But I eat really well, so why is my hair still falling out?

“But I Eat Really Well.” So Why Is My Hair Still Shedding?

There’s one sentence I hear over and over again when I start talking to people about the gut microbiome and its connection to hair:

“But I eat really well.”

And I understand why people say it.

We’ve been taught that if we eat well, take our vitamins, drink enough water and generally look after ourselves, then surely everything inside our body should be working properly.

But it’s not quite that simple.

You can eat an incredibly healthy diet and still have a body that’s struggling.

Because your gut microbiome isn’t affected by food alone.

Stress can affect it. Illness can affect it. Antibiotics can affect it. Certain medications can affect it. Hormonal changes can affect it. Inflammation can affect it.

And when that internal environment has been disrupted, simply eating a salad for lunch doesn’t necessarily put everything back together overnight.

Your Hair Has a Memory

This is the part I think we don’t talk about enough.

What you see happening to your hair today may be connected to what was happening in your body two or three months ago.

You get sick. You go through an extraordinarily stressful period. Your hormones change. You take a course of antibiotics. Your body experiences something significant.

Then life moves on.

A few months later, suddenly there’s more hair in the shower. More in your brush. Your ponytail feels smaller. Your part looks wider.

And naturally, you look at your hair and think:

What am I doing wrong with my hair?

Maybe that’s the wrong question.

Maybe the better question is:

What was happening inside my body a few months ago?

We’ve Been Looking at Hair Loss From the Outside In

I’ve been a hairdresser for more than 30 years.

I’ve spent my career looking at hair, touching hair, cutting it, styling it and understanding what we can — and cannot — change cosmetically.

And here’s the distinction I think is incredibly important.

There is absolutely external damage.

Years of tension from tight hairstyles or extensions can damage hair. Bleach, excessive heat, chemical processing and physical trauma can affect the condition of the hair and, in some circumstances, the follicle itself.

That isn’t what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about the person who says:

“Nothing has changed with what I do to my hair, so why is it suddenly falling out?”

For years, the beauty industry has overwhelmingly approached that person from the outside.

Another shampoo. Another serum. Another mask. Another topical treatment.

But cosmetically, we weren’t curing hair loss.

We were treating what we could see.

And eventually I became obsessed with a different question:

Why is the hair struggling in the first place?

Your Hair Is Part of Your Body

It sounds ridiculously obvious when you say it out loud.

Your hair doesn’t exist independently from the rest of you.

The follicle is living tissue. It depends on what is happening elsewhere in the body — including nutrition, hormones, immune signaling, circulation and the body’s ability to absorb and use nutrients.

And that’s where the gut became so interesting to me.

It isn’t simply:

“Am I eating enough good things?”

It’s also:

“Is my body in a position to actually use them?”

Those are two very different questions.

You can put beautiful ingredients into a system that has been under enormous stress, disrupted by illness or recovering from antibiotics, and that system may need time and support to rebalance.

That’s why “but I eat really well” doesn’t always tell the whole story.

Hair Can Be the Messenger

This is the conversation I want us to start having differently.

Instead of immediately declaring war on our scalp when our hair changes, perhaps we should become curious about what our hair might be telling us.

What happened three months ago?

Were you ill?

Were you under enormous stress?

Did you start or stop a medication?

Did your hormones change?

Did you take antibiotics?

Were you sleeping?

Were you actually absorbing what you were consuming?

Sometimes the thing we’re desperately trying to fix on the outside began somewhere completely different.

That realization changed the way I thought about hair — and ultimately, it was one of the ideas behind Burgeon Hair.

I didn’t want to create another product that pretended the rest of the body didn’t exist.

I wanted to approach hair from both directions: inside and outside.

Because beautiful hair may be what we see.

But the story behind it can start much deeper.

Laini Reeves
Celebrity Hairstylist & Founder, Burgeon Hai