, "Since Easter." Easter was four months ago. This is the part I have to explain right, because if I get it wrong I'll sound like I'm being vain, and I am not being vain. I have spent twenty-two years trying not to look like a sick woman. I had three aunts who died of the big C disease in the same five-year stretch when I was in my twenties, and I watched them get thin in the wrong way, and I have spent two decades subconsciously associating "thinner" with "dying." Some part of me, somewhere, was protecting me from looking like the women in my family who didn't make it. The whole reason I could never lose the weight wasn't laziness. It was a quiet, lifelong refusal. And there I was, in the body I had wanted for twenty-two years, in a dress I'd waited twelve years to wear, on the bathroom floor of the nicest hotel I had ever been in, and the woman in the mirror was starting to look like my Aunt Carolyn six months before she died. The hair was the line. The body alone could be "she's been doing the work." The body plus the thinning hair was "something is wrong with her." Every woman who has ever lost weight on a GLP-1 and then started losing her hair on the same GLP-1 knows what I am talking about…the moment you stop being a success story and start being a cautionary tale. I sat on that bathroom floor for forty minutes trying to do the math. Quit the shot? I had already watched three women in my Wegovy group quit and gain it all back inside seven months. One of them gained twelve pounds in twenty-eight days. I had come too far to do that. Stay on the shot and lose the hair? Then I look sick. Then I look like the cautionary tale. Then my own husband can't pretend he isn't scared. I had become the woman in the binary I had been trying to avoid my entire adult life. Either the woman who stays fat or the woman who looks like she's dying. Pick one. I got home from Charleston and I went to war. Biotin. The big bottle from Costco. Three months. Nothing. Nutrafol. Twelve weeks. Two hundred and seventy-six dollars total. My scalp itched the entire time. Nothing. Viviscal. Then a different brand of marine collagen. Then a different brand of collagen-plus-keratin. Then the rosemary oil from the TikTok with four million views, which leaves a smell on your pillow that your husband will quietly mention. I went to a dermatologist. I'd waited eleven weeks for the appointment She looked at the top of my head for forty seconds and said, "It's telogen effluvium from the rapid weight loss. It'll grow back when your body stabilizes." She was already standing up to leave. I asked her if she was sure. She said, "Try Rogaine if it bothers you that much." I did not try Rogaine. I had read enough about Rogaine to know that you can't ever stop, and I was already on one drug I couldn't ever stop. I stopped checking the shower drain. My husband started cleaning it on Saturdays. He never said anything. That was the worst part. He stopped saying anything. I started avoiding the back-of-the-head photos. I asked the photographer at my friend's vow renewal in May to please only shoot from the front. I told my hairdresser I wanted to grow it out, and she didn't push back, which is how I knew she'd been seeing it too. I had given up. I was lying to myself that I'd made peace with it. I hadn't. I had just run out of energy to keep being upset. The Facebook group has eleven thousand women in it. I lurk in it more than I post. Most of it is people freaking out about plateaus or asking which dose to titrate to or comparing the brand pen to compounded. A woman named Renata had posted the back of her head. The "before" was three months in. The "after" was six months later. The "after" had hair. There were four hundred and twelve comments. I read every one of them at one in the morning, sitting in the closet of my own bedroom because I didn't want to wake up my husband. A woman named Julie, an actual nurse, not a wellness influencer, had written a comment that was long enough that someone had asked her to make it its own post. She mentioned a doctor named Patricia Sullivan and a thing about how GLP-1 hair loss isn't ONE thing. It's TWO things. And every product on the shelf is treating the wrong one. I screenshotted the comment. I went to bed. I didn't open the screenshot for three weeks. Three weeks later I was brushing my hair on a Sunday morning, taking my Journey photo, photo number forty-three, by then, and I noticed in the picture that the part on the side of my head looked, in the right light, like a road. Like a road through a forest. I went into the bathroom and threw up. That was the night I watched the Dr. Sullivan interview. I'm going to try to explain what she said the way she said it, because if I science it up you're going to glaze over the way I almost did, and you'd miss what saved me. GLP-1 hair loss is two things stacked. The first thing is the fast-weight-loss thing. Your body goes "wait, what?" and dumps a bunch of hair because rapid loss freaks it out. That's the part the dermatologist tells you about. That part actually does grow back when the loss slows down. That's the half-truth they hand you. But here's the half they don't. When you lose a lot of fat, and