Intro: Who This Is For

If you or your little one have alopecia and you are actively looking for hope solutions and ways to overcome it outside of the mainstream pharmaceutical, ‘bandaid’, medicine treatment, then this is for you.

Who am I and Why I Do This

Who am I to be talking about alopecia?

Well, long story short, my background is actually in corporate tech and digital. My training had nothing to do with healthcare, but I’ve educated myself by being hands on and knee-deep in learning all I can about autoimmune and alopecia.

For the past seven years since my daughter’s diagnosis of alopecia areata, she was only 19 months young at that time, and the reason I learned all I can by myself is because no doctor, no medical professional, whether it be western medicine — family physician, dermatologist, pediatrician, and even pediatric dermatologist — or naturopathic doctors, alternative medicine, traditional medicine, you name it… no one, and I mean, no one can help me get to the root of this.

No one can offer me a solution, especially when we’re talking about young children where a lot of treatments for adults are not appropriate., not suitable, or even sometimes not safe for kids.

I had no choice but to help myself. I left the corporate digital world that I knew in order to try and solve this for my daughter. And in this channel, I’ll share what I’ve learned all these painstaking, bumpy years.

I’ve experimented with enough modalities. I’ve tried enough things, we’ve had enough setbacks and success, and we’ve been through enough cycles of ups and downs, so much that I feel I have a pretty good grasp of what this alopecia journey looks like. And dare I say, more so than how the doctors I’ve seen.

Doctors wanted to help. They tried to. They probably learned about alopecia and autoimmune. They probably learned about it in medical school, but they don’t know enough about it. They have not lived with it. They have not been through the ups and downs of trying to solve it, truly, and when put to the test, they simply don’t have anything to offer (outside of pharmaceuticals which just manage symptoms).

Disclaimer

So it’s very important for me to emphasize that I am not a doctor, I am not a medical or a healthcare professional in any capacity. That means that whatever I share in all of my content is not medical advice. If you want medical advice and if you want opinions from doctors and healthcare professionals, go see one. This channel and what I do is about looking outside the grid of western medicine for solutions and ways to solve alopecia

I’ll share what I’ve personally been through, and I’ve been through quite a rollercoaster ride with alopecia. It was not a smooth straight line journey from hair loss to hair growth. It’s not a straight linear zero to hero story. I wouldn’t have learned all that I needed to learn if it was that simple linear journey, right? I wouldn’t have built the depth of knowledge that I have if that were the case.

And although I share mainly non-pharmaceutical approaches, I am not anti meds. Modern medicine definitely has its place. Modern medicine has saved my life and I am grateful for it. It has its place, but I’m being objective by saying that it also has its limitations, and I don’t think that anyone can argue with that, right? Modern medicine may help in relieving symptoms, but it also comes with side effects. Whether you feel those side effects now or not, whether you can see those side effects now or not, it all comes with side effects. What I am is about being reasonable and making your own choice by weighing benefits versus risks.

What this video is about: 8 key points to overcoming Alopecia naturally

If you’ve been searching online, you’ve probably come across a bunch of information and some of what you found may even be contradicting, or at least things may seem overwhelming. The purpose of this video is to share eight important foundational points that I think you need to know before you choose which modality as your solution to alopecia or your potential solution to alopecia. Especially if you are about to drop a lot of money on so-called “healing programs”, or if you have already started out on your recovery journey or your effort for recovery and have varying degrees of success, then these eight points can still help you perhaps regain clarity and realign your steps going forward.

Point 1: No cure doesn’t mean no hope

We’re always told that there’s no cure for alopecia. There’s no cure for autoimmune diseases or autoimmune conditions. For many people, when they hear the words “no cure”, they automatically think that there is “no hope” to recover, to reverse, or even just to get better from a condition.

No cure usually means that there is no pharmaceutical solution, that there is not a simple solution in the form of a medicine, a pill or injection, to overcome something. If we think about cure from pharmaceuticals, even a simple cold has no cure from medicine. You recover from common colds by relying on your own body’s immune system to fight off whatever pathogens are making you sick. Medicine doesn’t do that. Medicine simply relieves symptoms while your body fights things off by itself. In many cases, medicine simply makes symptoms more manageable so that you feel more comfortable, or even to buy you some time while your immune system does its job.

