Ep. 55 Why Your Hair Is Falling Out—and What to Do About It

Hey friend,

If you're shedding hair like crazy and your ponytail feels thinner by the day… this episode is for you.

🎧 Listen to: Why Your Hair Is Falling Out—and What to Do About It

Inside this episode:

• The 3 real reasons perimenopausal women lose hair (and it’s not just estrogen)
• What your doctor probably isn’t testing—and why it matters
• The nutrients your scalp is begging for
• The exact labs I recommend and how to interpret them

Because your hair isn’t failing you—it’s just asking for help.

💥 Listen now and start rebuilding from the inside out.

In health & hormone harmony,
Tracy Erin

Transcript

Speaker: 0:09

Welcome to the Balance Hormone Solution Podcast. If you're a woman 35 plus feeling exhausted, struggling to lose weight, and wondering where your libido went, this is for you. I am Tracy Aaron, a functional medicine practitioner who helps women balance their hormones naturally. Without prescriptions, guesswork, or trending Nonsense.'cause here's the truth, your symptoms aren't random. They're signals. And if you know how to listen, you can fix the root cause and start feeling like yourself again. If you're ready for real solutions, let's get to it.

0:50

Hair loss in perimenopause isn't just a vanity issue. It's a vital sign, and if you've ever stared at your shower drain, wondering if you're going bald. This episode is for you. So welcome to the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. I am your host, Tracy Aaron, a registered nurse and integrative health practitioner, and I'm here to help you stop surviving, surviving, and start thriving. So if you're tired of shedding more hair than a golden retriever, which I personally own, and I know how much they shed and being told that it's just aging. Today we are pulling back the curtain. So hair thinning, bald spots, breakage, shedding by the handful. It's heartbreaking and it's happening to so many women in perimenopause. But here's the truth, your hair is not the problem. It's the messenger. So today we're going to unpack the real root cause reasons your hair is thinning, what labs to run, and how to interpret them functionally. What to eat, what to supplement, and how to nourish your scalp from the inside out. So I've sat with women sobbing because they feel like they're watching their femininity disappear in the mirror. Hair loss hits deep, and I've been there too. Postpartum mid burnout, cortisol crashing, and it takes more than a shampoo or daily doses of collagen to fix it. It took listening to my body's signals. So here's the catcher. Your hair follows your hormones. When estrogen and progesterone drop, hair growth is gonna slow and shedding increases. And this is because estrogen promotes hair growth and it prolongs the growth phase of hair and progesterone helps block something called DHD. T, which is a hormone that shrinks the hair follicles and in perimenopause as these drop DHT can dominate, causing androgenic thing. Thinning. What does that mean? Androgenic meaning male. We all have male friends and some husbands who are bald, right? Or at least have very thinning hair as they grow older. So in perimenopause that DHT. Dominates and we get thinning just like men do. The thing to look out for would be to do a Dutch complete or a blood test. You'd want to know your numbers for estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, and DHT. So what we're gonna look for on these tests and in your results is do you have low estrogen progesterone and elevated DHT or testosterone? If that's the case, here's some supplement supports that really go a long way dim. Plus calcium. D. D Glucarate. These two supplements really help to clear estrogen safely. Salt palmetto really helps too. That blocks DHT activity and evening primrose oil is the perimenopause. Woman's best friend, it balances prostaglandins and it definitely supports your scalp. So, and here's a couple things that you can eat in order to improve this seeds like flax and pumpkin and sunflower seeds. I personally teach all my clients how to do seed cycling, where we're eating certain psych seeds, the first two weeks of our month and the of the cycle and different seeds the last two weeks of the cycle. And this makes a tremendous difference in things like. Mood and how our periods go. Also, cruciferous vegetables daily, and that is because not only do we need the fiber for our microbiome, but our liver loves broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables to help get spent ex estrogen out of the body properly so that it does not uptake and recycle. Also, zinc rich foods, things like pumpkin seeds, oysters, I love a good oyster. The second thing is that cortisol is a hair loss trigger, right? Because stress hormones reroute nutrients away from non-essential functions like hair. Remember that cortisol is your stress hormone and it is there to help you survive. Therefore, you don't need your hair for survival, and it's one of the first things to go when cortisol is high chronic stress. If it's high or means dysregulated, cortisol, right? That is going to create stress related shedding. Also, cortisol depletes, B vitamins, zinc, iron. These nutrients are essential for hair growth.

