do you believe your dietary approach only stops balding or can even reverse several norwoods? Did you regrow a significant amount of hair yourself or just maintain?
It's difficult to answer this question because I never had enough time to allow further improvement before screwing up my entire ecosystem again with finasteride. Let me give you a little information about what my hair loss was like before I ever began using finasteride and I'll explain why this is important later.
I started
very aggressively losing hair between the age of 16-17. My skin has generally always been irritated and red even though it improved a little as I went into my 20s. My scalp and forehead was also very irritated and itchy... almost kind of a burning sensation at times. Now, let's fast forward to me recovering from finasteride. So, what's actually happening during this recovery is that my body is gradually regaining its ability to properly express the genes that encode for the 5AR enzymes. And as this improves, these newly synthesized 5AR enzymes begin drawing from the pool of steroids your body has to offer. This means that you temporarily end up with lower than ideal concentrations of testosterone and estrogens (among other steroids, obviously). Keep in mind, at this stage, your body is still generally synthesizing lower than ideal levels of steroids and your expression of aromatase and estrogen receptors is also lowered as well.. and this is due to the effects that finasteride has caused.
So, anyway, 5AR starts drawing away 5a-reducible steroids (like testosterone, androstenedione, etc.) and there is now less available to be aromatized. This will start to bring back symptoms of itchy and irritated skin as the hypothalamus begins to command an increase in steroid synthesis. As steroid synthesis grows these symptoms become a little worse. However, these symptoms should improve to a certain extent because the hypothalamus also begins to upregulate aromatase and estrogen receptor expression.. and this is due to the increased activation of the androgen receptor that is occurring due to its high affinity for DHT (of which tissues are now making much higher levels).
So, this, in essence, is exactly what I experienced. I started feeling incredible, cognitively and physically... I started growing new facial hair in areas that were somewhat barren, my voice became much deeper, and my skin became more like it was before I began using finasteride. I was more sensitive, it was more itchy, kind of pinkish and irritated most of the time and I started experiencing accelerated shedding of hair. This is exactly what I was expecting to happen... that everything would kind of just go back to the way it was before finasteride and that I would just have to live with it. And I was actually ok with this because of how amazing I had felt.
What I did not expect was for things to actually continue improving. Around 3 weeks later, my skin started producing a very thick oil, but it didn't look nasty and greasy... it actually looked very matte and waxy and it looked incredible. I also had a more youthful skin tone (maybe reddish-orange glow from better blood flow?) and the itchiness and irritation in my skin and scalp went away and ALL shedding ceased. I couldn't even get hair to come out from pulling on it. What did
not change was the thickness of the hair shaft. The hair shaft became slightly finer... closer to what is has always been for me naturally. But the hair wasn't falling out at all and that's something you can work with. If the hair isn't falling out, that means when new growth cycles start, the density of hair at any given moment will begin to increase.
Now, the problem was: I didn't just want my hair to grow back. I wanted my hair shaft to be thicker and I wanted to continue experimenting with 5AR inhibitors to see if I could come up with a way to localize the effects to the scalp and maybe get the best of both worlds. I foolishly assumed that if things didn't work out, that I would likely suffer some sides for a few months, but I would be able to recover more quickly because I was using much smaller doses.. microdoses. Finasteride is incredibly potent, though, and it didn't matter if I used 0.01mg or 1mg. It wrecked me just as hard.
So, back to your original question.. it's kind of difficult to answer that question because I barely gave myself a month after all of these amazing changes before I started messing around with finasteride again.
do you believe your dietary approach only stops balding or can even reverse several norwoods? Did you regrow a significant amount of hair yourself or just maintain?
I believe it can and when I'm fully recovered from finasteride again, I'll keep you up to date on improvements. However, I will tell you why I think this is possible and I'll answer the other questions you asked along with that explanation.
do you feel you have adequate steroid production on just raw veggies, fruit nuts?
At the moment, my steroid production is already insufficient due to finasteride, but it's still much better than it would be with a diet heavy in meats, dairy, and grains. And I have another interesting story about what happened when I recovered from finasteride related to this, but, in short, when I fully recovered my 5AR functionality, I had far more than adequate steroid production.. it was well beyond abundant. After reaching recovery, I remember a day waking up and looking in the mirror and seeing that I had increased muscularity, vascularity, and muscular volume/hydration without having done anything at all. I hadn't been doing any weight training or any type of exercise because it's kind of an act in futility to workout when your steroid synthesis is impaired due to finasteride. I also developed an intense need to be physically active after that. Many people struggle with being motivated to exercise (and while screwed up on finasteride, myself included), but I didn't actually need any motivation... it was really more of a necessity.. I would actually feel a certain level of anxiety without it and it made it more difficult for me to focus on thing that required me to sit still.. like staring a computer. But, I wasn't bothered by this because I felt incredible.
