Why does fasting stop hair loss?

Can someone explain this to me? I am 100% sure I have stopped hairloss, and it wasn't through supplements, it wasn't through changing my diet, the only thing that works 100% for me is to fast for a long period of time every day. That's the only thing that works for me. I have a very physically demanding job at a lumbermill yet I still manage to go through a full 9 hour work day without eating anything.

Whenever I go back to eating throughout the day, when I rub my hair it just feels awkward as I run my hand through my hair. And I see a bunch of hairs fall out into my hand or onto the table in front of me.

When I go back to fasting atleast 8 hours throughout the day, my hair immediately feels tougher, i don't feel any different when i run my hands through my hair and i don't see any fall out.

The question is, is this healthy to fast this long every day?

/discuss

Look, I'm in no way an expert in this area but I'll put my two cents in.

Going back to the day of our hunter-gatherer ancestor days, they never had a three meal routine. There was no such thing as Breakfast at 7am, Lunch 12pm and Dinner at 6pm. They ate when they the opportunity presented itself, meaning that they would often fast for long periods, so I don't think that fasting for 8 hours is unhealthy since are bodies are built for this type of ingestion.

That's my theory anyway.

i am convinced a weekly 24 hr fast is healthy.....start the fast after dinner, end the dinner at 8pm....then do not eat until 8pm the next day...

with the exception of filtered water, some sea-salt and perhaps lemon juice....

let your internals rest up...and also hopefully you urinate often as well as bowel movement which means toxins are leaving your body too...

this is my 2-cents. i hope it makes sense...

it seems to give your body system a nice rest...maybe a 48 hr fast would even better to add another day of sleep in there!


RobHealthMan

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IMHO more likely that it is by avoiding foods causing hair loss and not fasting itself.

The answer is simple: GI track inflammation, most of the things about fast helping detoxification or whatever are BS I think. You don't need to fast to detoxify, the body does that very well.
Now the good question is what is causing this inflamation, answer: mainly infection. Gluten, milk... exacerbate the problem because highly allergen.

What type of infection and how to treat it? IDN.

Well the good thing is I don't need to do a 24 hour fast to stop my hair loss, atleast in my case, all I need to do is this: Once I wake up in the morning, skip breakfast and go strait to work. Work 4 hours, then on lunch break I'll eat a few carrots and drink a can of Mountain Dew (the throwbacks made with real sugar). Then work the rest of my 4 hours and when I go home I eat all that I want.

If I go from grazing all day to eating like this, I will notice my hair stop falling out in just a day. This isn't something that takes months to work, I notice an immediate stop in hair loss.

You are right it could be that I'm not eating something that triggers it, I will experiment with eating carrots and mountain dew all day and see if it still triggers it. It's easy to test this diet because I can test the effects immediately by rubbing my hand through my hair and feeling for that awkward pain and looking to see if hairs fall out onto my hand.

Ah, the carrots and mountain dew diet, I love this diet.

Espio,

Mountain Dew is not a safe drink. It contains huge quantities of bromine and thus your experiment won't work.

Besides, if you have leaky gut the experiment won't work either and thus conclude that fasting is what is working in preventing hair loss.

But yeah, fasting is good so long as you don't have cancer or immune suppressed. Because of this, it's not always good for everyone for those with active hair loss until it's stopped, as it can make the body weaker, IMO.

Peat's not a fan of fasting I believe,
"After the liver's glycogen is depleted, fasting destroys the tissues, starting with the thymus, then the muscles and liver."

Give pepsi throwback a try, or coca cola with real sugar, Peat and Roddy are big on them as far as i'm aware.

tooyoung wrote:

Give pepsi throwback a try, or coca cola with real sugar, Peat and Roddy are big on them as far as i'm aware.

Yeah bring em on! Who needs teeth anyway?

Hey folks, long time lurker, first time poster.

I think this still remains one of the better posts debunking the myths of fasting:

http://www.leangains.com/2010/10/top-ten-fasting-myths-debunked.html

Many journal references are provided. I don't agree with everything Martin preaches but I think if anyone tells you that short term fasting (16-24 hours) will destroy your muscles then they are uninformed.

I'm not a huge fan of intermittent fasting when it involves having a massive dinner of gluten and casein that will sit in your gut for hours on end. I've screwed up my digestion trying this.

I think you could get away with eating other things during the day then eating more later like citrus fruits and other vegetables radishes etc. high vitamin c

did a bit of research and found this:

it provokes the secretion of human growth hormone
decreases insulin levels

but it seems fasting is not a good idea for everybody...
for example is not recommended for those with those cortisol dysregulation...

researchingeverything wrote:did a bit of research and found this:

it provokes the secretion of human growth hormone
decreases insulin levels

but it seems fasting is not a good idea for everybody...
for example is not recommended for those with those cortisol dysregulation...

HGH (191) should be able to be increase via amino acids, I notice a different in thickness in hair when supplementing with aminos.

Fasting is what started my hair loss and every single problem that I have now...

Do NOT do it. You will be sorry. Guaranteed.

You might get away with one fast a week, but seriously, it's better not to do it at all.

DeadlyDevice wrote:

Do NOT do it. You will be sorry. Guaranteed.

I suppose everybody is diferent...

I did intermittent fasting before...

one big meal a day for almost 3 years...

