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…
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.