But pharmaceuticals are not all that we have. Many people have it so pre-programmed in their minds to look to medicine for anything. That’s just how we’ve been pre-programmed to think, right. We get something, and we look to medicine automatically… first thing, by default. It’s almost like we’ve been trained over time to immediately search for answers in pharmaceutical medicine. And when they don’t have any solution, we put it in our head that there is no cure and therefore there is no hope.

But there’s way more than just pharmaceuticals that can help us. So you need to get used to this in your mind: No pharmaceutical cure does not mean no hope of getting better or recovering from a condition, including alopecia, including autoimmune.

Point 2: Be careful with your thoughts and beliefs

As much as what you put into your body by way of food, — you know, what you eat — is important, so is what you put into your thoughts and your mind. Your mind and your body are connected. If you want to heal from alopecia, you need to tell yourself that you can heal, that you’re not meant to have alopecia, that you’re not born to live with this condition. You need to put these positive, affirming thoughts because your thoughts become your beliefs, and your beliefs can become your reality.

If you want proof that your mind and your body are connected, you can try this simple exercise.

Close your eyes and imagine cutting open a juicy lemon. A imagine running a knife through the middle of that big, fat, juicy lemon. Now imagine squeezing all that lemon juice into your mouth. Do you feel the sensation of your mouth salivating? There is, in reality, no lemon squeezing into your mouth. There’s no lemon juice dripping into your mouth. There’s simply your thought of it. But what is stimulating your saliva glands?

Your thoughts affect how your body responds at a physical level.

Tune out any negative suggestions, including those from your doctors. Actually, it doesn’t matter who they are. If they tell you that there’s no way to get better from alopecia, if they tell you that you will have no hair, that you will just have to live with and accept the fact that alopecia will be there for the rest of your life, or even if they say that you are totally at the mercy of the hair randomly deciding whether to grow back or not, tune them out.

Be very careful with these kinds of suggestions and tune them out. Train yourself to tune them out the moment you hear them. It doesn’t matter who they’re from. If you want a shot at this, you need to only fill your mind with what you want to achieve. If what you want to achieve is full hair growth and to put alopecia behind you, then that’s what you need to flood your minds with. It doesn’t matter whether you are there, whether you’re seeing progress, whether you’ve seen hair growth, it doesn’t matter. You just keep believing in that. You just keep believing that alopecia will be history for you. Just keep persisting with that belief.

Don’t underestimate the power of your thoughts and your beliefs. Your thoughts become your beliefs. Your body starts to believe what you repeatedly tell yourself, whether it is consciously or subconsciously.

If you want to get all your hair back, then don’t keep telling yourself or your child or your little one, “I don’t need hair.” Stop that. Stop glorifying hair loss and the bald aspects of this. Yes, it’s important to have the capacity to deal with hair loss and the worst case scenario. It’s important to be prepared for that, but it’s also important, if not more important, to fill yourself with where you actually want to go.

In seven years, I never once told my daughter that she’s the chosen one to have alopecia, that she’s meant to have alopecia, or that she doesn’t need hair. I never said those things to her. I never told her that she had the perfect head that doesn’t need hair. I avoided this type of language like a plague. I teach her the realities of what we’re dealing with. I explain to her the mechanisms of how this happens. I’ve always been very careful with my language and what I teach and what I tell her. I don’t want to use languages that make her mind retreat into simply accepting the condition as being meant for her. Saying these things may make you feel better in that moment, because then you may feel that you don’t have to deal with X, Y, and Z, especially when things seem to be extremely frustrating, which they can be. But be careful because if you keep telling your body that it doesn’t need hair, then it may just become your reality. Your body starts to believe that, “Okay, I don’t need hair… I don’t need to make hair.”

Distance yourself from negativity.

Point 3: Elimination diet is at the core of any healing program

Some form of elimination diet is always at the core of any healing program. Any healing program has elimination diet, various forms of it, at the core of it.