I have never been as healthy and happy in my life as I was during those three years...

I don't know if it helps your hair or ot, as back then, my hair loss hadn't started yet...

Anyway, based on my experience, I would say DO IT, You won't be sorry. Guaranteed.

Well... your call. I'm just saying I would do everything to go back and do differently. Worst decision of my life. But, to each his own.

this book (glorified work out pamphlet with a bunch of extraneous bullshit added to make it book length) recommends a unique approach. they claim the most important factor in diet is the window of time between your first meal and last meal of the day, recommending 8 to 10 hours max. they make a compelling argument... anyway, book here: http://www.amazon.com/Man-2-0-Engineering-Alpha-Muscle/dp/006222087X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386879092&sr=1-1&keywords=engineering+the+alpha

DeadlyDevice wrote:Fasting is what started my hair loss and every single problem that I have now...

Do NOT do it. You will be sorry. Guaranteed.

You might get away with one fast a week, but seriously, it's better not to do it at all.

could you please give us more details about the fasting regimen you followed?

I think before anybody goes on a fasting regime, they need to get pretty familiar with bioenergetics in general. I think Peat's work has some great things to say in this regard. There is absolutely no evidence out there to show fasting is going to have any impact impact on hair loss. In fact, anything I've ever heard with regard to more extreme fasting is that is been extremely bad for hair. It has in my experience as well.

Fasting is a stress, hands down. That said, its about how you manage the fast and the stress and there can be some good things had from fasting. I think intermittent is the way to go if that's where you're headed. There is actually some very interesting science out there on meal timing, and Martin over at leangains has compiled some good stuff that's worth a look. Its not for everyone, but in terms of changing body composition I think its a good strategy. If it helps you to balance your energy, lose fat, etc. etc., it will probably make a better envionrment for hair growth. But fasting isn't ever going to be the miracle we're looking for for MPB.

I agree with AS54, but will tell the story a bit different.

Stress of metabolism (mostly carbohydrates) is what many with MPB cant handle, so it produces the massive inflammation for those with metabolic syndrome. It produces shedding. It gets a lot of worse if eating food one is allergic to (most of people don't know about their food intolerances). Fasting is period of time where this stress is limited, but if do it for a longer period of time, organs are about to shrink (faster than body fat). Intermittent fasting is where balancing goods with the harms happens, IMO. If one is about losing weight, exercises might be a better way to do it...

I think its also a function of the efficiency with which you switch between and use different metabolic pathways. Obviously the body is preferentially using sugar when it is available, but we know it can also oxidize fatty acids and also convert amino acids into carbohydrates. There are a lot of people who make the argument that switching between these pathways is like deciding whether or not you want to eat a ham or a turkey sandwich; I am one person who does not agree with this at all. Once you've made the switch over to oxidizing fats preferentially, it is quite a high energy yielding process but this efficiency shouldnt be confused with optimal, at least in my mind. It is the starvation response. Just because we are capable of surviving this way doesn't mean its optimal.

This is why I've enjoyed Peat's and others work on the stress response and how this response relates to blood sugar. Fasting is absolutely a stressful occurrence but the hormones that are released (catecholamines) can have positive effects on our mental state and can make us more efficient at utilizing glucose (higher insulin sensitivity). So to me, its quite simply how much of this stress we expose ourselves to. If you are intermittent fasting, you are generally getting quite a few calories in, probably within the 4-6 hours prior to sleep for a lot of people. You will replenish your glycogen reserves this way, and depending on your individual metabolic rate, you will go a good part of the night and next morning running on glycogen. You'll be supplementing that with glucose converted from protein all along the way, along with beta oxidation. But within 24 hrs, you are refeeding again soon. There is a point where you will almost entirely be running on fatty acids, which is the stressful circumstance. There is some evidence out there that suggests our stress response was built for this very purpose and that these periods of short fasts are very natural to the human condition. In most cases I've seen, the body composition is what is effected the most, people who are naturally geared toward eating this way will have their body fat levels drop and they'll get healthier from doing almost nothing different than eating only during a 6 hr period of the day.

I've done it in the past and eaten from only 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm. My bodyweight was better during this phase. Some people hear about intermittent fasting and think, "Wow, that's nuts". But really, a six hour feeding window? If you look at my window of noon to six, it isn't all that different from how some people eat now, save for one thing: night feeding. A lot of people dont' eat breakfast and wait for lunch. So many people aren't hungry in the morning and we're told "Its the most important meal!" Is it really though? So we've got that, waiting until noon to eat. And then you don't eat after six. The part where most people go wrong on this specific schedule is night time eating. If you are a nighttime eater, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, you could always just make your window from 3:00-9:00. Its that simple. It can be adapted to different lifestyles.

Going longer than 18-20 hrs (fasting) though probably won't provide the benefits you're after, and will ultimately be too stressful. The body likes short bursts of stress, not long drawn out forms of it. There is some evidence that 48 hr fasts can really kick insulin signalling back into gear, but I'd save experimenting with that for the more difficult to crack cases. Intermittent fasting works for most people. Will it grow back hair though, probably not.

Because mercury or any other heavy metals screws up your digestion and gut making your immune system more sensitive to all the garbage in our food that it otherwise wouldn't even notice and that screws up other processes which eventually trickle down to hair loss.