Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

I have a receding hairline on both temples that goes back about 1 1/4". I am 22 years old in great health (as told so by doctor and blood test). I need help from you guys to tell me what I am doing wrong as far as my method is to curing my hair loss problem.

I am on a pretty strict diet which consists of...

-3 brown, omega rich eggs
-Gluten Free Rice Krispies with almond milk
-Fruits
-Vegetables (Sometimes juiced with kale, cucumber, etc.)
-Chicken (not very often)
-Salad (no dressing)
-Fish/Sushi
-Almonds, cashews, walnuts
-Tablespoon of Bragg's ACV every morning
-Drink ONLY water or tea (No alcohol, no coffee)

Mostly anything out of a package I try to stay away from.

As for my methods...

-Brush with 100% BBB every morning, evening, and night until scalp is irritated and blood is flowing (6 months so far
-Massage with Emu oil 3x a day in the bald spots and brush the rest over my hair (1st week trying this)
-Inversion
-Meditation for stress relief (which is definitely helping)
-Pinching the scalp to get more blood flow
-Shampoo 2-3x a week with Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap


Does anyone see any problem as to why I'm not getting regrowth? Have I not been doing this stuff long enough? Sometimes my scalp bleeds a little bit from me getting blood to it. Is this healthy, is this not healthy? I need to know I'm not hurting my situation. Over the past 6 months of brushing, my hair went from dry and frail to equivalent of a model's mane. I suppose it is working on hair health, but not regrowth. I just need advice from you guys.

Thanks!

are your "bald spots" the recession in the temples? I sounds like you're doing lots of healthy stuff.

My only thought would be to keep at it, and make sure you have before pictures so you can really monitor your progress. But if it's just temple recession, and you're only 22, it might just be normal progression.

I mean, we'd all love to have awesome perfect norwood 1s, but let's be honest, nobody here is getting back to a juvenile hairline with just diet and manual brushing.

Any supplements? I bet you are missing several essential vitamins/minerals with just that diet. I heard Omega eggs are bad (google it). I'm not sure you need the rice krispies, there's probably a better way to get carbs. You could probably add in more fats (butter, ghee, coconut oil, olive oil, meat). Just my take, I'm new to this too.

You might need to just give it time man. The hair growth cycle is 2-3 years I believe and for a hait to go from vellus to even half sized will probably take a year. I notice that at my hairline I have a ton of 1/3 sized hairs going a good 1/2" down past my current hairline that werent there a year ago. I feel as though in another year these will be almost full sized and I will have another batch of small hairs another 1/2" below them.

It took several years for the hairs to miniaturize, I would expect at least a couple for new ones to mature

SlowMoe wrote:You might need to just give it time man. The hair growth cycle is 2-3 years I believe and for a hait to go from vellus to even half sized will probably take a year. I notice that at my hairline I have a ton of 1/3 sized hairs going a good 1/2" down past my current hairline that werent there a year ago. I feel as though in another year these will be almost full sized and I will have another batch of small hairs another 1/2" below them.

It took several years for the hairs to miniaturize, I would expect at least a couple for new ones to mature

Thanks a lot, man. I hope it works out for me. I never knew hair loss would be this big of a worry for me.

SlowMoe wrote:You might need to just give it time man. The hair growth cycle is 2-3 years I believe and for a hait to go from vellus to even half sized will probably take a year. I notice that at my hairline I have a ton of 1/3 sized hairs going a good 1/2" down past my current hairline that werent there a year ago. I feel as though in another year these will be almost full sized and I will have another batch of small hairs another 1/2" below them.

It took several years for the hairs to miniaturize, I would expect at least a couple for new ones to mature

What do you think would happen if you waxed them off? If you have a vellus hair that will become terminal when it eventually falls out could you accelerate the process by pulling it out early or would that do more harm than good?

If you are nailing the essential things one needs to do to achieve health and some ancillary things that are dedicated pro-hair strategies, then I wouldn't continue to stress about the minutia of your regimen. That's not to say just forget the stress of hair loss, that's rather difficult, but I'm saying splitting hairs over your regimen can be extremely, extremely unhealthy. And its a slippery slope once you get into this world of alternative health, because when something doesn't "work" for you, you are enticed to continue adding things and adding things to try and "perfect" a regimen (whatever that means) and before you know it, you are spending 300 dollars a month on supplements.

It looks as if the foods you are including in your diet are pretty good. That said, you need to establish what kind of diet works best for you, i.e. the one that optimizes your sense of well-being and this will require you also monitor your caloric needs and your macronutrient ratios. Sometimes a "healthy" food can still give you problems. An elimination diet can help you to refine your diet to include only foods that are benefitting you, based on the argument that a diet that makes you feel good is probably doing the best things for your body. Many people underestimate their protein needs, and overestimate their intakes as well. I have found, irrespective of carb intake, bumping up my consumption of good healthy protein makes me feel much, much better, especially if I kick it up with branched chain amino acids.

Aside from diet, you need to establish the other pillars as well: adequate sunlight, healthy socialization, enough good clean water, and try to perfect your sleep as much as you possibly can. These combined with a diet that is hitting your nutritional goals for calories, vitamins, and minerals (vits and minerals don't have to be hit everyday, rather the targets should be hit over a 3-day average) are all that is required for good health.

I think there are several supplements that can bolster your health as well: ALA/L-CAR, CoQ10, EFA's, Vitamins/Minerals from Humic/Fulvic acid, garlic extract, colostrum, BCAA's, etc. But do not go overboard on supplements. There isn't some magic combination that is going to regrow your hair, no matter how much you might like to believe it. Hair loss is still a creature we have not figured out completely, and for that reason, no one specific regimen will work for everyone. You need to establish what your own personal health struggles are to begin with and not go buckshot by buying a hundred supplements.

And stress is a big factor as well. Adding in the stress of obsessing about your health ("maybe just one more supplement will do the trick") is going to do nothing but get you further from your goal. Put together a program, commit to it, follow it for a year. Reassess. But once its down on paper just do it, stop thinking about it from day to day, give the body what it needs (including physical and social challenges), and trust that it will do what it needs to do with what you give it. Trust in your program and follow it. Try not to even think about health while you are doing it. Remember when you were healthiest? You probably weren't obsessed about being healthy while you were your healthiest. I know I wasn't. Do your program, and continue to live your life and immerse yourself in all of the things you'd be doing if you weren't worried about hair. That's what will make you healthy. [Sorry for a rant!]

Excellent post with great advice, anthonyspencer. Thanks a lot. The thing is, I'm my healthiest now in my whole life. It's just that my hair didn't seem to like what I ate as a kid.