You’ve probably seen programs that promise the hope of reversing alopecia, and some of them even come with pretty hefty price tags (multiple thousands of $$$). Ultimately, it’s your choice. It’s your decision on what you want to do and what you are willing to pay.

But before you drop some serious $$$ purchasing any program, and if you have an inkling of a question, or you’re starting to question whether it’s worth the the price tags, know that any of those so-called healing program involves elimination diet at the very core of it, no matter how glowing testimonials are presented to you.

If you have even the slightest inkling to question the price tag, whether it’s worth the price that you are gonna pay for these programs, know that there’s hardly any big secret behind these programs. If you think that you’re paying the hefty price tags for some well-kept secret that’s going to be the ultimate answer to your alopecia struggles… there is no huge, mysterious secret approach.

Diet is at the core of it, along with other measures, of course, but the value in paying for healing programs is when the approach is well organized and well put together, especially if you also get personalized support so that you have a step by step process that you can follow… that’s the actual value of it. There’s no big secret behind it. There’s no big, you know, well kept secret key to solving this. There’s no such thing.

If you have never done anything else for your alopecia, you may want to work on your diet first. And the information about diet is widely available for free.

Simply put, you have the option to pay a lot of money to access organized information and guidance, but you don’t HAVE to. Paying a lot of money for healing programs is not your only shot at putting alopecia behind you. It’s still possible for you to do it yourself or with varying levels of support. But I just wanna free you of that thought that you’ve probably been sold to, that paying hefty price tax and thousands and thousands of dollars for something is your only way out. It is not.

Point 4: Choose a diet modality that works for YOU

Any diet modality that you’ve heard of can have success stories. You need to choose one that works for you and what works for one person may not work for another. Even what works for one person at one time may not work for that same person at another time.

Diet can be super overwhelming because there are so many theories and justifications and success stories and proof for all of the different modalities, and they can look extremely different from one to the other. And you are wondering why can there be success stories for something so different, right?

So here are the general guidelines that I stick to when it comes to diet that can hopefully help you choose your modality as well.

Guideline #1.

Choosing a diet modality that has worked for most people with similar condition as you, in this case alopecia, would be a good start.

Although autoimmune conditions theoretically all have the same mechanism, technically the solution for different kinds of autoimmune conditions will be pretty much the same, right? If they have the me same mechanism that cause it, then the solution should be pretty much the same. But I found that in practice, in reality, that’s not always the case.

The diet for alopecia doesn’t only need to address the triggers that cause hair loss, but it also needs to fulfill the nutritional requirements to speed up hair regrowth. So in this case, the most efficient, the most effective diet for resolving alopecia as an autoimmune condition may not be, or may be slightly different from a diet to resolve another type of autoimmune condition, for example, rheumatoid arthritis, because alopecia involves a lot of hair regrowth as part of the solution, but rheumatoid arthritis involves a lot of pain, so it’s more about arresting the triggers, but there’s no demand to grow a lot of something. In alopecia, that something is hair.

Guideline #2.

Choose a diet modality that doesn’t focus solely on addressing your current alopecia symptoms while putting your longer term overall health at risk of other illnesses, especially if we’re talking about kids here with their whole life ahead of them, or younger people with their whole life ahead of them. We wanna think of that overall long-term health too.

Guideline #3.

Choose a diet modality that you can see yourself sticking to, that you can implement sustainably, for the next little while. Because even if you are in remission, even if you’re no longer getting symptoms or your symptoms are hugely improving, chances are that you will most likely have to stay on some variations of that same diet for the foreseeable future.

Many programs like to put timestamps, like X number of weeks. Putting timestamps like that appeals to the audience as if a condition can be resolved in just X number of weeks, right? But the truth is, X number of weeks is just when you can start to see signs that things are working, and you will have to continue on that path for at least months and sometimes even years. Especially if we’re talking about things like alopecia, where the biological process of hair growth itself takes time.

So don’t get too caught up in the X number of weeks as, okay, I only have to stay on this for x number of weeks. So be careful when you’re choosing a pretty extreme form of diet because usually you’ll have to stay on it for quite a while.

