hair started shedding at month 4 and stopped at month 9. protein and patience.
Posting the full arc because every thread I found while it was happening was written by someone in the middle of it, which is the least reassuring possible moment.
Month 4: noticeable shedding, the kind where you see it in the shower drain and start counting. Month 6: worse. Month 7: plateau. Month 9: stopped. Month 14: visibly recovered, not quite baseline density.
What I changed: protein up to about 1.6g/kg, checked ferritin (it was 22, low-normal, supplemented), and stopped panicking. What I cannot tell you is which of those mattered, or whether it would have resolved on the same timeline regardless.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Ferritin at 22 is worth treating even though a lot of labs will flag it as normal, and the reason is that hair is one of the first things to notice suboptimal iron.
Mine was 9. I was eating around 1,100 calories a day and calling it discipline. A small appetite tanks iron quietly and nobody screens for it because nobody expects a well-fed person in a rich country to be iron deficient.
9 is grim. and yes — the mechanism is not the drug, it is the deficit, which is a much more actionable framing.
1.6g/kg minimum, front-loaded at breakfast, and the front-loading is the part people skip. When your appetite disappears by 3pm, anything you planned to eat in the evening does not happen.
Telogen effluvium after a significant metabolic shift is a well-described phenomenon and it is not specific to these drugs — rapid loss by any route does it. It is also self-limiting, which is the bit nobody in month 5 believes.
"anything you planned to eat in the evening does not happen" is the truest sentence about this whole experience.
which is why i cook in advance and eat the protein first. appetite suppression makes cooking hard and cooking badly makes protein targets impossible.
this is the practical version of the advice and it is more useful than the number.
Management flair is right. Posting the full arc rather than the middle of it is genuinely valuable and I wish more people did it — the archive is full of month-5 panic threads with no resolution attached.
the protein point generalises well beyond hair. under-eating protein during rapid loss costs you lean mass and you will not see that on a bathroom scale.
deficient at baseline, corrected, felt better, and almost certainly unrelated to the drug. still worth doing.
three interventions, no control, self-limiting condition. this post cannot support any conclusion.
the post says exactly that in the last sentence. what it can support is "this happened, on this timeline, and it ended", which is the thing i could not find anywhere at month 5.
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