Speaker 5: 5:48

Perimenopause got you. Feeling like a hormonal hostage. Your period's unpredictable. Your sleep's trash, your mood's, a mind feel, and no one prepared you for this. Enter the Balanced hormone solution. My 90 day program for women, 35 plus who are done guessing and ready to feel like themselves again.'cause we test not guess. We detox, rebalance, and get your hormones and your life back in check.'cause you're not broken, you're just burned out. So let's fix that. Head to tracy erin wellness.com and let's get started.

6:22

Elevated cortisol triggers, blood sugar imbalances and inflammation. So how do we know if this is our trigger? Well the Dutch test, this is why I personally use it on every single client. Also, you could do just a four point salivary cortisol, but why not do the Dutch test and get it all at once? If you're gonna look at functional blood work, you could do fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1C, and insulin.'cause we're looking to see. How imbalanced is your blood sugar when it comes to supplements, things that really turn the need, move the needle on this would be adaptogens like ashwagandha, rhodiola, magnesium glycinate before bed, and a B complex with methylated B12 and folate. These are very, very calming and supportive to the adrenals. As far as nutrition goes, you know what I'm gonna say? We need a protein rich breakfast, at least 30 gram grams of protein. I will never stop shouting this from the root tops. Stable meals. Okay, no skipping, no fasting unless you're my client. We've talked about how to use that in an advanced way. Salted adrenal cocktails. Coconut water, sea salt, a little bit of lemon, lime, or an orange. Really, really wonderful. The adrenals need salt to function optimally. That whole low salt craze totally tanked women's hormones, so also you can't grow hair without the right nutrients. Why is that? It's because hair is made of protein, but it also relies on minerals. Thyroid function and a healthy gut. So iron deficiency is a leading cause of hair loss in women. Even if you're not anemic, we need to figure out what your iron levels are. Thyroid dysfunction slows the metabolism of hair follicles. Do you know the status of your thyroid? And no, I'm not talking about just TSH levels, low protein. Low calorie diets, definitely stall growth and increase hair shedding. So what tests would we run in order to check for this? Well, on a functional blood test, we wanna know what your ferritin levels are. We want your ferritin to be between 70 and a hundred. So what is yours? When we're looking at a thyroid panel, we're looking at more than just TSH. We want T three, T four free, T three, free T four, reverse T three, and also the two types of antibodies that let me know if your immune system is involved with the type of thyroid issue you're dealing with now. GI Map or a blue poof or gut health. These are big deals too, because absorption matters. You can be taking all the right nutrients all day every day, but if your gut is in bad shape, it's not going to absorb any of them. So what can we do for supplement support? Well, beef liver capsules or heme iron. If your ferritin is low, like under 70, these make a big difference. Collagen peptides and silica, and definitely thyroid support if it's needed based on labs. So when it comes to nutrition, we're looking at bone broth collagen, vitamin C. Vitamin C is a co-factor for collagen synthesis. So make sure if you're on that collagen bandwagon, which is so popular in the alternative or the natural health world right now, make sure you're getting vitamin C in your diet. Grass fed red meat. Two to three times per week. None of this telling me that you don't really eat red meat. It's time to change that two to three times per week minimum. Also, I want you to get sulfur rich foods, things like eggs and garlic and onion. Okay, so let's talk about your action steps when we are talking about root cause hair loss, here's a lab panel for you to look at. The Dutch complete. When we're talking about blood, I wanna see your ferritin, your C, B, C, your complete blood count, and your TIBC, which is an iron number, a full thyroid panel. I wanna see your insulin, your A1C, your cortisol, which is going to come back on your Dutch test. Okay? And then I want you to nourish your body with 30 grams of protein per meal, two cups of leafy greens plus cruciferous vegetables, one adrenal cocktail a day. One scoop of collagen plus some vitamin C, a minimum of 20 minutes of sunlight. I just gave you a perfect prescription for how to turn hair loss around. So here's the thing. Hair loss is never just about the hair. It's your body waving the white flag saying Help, I'm depleted. But here's the good news, once we fix the foundation, your hair can totally grow back better, stronger, shinier. And you're not broken. You're just hormonally misunderstood. So let's fix that starting today.

Speaker 3: 11:38

That's it for today's episode of the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. If this resonated, don't just listen. Do something about it. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you know another woman who's tired of feeling like a stranger in her own body. Send her this way for more support. Check out the show notes. I've got resources to help you get started. Just remember, your body isn't broken, you just need the right tools. See you next time.