Woohoo! New hair!

After years with female alopecia (thinning hair), at last, I seem to be winning that war. The smaller, younger hair you see below (click for the bigger image), did not exist a few weeks ago. My hairline now grows half an inch lower in my forehead too! My husband noticed too and he’s as delighted. If this good luck continues, I expect to have most of my lost hair back within a year or so.

So, how I did it:

1. I follow Paleo (I moved to Paleo-ketogenic 1.5 weeks ago). I eat lots of fermented foods (e.g. sauerkraut, home-made lactose-free probiotic goat yoghurt fermented for 24 hours, home-made goat kefir fermented for 36 hours), as much pastured offal as I can find in the market, home-made bone marrow broths (bones cooked for 12 hours), kombucha decaf tea, Greek Mountain Tea (one of the magical herbal teas for health), coconut oil, and a bit of raw & unfiltered local honey — among other “forgotten” foods by our civilization. I also take the iFlora multi-probiotic occasionally for my (now almost-cured) IBS-D.

2. I supplement with a lot of stuff (not all every day), mostly with: D3, Mg, K2, C, PQQ, Q10 Ubiquinol, 500 to 1000 mcg biotin (no more than that per day), and most importantly for hair: E d-tocotrienol. I bought the Dr Best one from Amazon because it was the only one with a respectable amount of tocotrienols in it, that didn’t also include a-tocophenols. These two are antagonists and they cancel each other out, so be careful what you buy. I use Cron-o-meter to estimate daily what vitamin I might be short on.

That’s it. It took 4 months of following this regimen diligently, and I got results! I fixed a lot of health issues this way, but regarding my thinning hair, the problem was hormonal, and it now slowly fixes itself back. If you’re losing hair because of genetic factors, I’d expect fewer results, but I believe that purely hormonal hair problems are reversible.

Update May 2012: After that initial bout of new hair, I got no new ones after that, but it’s possible that the Paleo-ketogenic diet I followed afterwards shot my thyroid, so I didn’t get any new hair.

Update June 2012: Scalp test now shows that my alopecia is “probably genetic”. I will be monitoring the situation and I’ll be updating here over time.