A personal account of hormonal breakdown, grief, hair loss and recovery — and the discovery that changed everything. The most searched topic among women who fast, answered honestly.
I need to start with the context, because the hair loss did not happen in isolation. It happened inside a life that had just been cracked open.
I had lost my mum to cancer. I was a mum of three young boys. I was running a consulting business, carrying a family, trying to be everything to everyone — and I was overweight, exhausted, and quietly terrified about my own health for the first time in my life.
Grief does something interesting. It makes you stop performing wellness and start actually looking for it. I could no longer pretend that my health did not matter. I had watched what it looks like when a body breaks down. I had sat in hospitals, read medical literature in the middle of the night, watched my mum fight with everything she had.
I was not going to be the woman who waited until she was sick to start paying attention.
So I started. Hard.
The weight loss that nearly broke me
I threw myself into intermittent fasting. I read everything. I followed the protocols. I fasted daily — 16 hours, sometimes more. I exercised. I tracked. I was disciplined in the way that only a person who has been terrified of death and is furious at their own body can be.
And it worked — in one very specific sense. I lost 45 kilograms.
I am not going to pretend that was not extraordinary. It was. My body was changing. My energy was better. I felt, for the first time in years, like I was taking my health seriously.
And then the hair started going.
First in the shower — more than usual on my hands, more than usual on the tiles. Then on my pillow. Then my hairbrush. Then I could see it. Patches of thinning. A scalp visible in places it had not been visible before.
I panicked. I went to doctors. I had blood tests. I was told my thyroid was fine. I was told to consider that it might be stress. I was told, in one memorable appointment, that some women simply lose hair and this is ‘normal’.
Nobody connected it to the fasting. Nobody connected it to my hormones. Nobody asked about my cycle — which had, quietly, also stopped.
What was actually happening
When I eventually discovered Dr. Mindy Pelz’s work, I understood in about ten minutes what no medical professional had explained to me in months of appointments.
Estrogen is the hormone that tells hair follicles to grow. When estrogen drops — or when the body stops producing it at normal levels — the follicles receive the signal to let go. This is why women lose hair during menopause. It is also why women lose hair when they are over-fasting.
Here is the mechanism: chronic fasting raises cortisol. Elevated cortisol suppresses estrogen and progesterone production — because the body, in survival mode, does not prioritise reproduction. No estrogen means hair follicles stop getting the signal to grow. They enter a resting phase called telogen. Eventually, the hair in telogen falls out.
My cycle had stopped for the same reason. My body had decided, very sensibly, that this was not the right environment to maintain reproductive function. It was in survival mode.
“I was doing everything right by the standard wellness playbook. And my body was shutting down because that playbook was not written for female biology.”
The recovery
When I understood what had happened, I changed everything.
I became a certified Fast Like a Girl Coach. I learned the methodology. I began fasting in alignment with my cycle — longer fasts in the first half, shorter fasts or none at all in the days before my period. I ate nature’s carbohydrates at the right time instead of avoiding them. I stopped treating my body as a problem to be fixed and started treating it as an intelligence to be worked with.
My hair grew back.
My cycle returned.
My energy — which had been high but brittle — became genuinely sustainable.
And I sat with all of that, and I thought about how many women were doing exactly what I had done — pushing hard, following protocols, ignoring the signals, paying the price — and believing it was their fault.
It is not their fault. It is a knowledge gap. And it is completely closeable.
What I want you to know
If you are reading this because you are losing your hair and you fast — please do not stop reading here.
The answer is not to stop fasting. The answer is to fast like a woman. To understand your cycle, to work with your hormonal phases, to give your body what it needs when it needs it — and to stop following advice built for a body that is not yours.
I built Lunar Living partly for this reason. Not to turn everyone into a certified hormonal health coach — but to give every working woman the foundational knowledge that I had to find the hard way: after the grief, after the weight loss, after the hair loss, after the broken cycle, after the months of being told everything was fine.
You deserve to know this before you get sick. Not after.
→ Why women should not fast like men — the hormonal science
→ Cortisol: the root of most hormonal disruption