Point 5: Keep and open mind: “Experts” have biases too

Don’t just blindly buy into the preachings of any so-called experts. Listen to them, get the information, but always keep an open mind. Use your own common sense, your own intuition, and listen to your gut. Listen to your body.

A big issue I often see is that people go into this with the right positive mindset of wanting to heal, but over time as they consume more and more information from these “experts”, they become so rigid and uptight about certain protocols, and I personally don’t even like to use the word protocol. But anyway, they become so uptight about certain theories in whatever modality they choose to adopt.

Don’t ever stop to be objectively critical about any stand that you are presented with by any experts. All of these experts are humans. They have their own biases, and I’ve watched enough of them over the years and I see the same pattern. Usually they have all built a brand for themselves based on the views and the approach that they use and they teach and they kind of have to hold on to those views to maintain their personal brand. So, use your own good, objective judgment. And remember that every human has their own biases and no one is ever always a hundred percent correct.

Point 6: Finding the true ROOT cause is extremely rare

Finding the root cause and healing the root cause of any condition is very important, but it’s extremely rare that we are able to find and get to the root causes in the case of chronic conditions that have been going on for years. Extremely rare.

If your alopecia is not caused by a clear trigger, like fungal infection, for example, or even something more complicated, let’s say your alopecia is caused by built-up trauma, and you manage to identify what that trauma is and you manage to go through certain processes to release that trauma…these are considered pretty straightforward triggers or causes, and they can be resolved by getting to that particular trigger.

But it’s very rare that people manage to get to the root of things, because as we understand things right now with all the limitations of science, the root of autoimmune alopecia, true autoimmune alopecia that’s caused by the immune system reacting in ways that it shouldn’t, is multifactorial, meaning that there’s not only one thing that causes it.

I think that the idea of healing the root cause has been oversold, quite frankly. Holistic approaches always emphasize on gut health. And gut health is important, but it’s not the root of the problem. Usually, it’s not.

Elimination diet can do wonders for stopping the triggers of hair loss in autoimmune alopecia, but elimination diet is not root cause healing, because even food sensitivities and overreaction of the immune system to certain foods are not root causes. Something else is causing the body to react. Diet does not solve the root cause, especially if poor diet has not been the culprit in the first place, which is the case with my daughter. This is why people still have to stay on a variation of that same diet in order for symptoms to not come back, because we have not got to the root cause.

The point is more about setting expectations, and I think it’s important to understand what it really means to get to the root cause and not be misled into thinking that staying on a particular elimination diet is fixing the root cause, because it’s not.

Point 7: Genetic predisposition is HUGE

Genetics play a huge role. I am probably going against the grain here by saying that genetics are super important. People don’t like to hear this because you can’t do anything about your genes. And saying that it’s genetics makes people feel as though it’s their fault. But I’m not here to say what people like to hear. I’m here to say what I think is the cold, hard truth. I’ve been knee deep in this autoimmune and alopecia thing for long enough to be able to say what I think is really the fact, the reality, not just theories.

Holistic wellness, health coaches, and health experts like to preach that genes simply load the gun, and epigenetics, which means everything else we do and expose our body to… basically through our diet, our environment, our lifestyle and and so on… is what really pulls the trigger.

In general, I agree with this analogy. But the big problem with this is that this view is largely based on a majority of the population who have made poor diet and lifestyle choices over a period of time, or have been exposed to environmental stress before they get symptoms of an autoimmune condition or any chronic condition. It is almost based on assumptions that everyone who has developed an autoimmune condition has made bad choices, or suboptimal choices through what they eat and how they’ve led their life up to that point. And this is simply not true.

Case in point, my daughter was 19 months old. She had always had well balanced, home prepared meals, slept well, received lots of love and attention at home, had no work stress, no life stress, not loaded with chemicals, no mold at home… you name it, all the common culprits of epigenetics. But a course of antibiotics from an illness she picked up from daycare, which she only went to three days a week, set off her autoimmune triggers. Why? Because of genetic predisposition. She ate better than every other kid we’ve seen. She slept better than most kids we knew. And other kids were picking up illnesses from daycare too. They were taking medications too. They were taking antibiotics too, but they did not have autoimmune going off. Why? Because genetics, because genetic predisposition, because the gun is loaded to begin with. If you don’t have a loaded gun, you can pull at the trigger all you want and nothing will happen. And that is just a fact.

