How Hormones Secretly Affect Your Hair
As if horrid zits and murderous mood swings werent enough, now we can thank those blasted hormones for messing up our hair as well. Turns out, hormone levels affect both the quality and quantity of hair, making it thin, brittle or lustreless during certain times. When? And how? Here you go.
Hair and hormones: Going on and off the pill
Popping the pill changes some womens hair, usually for the better. Normally, it makes strands luscious, shiny and voluminous. But go off the pill and there may be sudden hair loss, along with changes in texture.
What you can do: Consider all-over colour or highlights, which will plump up the hair cuticles and create instant volume. Plus, build body with a thickening shampoo and apply conditioner just to the ends, so locks dont become limp.
Hair and hormones: Thyroid troubles
Hair loss, in fact, is often the first sign of a thyroid disorder, since fluctuating levels of this hormone directly affect your strands growth cycle.
What you can do: The thyroid gland accumulates more toxins than any other organ, so an imbalance of this hormone can accelerate hair loss. Counter by switching to organic foods and non-toxic hair products wherever possible. Besides this, stock your diet with proteins and give your scalp a daily massage.
Hair and hormones: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
Hair and hormones: Stress saboteurs
What you can do: Taking a B-vitamin complex supplement and trying relaxation techniques could go a long way.
Hair and hormones: Menopause
Natural Ways To Balance Your Hormones
Hormones are chemical messengers that have profound effects on your mental, physical, and emotional health. For instance, they play a major role in controlling your appetite, weight, and mood.
Typically, your body produces the precise amount of each hormone needed for various processes to keep you healthy.
However, sedentary lifestyles and Western dietary patterns may affect your hormonal environment. In addition, levels of certain hormones decline with age, and some people experience a more dramatic decrease than others.
However, a nutritious diet and other healthy lifestyle habits may help improve your hormonal health and allow you to feel and perform your best.
Here are 10 natural ways to balance your hormones.
How To Treat Female Hair Loss
Whether your hair loss is caused by hormones or a factor such as diet, stress or weight loss, it is treatable.
The first step in treating hair loss is determining why its happening. If your hair looks and feels thinner than normal, the best approach is to talk to your healthcare provider about it. Your healthcare provider will be able to look at your hair and, based on your symptoms and health history, provide a diagnosis.
If your hair loss is hormonal, the most effective treatment options include spironolactone, saw palmetto and minoxidil. Weve listed these hair loss treatments below:
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Stopping Menopausal Hair Loss
Women Suffer From Hair Loss Too
young woman worried about hair loss
But its not just men who suffer from hair loss women can experience it too. For women, an underactive thyroid can be one of the factors contributing to hair loss, but in most cases, for both men and women, androgenic alopecia occurs because of a genetically determined shortening of anagen, a hairs growing phase, and a lengthening of the time between the shedding of a hair and the start of a new anagen phase.
About one-third of women experience hair loss at some time in their lives already struggling with hot flashes, as many as two-thirds suffer hair thinning and bald spots. Hair loss often has a greater impact on menopausal women than it does on men, because society is more accepting of men with thinning hair. A womans emotional wellbeing and quality of life can be severely affected due to alopecia.
Hair loss in women can be due to a hormonal imbalance called hypothyroidism, when the thyroids production of body-regulating hormones decreases, and which can be addressed with the application of suitable bioidentical hormones to replace the thyroid hormone that your body is no longer producing or is producing in diminished quantities.
- Feeling cold when other people do no
- Constipation
- More than usual menstrual bleeding
- High LDL or bad cholesterol, which can raise your risk for heart disease
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Making Lifestyle Changes To Balance Hormones
How To Stop Female Facial Hair Growth Using Diet And Nutrition
Posted by safiyaelle | May 31, 2015 | Health | 31
Its an embarrassing situation to be in and a lot of women are secretly battling with it daily. Facial hair is something that doesnt belong on women, but for many, it does.
If you are having issues with unwanted facial hair, youve likely tried or considered different remedies, like shaving, waxing or even laser hair removal.
But like with funk, you cant spray on more cologne to cover it up, thinking itll go away. You have to get to the root of the problem, which in that case would be to simply take a bath.
