The first time, I told myself everyone sheds. The second time, I counted. And one morning I stood there with the water running cold, holding a dark swirl of my own hair, doing the thing you do when you're deciding whether to be scared yet.

I stopped wearing it down. I started checking the back of my head with my phone camera.

Then one night my daughter was sitting behind me on the couch, playing with my hair the way she's done since she was five. And she stopped…

…Just for a second. Her hands went still.

She didn't say anything. That was worse.

And my face. I could see it happening. The hollows under my eyes. The way my face looked like it was losing its grip on itself.

I was fifty-two pounds lighter, and I looked worse than I had in years.

I thought I was broken. I thought my body was punishing me for the one thing that was finally going right.

And when I found out why… and how fast it could be fixed… I got angry. Because the answer was simple, it was sitting in published research the whole time, and not one person handed it to me…

So I'm handing it to you!

I found out why on a Tuesday, sometime after midnight.

My husband was asleep. I was in the bathroom with the fan on, parting my hair with my fingers under that awful light, looking at scalp where… it… shouldn’t be. You know?

So, I took my phone to the couch and started typing.

"Hair loss Wegovy normal"

"Ozempic hair falling out how long"

"Telogen effluvium GLP-1"

I didn't even know that last term until the internet taught it to me at 1am. There are whole forums, if you go looking. Thousands of women. All shedding. All told the same thing by the same doctors: it happens sometimes, it should settle down, let's keep an eye on it.

And then I found the study that made me put the phone down.

The Cleveland Clinic…

One in three women on these medications sheds significant amounts of hair. One in three. 33%.

And a Cambridge study from this February found that almost none of us get any guidance at all on what we're losing nutritionally while we lose all the weight.

We celebrate the number on the scale. But no doctor is checking out what's going on underneath it.

Well, here’s exactly what's underneath it. I'll explain it the way I finally understood it, because I'm not a doctor and neither are you.

The shot shuts off your appetite - and you lose fat. However in roughly 1/3 of women, every time you eat on the shot, virtually ALL nutrients go in to keeping you full and slowing digestion. This is what it was designed to do.

However, GLP-1s are designed to reduce hunger and slow blood sugar. Yet for 33% of women with blood sugar sensitivity, ALL nutrients get stripped to keep the meds working. This is why some of us lose our hair in clumps - and nothing seems to stop it. And others have no problems.

I had No answers. I couldn’t stop the shot, right?
Until I found this…

And here's the cruelest part, the part that explains why it feels like it comes out of nowhere. When a follicle gets cut off, the hair doesn't fall that day. It dies quietly and hangs on for six to eight weeks first.

The hair in my drain that morning had been decided back in the spring.

And whatever my body was rationing that night, while I sat on my couch reading, would fall around Labor Day.

That's the part that got me off the couch. Not the hair I'd lost. The hair that was being decided while I did nothing.

So I did what any desperate woman does. I bought things.

The biotin gummies with the mermaid on the bottle. Nothing. Because biotin was never what I was missing. That's gas in a car with no engine.