And maybe if you have little ones dealing with this, unless they’ve been feeding on junk foods, which very few of us have not, then this is the group that I’m talking about. The group that has not been exposed to bad diet, bad lifestyle, environmental stress, chemicals, you name it. This is the group where the genetic predisposition is what puts them here.

I agree that for the most of us, diet and lifestyle have been suboptimal, unless you go out of your way to pay attention to what you eat and how you live your life. But even if you are not a super strict health nut who watches every single compound that ever enters your mouth, the occasional junk food, the occasional treats here and there should not and will not set off autoimmune symptoms, if you don’t have the genes for it.

I am not advocating for junk food or eating poorly, because eating poorly can lead to other problems, even if not autoimmune diseases. But my point is, you have to watch what you eat and every single aspect of your environmental and lifestyle choices carefully because you have a genetic predisposition to getting autoimmune triggers.

It’s not fair. Nothing in life is fair, but that is reality.

Point 8: Science is NOT everything

How many times has “Follow the science” been shoved down our brains in the past few years?

Science has done many, many great things, but science is not everything. Science doesn’t have the answer for everything. Science cannot help with everything.

People like to ask, what’s the scientific evidence of X, Y, and Z? What are the research papers?, where are the clinical trials?, double-blind, placebo, blah, blah, blah, as if these are the only things that would validate an idea.

Research and studies can support an idea, but I would even take those with a grain of salt. Again, research and studies are done by humans. Humans with limitations in their capacity, humans with biases. What scientific evidence you are able to see that you are able to read, that you are able to get your hands on, is simply what someone somewhere has proposed to do studies on , and what someone else has agreed to pay for.

If an idea hasn’t been proposed by someone, studies don’t get done. If an idea is proposed by someone, but no one wants to pay for it, studies don’t get done. Studies research, clinical trials are very expensive, time consuming, resource heavy things to do, so in order for your so-called research paper or journals or any other scientific evidence you deem will prove the validity of a concept or a modality, if no one wants to pay, you won’t see it. It doesn’t mean that it’s quack or that it doesn’t work or it’s not valid because there’s no research paper to to back that up. Just because something doesn’t have research and studies to back it up, it doesn’t automatically make it invalid.

Again, always be critically objective. Have a healthy dose of skepticism, even when it comes to science. Personally, I get tired of hearing “There is no evidence to show or prove X, Y, and Z”. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and vice versa.

I have spent the earlier years of this journey combing through every research paper I could get my hands on, every journal, every clinical trial. I’ve come to learn that what matters most is what works for me. I don’t care if there’s no research paper or journal or clinical trial as long as — use your common sense — whatever that you’re doing does not harm your health, that it improves your health, then that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter if you can’t find a thousand journals to back it up.

This obsession with science by way of research and studies has eroded or intuition, our own gut feeling when it comes to our own health. I like to look at scientific papers as references and only as references, and I also like to balance my view based on my own gut feeling, my own intuition, and seeing the realities of what works.

It doesn’t matter how many papers support an idea. If it doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t matter if pharma drug X, Y, and Z has a ton of papers to prove that it’s “safe”. If it causes you harm and sets you off an autoimmune spectrum, and all the papers in the world don’t mean a thing.

Basically, my point is, keep an open mind and keep a balanced view on things, and don’t be too obsessed over a particular idea.

Conclusion

So that is it: Eight important points that I’ve learned over more than seven years. Seven long, bumpy years of navigating and resolving alopecia. Tell me in the comments of my Youtube video, which of these eight points resonates with you the most, or which point sparks an aha moment for you? What’s your biggest challenge with trying to overcome alopecia, whether naturally or with the help of pharmaceutical medicine? Tell me, what’s your biggest challenge? What’s your biggest, biggest question? And what do you want me to talk about in my next episodes and. Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you in the next one. Thank you!