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How Hormone Replacement Therapy Can Stop And Reverse Hair Loss
Hair thinning is one of the most natural things that happens to the body. In a regular day, you lose 50 to 100 older hairs that are constantly being replaced by new hair. There are about 100,000 hairs growing out of your scalp at any given time.
But as you age, hair that is lost does not always get replaced by new hair growth.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, nearly half of all male and female Americans will begin showing signs of baldness by age 40.
How To Test Your Hormone Health
If you are concerned about your hormone health, you can have your hormone levels tested in the following ways:
- Saliva testing: Saliva testing measures your bodys hormones levels at the cellular level. A saliva test can measure your estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol and DHEA levels. When you provide and test multiple samples over time, your healthcare provider can formulate charting changes in hormones with saliva testing.
- Blood testing: This type of hormone test requires that your blood is collected at a lab and then measured for hormone levels. A blood test can measure free and total hormone levels, which saliva and urine testing cannot do.
- Urine testing: A urine hormone test requires that you collect every drop of urine for a 24-hour period. Then your urine is tested to identify each hormone that is present and at what levels on that particular day. This is the most extensive hormone health test because it measures your hormone levels throughout the entire day, instead of the levels for a moment in time, which is the case for blood and saliva tests.
- Follicle-stimulating hormone testing: This type of test is commonly used to measure the hormonal status of premenopausal women who are beginning to experience symptoms of menopause.
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Estrogen Increases The Amount Of Time That Hair Spends In The Growing Phase So When Estrogen Declines Hair Loses These Protective Effects
Estrogen increases the amount of time that hair spends in the growing phase, so when estrogen declines, hair loses these protective effects. Additionally, androgenic effects of testosterone can also be intensified where testosterones metabolite dihydrotestosterone can produce progressively weaker hair due to the follicles failure to thrive . When menopausal symptoms are present, a simple-to-collect saliva test can assess the levels of estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone, and help both patient and practitioner decide on the best therapeutic strategy.
PCOS: This is a common female endocrine disorder based on a cluster of symptoms, with hyperandrogenism taking center stage . In PCOS, the Alice in Wonderland equivalent reality of elevated androgens, women lose scalp hair, while simultaneously growing hair in places where men usually get it and where women certainly dont want it face, chest and back. Although there is no cure for PCOS, treatment is usually focused on managing symptoms. A laboratory workup is typically performed for saliva steroids and blood levels of HbA1c and fasting insulin.
What Is Female Pattern Baldness
Female pattern baldness also called androgenetic alopecia, is hair loss that specifically affects women. Its similar to male pattern baldness, except that women can lose their hair in a different pattern than men.
If youre experiencing female pattern baldness, youre not alone. According to the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology , this condition affects roughly 33 percent of all women who are at higher risk for the condition.
Hair loss in women is a normal process, especially as you age, with most women experiencing hair loss after menopause. More than half of women ages 65 and older will experience some degree of hair loss.
In female pattern baldness, the hairs growth phase slows down. It also takes longer for new hair to begin growing. Hair follicles shrink, leading the hair that does grow to be thinner and finer. This can result in hair that easily breaks.
Female pattern baldness is hereditary. Its also more common after menopause, so hormones are likely responsible. If you notice that youre losing hair, its important to talk with your doctor or a dermatologist. They will be able to determine if youre experiencing female pattern baldness or a different type of hair loss caused by other factors.
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How To Balance Hormones With Sleep
Restful sleep is foundational for overall health, but is also important when youre experiencing the symptoms of hormonal imbalance. Menopausal symptoms can include restless leg syndrome, hot flashes, night sweats, and breathing disorders, which can significantly impact sleep and quality of life.
A healthy sleep routine is the first place to start, so consider going to bed and waking at the same time each day, and sleeping in a dark, cold, and quiet environment. In addition, limit screen time before bed.
Additional tips for supporting healthy sleep for women with hormone imbalances include:
- Yoga: One 2019 randomized controlled trial found yoga three times per week over the course of 10 weeks reduced sleep disturbances and improved overall sleep quality in women with PMS [21
- Trusted SourcePubMedGo to source].
Live An Active Lifestyle
Exercise is important to overall health and fertility, as it keeps the body oxygenated by increasing circulation. It is also important for lowering excess body fat. Excess adipose tissue lowers insulin levels, and holds onto the hormone estrogen. A combination of excess estrogen, lowered insulin levels and elevated androgens can lead to thinning hair for women. This is common in women with classic PCOS.