So, this question actually converges upon what I believe is actually the heart of what causes hair loss and I'll use myself as an example for what I'm going to explain:
What I think is actually happening.. and I believe this is for most men that suffer male pattern baldness, but it obviously occurs in varying degree (some experience early and aggressive, other more mild and later in life).. is that when you're younger you're obviously producing higher levels of steroids. If you are like me, you naturally have very low levels of aromatase and estrogen receptor expression. Now, due to a variety of environmental, dietary, and lifestyle habits, your steroid synthesis begins to lower as the body protects itself from steroids that may be produced in excess due to these habits. Your enzymatic profile also begins adjusting to help facilitate the protection of your body, upregulating certain enzymes maybe to create more of a certain steroids and endogenous chemicals to deal with stress and inflammation, as well as downregulating certain enzymes for which their products are maybe starting to be overproduced and threaten the overall well-being of your organism. Right?... this is what epigenetics is about.. you encounter harsh environments or you have poor dietary habits and your body alters its epigenome to handle these changes as best as it can to help you survive as long as possible with what it's been dealt. So, for someone like me (that already has naturally low levels of aromatase expression and likely, estrogen receptor expression), the little amount of estrogenic activity I was getting as a teenager before hair loss started was barely enough to keep my hair from aggressively falling out. And when my body began to lower its steroid synthesis
and/or increase its 5alpha-reduction of aromatizable steroids (perhaps, as a reaction to handle chronic inflammation), it was no longer capable of producing enough intrafollicular estrogens to sustain the hair growth cycle properly. An interesting side note I'll add is that before my hair actually started falling out during my teenage years, the quality of my hair began to decline well in advance.. it got dry, wispy, and kind of curly.. just not healthy looking. When it finally reached a certain threshold of lowered estrogenic activation, that's when it began to shed.
Now, this is not the same for everyone, but it is some variation of this same problem. In my case, my naturally low expression of aromatase/estrogen receptors means that my body needs to deliver its peak level of steroid synthesis in order to be able to provide a sufficient level of estrogenic activation to satisfy the requirements of maintaining a healthy hair cycle. Compare this to someone that doesn't experience hair loss despite eating absolute trash. They likely have much higher expressions of aromatase and estrogen receptors and their lowered steroid synthesis has relatively little effect on their abundantly sufficient supply of estrogenic activity in the scalp. On the flip side, they are more like to gain weight very easily due to their ability to produce higher estrogenic stimulation. They may also be more susceptible to conditions like gynecomastia. In my case, I couldn't become obese if I tried, nor am I able to induce gynecomastia.
So, doing anything that removes inflammatory burden from your body and causes it to operate at its highest level is going to:
1. increase total steroid synthesis
2. decrease unnecessary metabolism of steroids which was previously necessary to deal with an increased inflammatory burden brought about by poor environment/diet/lifestyle
3. increase metabolism of steroids that was reduced previously as a reaction to increased inflammatory burden....
how much Calories are you eating a day if you don’t mind me asking?
Currently, if I had to guess... probably well under 2000 calories. But this only until my body is healed again. When I first started eating this way, my brain had to get used to it. I felt hungry a lot and I just pushed through it. I started fasting as well and the desire to shove loads of food down my throat went away. It's literally addiction. I eat far fewer calories now, but much higher in nutrition and I don't get hungry at all. In fact, I can easily go a week without eating anything at all.. and I mean literally nothing.. no snacks, no small bite of this or taste of that.. just water.
Once I've recovered, though, my appetite will naturally increase quite a lot and I'll have to increase my dietary intake. For now, though, I eat enough to be fully satisfied. Ideally, I would like to weigh more and be physically bigger, but it's simply not worth bothering to do until I'm recovered and my body is producing ideal levels of steroids. Doing weight training and eating more at this point is like swimming against the current in a river. It's completely futile. Also, keeping my dietary intake as nutritionally dense and calorically low as possible will help in accelerating recovery. If it were possible to fast and then fast again a week later, that would be even better, but that's not actually possible.
So, I'll be increasing dietary intake when my body actually calls for it (and it will... it did before). One amazing thing I've learned, though, is how little your body actually needs to not just survive, but actually thrive when you remove nutritionally void foods from your diet and replace them with nutritionally dense, low calorie foods. Your body obviously needs a certain amount of calories to operate, but it's much less than most people think. Also, what most people lack is certainly not caloric intake, it's nutritional intake.