we ARE losing a lot of fat, you also lose the place where your body makes a big chunk of your estrogen. Fat tissue makes estrogen. That's just biology. Less fat tissue, less estrogen. Less estrogen, more DHT. (DHT is the hormone that shrinks hair follicles. It's the male-pattern-baldness hormone. Women have it too.) More DHT, more shrinking. Period. So the shot doesn't just shock your hair. It changes your hormones. And the hormones it changes are exactly the hormones that decide whether your hair lives or dies. The first half stops when your weight stabilizes. The second half does not stop. The second half just keeps going as long as you are on the shot. Which, for most of us, is forever. Sullivan said it like this: "Biotin doesn't touch DHT. Nothing in the supplement aisle of a CVS touches DHT. Most of what you've been buying is for the half that was going to grow back anyway." I sat on the floor of my closet listening to that and I felt twenty-six hundred dollars of failed bottles re-explain themselves to me. Then she told me what does work. Bloom & Bond. Two capsules a day. She said it the way a woman tells another woman where to find a good tailor. She'd been a doctor for twenty-three years, and she said this was what she had her own sister on. Forty-three, on Mounjaro, hasn't lost a strand. The formula is just two things. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto. Pumpkin seed oil is for the estrogen side. It mimics the estrogen activity your body lost when the fat tissue went down, which keeps the DHT from running wild now that the brake is gone. Saw palmetto is for the DHT side, directly. It blocks the enzyme that turns testosterone into DHT in the first place. So there's less of it around to attack your follicles to begin with. Sullivan said it has to be both. One for each pathway. If you take only one of them you're playing the same half-game I'd been playing with biotin. I ordered it before I finished the interview. I want to be honest about that. I didn't research it. I didn't comparison-shop. I had been losing for six months and I was so tired of losing. Week three, I noticed there was less on the pillow. Week six, my husband cleaned the shower drain on a Saturday and looked at me afterwards in a way I hadn't seen since before Charleston, and he didn't say anything because he didn't trust himself, but I knew. Week ten, I was brushing my daughter's hair before her piano recital and she looked up at me in the bathroom mirror and said, "Mom, your part is gone." Week fourteen, a woman in line at TJ Maxx asked me who does my color. Nobody had asked me who did my color in three years. I started laughing and she thought I was being weird. We're going back to Charleston for Memorial Day weekend. My cousin is getting married there. I packed the backless dress. My husband, who is forty-three years old and a senior partner at his firm and a grown man who does not get nervous about a hotel weekend, has been weird and giddy about this trip for two weeks. Last night he asked me if I still had the dress. I said yes. He said, "I was scared to ask if you still had the dress." He had been scared to ask. For ten months. Here is what I want you to understand if you are still reading. The shot did not give me back my body. The capsules did not give me back my hair. Neither one of those things happened on its own. What happened is, together, they gave me back the woman I have been picturing in my head since I was nineteen years old. Not just thinner. Not just with hair. Visible. Wanted. Walking into the room with my own husband behind me. The shot was draining the pool. The capsules were what kept the foundation from cracking when the water went down. So if you are four months in. If the scale is finally moving for the first time since you had kids. If your wedding ring spins. If the food noise is gone. If you've had to lie to your sister about how you're losing the weight. If you are still in the part where it's all good news. Your hair has six to nine months. Maybe less. The shot is doing what you hired it to do, and it is billing you in a currency that nobody warned you about. I'm telling you this because nobody told me. I'm telling you this because I sat on the bathroom floor of the Four Seasons last summer and I could not stop crying because I had finally, finally, finally gotten the body I had wanted my entire adult life, and I was about to lose the woman I was picturing inside it. You don't have to do that. Two capsules a day. Bloom & Bond. With your morning coffee. With the protein shake you're choking down at six AM. With whatever ritual you already have around the shot. Until one Sunday morning you take your Journey photo, photo number sixty-eight, photo number a hundred, and the part on the side of your head looks, in the right light, like a part. Not a road. And you don't have to choose between the body you have worked twenty-two years for and the woman you wanted to be inside it. Twenty-two years of dieting. Eight months of losing it. Six months of almost losing the only thing that made me look like myself. And one capsule. I would do it all again tomorrow. 👉 https://bloomandbonds.com/products/new-pumpkin-seed-oil-softgels