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What To Do If You’re Losing Hair
Female hair loss doesn’t have to signal the end of your glossy locks you can make changes to help your hair retain its health.
Maintaining a healthy weight can help lower the androgen levels in your body. For example, exercising for just 30 minutes three times a week can help women with hormonal hair loss issues reduce their weight and, in turn, slow down hair loss. Exercising can also help reduce symptoms of menopause.
Diet plays a massive role in maintaining proper hormone levels. If you are chronically stressed, it may lead to nutritional deficiencies as your body cannot absorb nutrients, which may also cause hair loss. Finding healthy outlets for stress, such as yoga, meditation and journaling, can also help.
Remember, you’re not alone, a hormonal imbalance can affect anyone at any time. But, if related symptoms are giving you cause for concern, always contact your doctor for a diagnosis and treatment options. Then, follow up with a daily routine that includes a healthy diet, stress reduction techniques and shop hair wellness products that can help encourage thicker, fuller-looking hair.
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Hormone Healing Tip : Boost Hair Growth Hormones
In addition to reducing our DHT levels, you also want to boost your hair growth hormones. So for females, we want more estrogen and progesterone in order to grow hair. We also want to have healthy levels of T3, our active thyroid hormone. So getting your hormones in balance is incredibly important to growing healthy hair. One of the little known benefits of bio-identical hormone replacement therapy is the confidence that women gain as their hair and skin becomes much healthier and youthful, which is a result of their hormones being in balance. By increasing the growth hormones that are related to growing hair, and by getting more of those hormones to the hair follicle, this allows for a longer growth cycle and less dormant follicles, which means a healthier, fuller head of hair.
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Liberated Women Of The 60s And 70s Dont Speak Up
Moore said women are embarrassed to mention to their doctors that sex is painful, in part, because they think they are the only ones experiencing this symptom. According to Moore, of the 65 million women in the United States who are now going through menopause, about half, or 32.5 million, are experiencing painful sex.
We know that only about 24 percent of those women even talk to their doctor and get properly diagnosed. Of those women, only about 7 percent are being offered medical treatment. So there are an awful lot of women who have this condition, who havent had the conversation with their doctor, and have not received proper therapy, said Moore.
Women are mum on the subject with their friends, and even their sexual partners. We have a dont ask, dont tell situation The irony is, baby boomer women are going through menopause at a rate of about 5,000 per day in the United States and Canada. This is the generation of women who came of age in the 1960s and talked about everything. This is the group of women who ushered in the sexual revolution, and now many of these same women are among the millions of women who are experiencing painful sex due to menopause, and nobody is talking about it, said Moore.
How Are Hormones And Hair Loss Related
If you’re in your 30’s or older, you might have seen old pictures of yourself and wondered where ‘all that hair’ went. Well, your hormones probably have something to do with it.
As we grow older, our hormones also tend to wane and go off balance. When this happens, hair loss is almost inevitable.
With that said, lets take a look at some of the hormones we can blame for hair loss
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Sex Hormones Not Just For Reproduction
PREGNANCY: Remember all that hair that you didnt lose when you were pregnant? I loved my luxurious pregnancy hair so strong, thick and shiny. It wasnt me who had the pregnancy glow, it was my hair! Pregnancy increases the number of hair follicles in the anagen phase. The enhanced supply of estradiol and progesterone in pregnancy are particularly nurturing to hair, expanding the growth phase and preventing shedding. Little did I know that at about 3 months postpartum, when my hormones were trying to re-equilibrate themselves and adjust to a new normal, my hair would all come out in clumps, washing down the drain, falling out so fast it was a seeming miracle any of it actually remained attached to my head.
Hair changes in pregnancy are common however, every woman is different and therefore hair changes are all individual. If hair loss is experienced in the postpartum period, most women will experience a full recovery, although the process may be slow.
MENOPAUSE: Along those lines, when the levels of estradiol and progesterone fall in menopause, hot flashes and night sweats are not the only symptoms that seemingly appear out of nowhere. What many women are unaware of and unprepared for is the fact that they may also find themselves facing hair thinning. And just like the postpartum hair loss, it has everything to do with hormones. However, unlike the postpartum period, hair loss in menopause is irreversible, unless hormone replacement therapy is introduced.