# Women's Hair Loss > Introduce Yourself & Share Your Story >  New to forum

## EmmaRose

Hi Everybody, 
    First of all, it is so relieving to have found this forum.  It is amazing how isolated I have felt with my hair thinning situation for the last 20 years even though I am well aware now so many women are affected with similar issues.  For the high static rate, it is amazing how do many women feel there is noone directly around then to relate to that trully understands the impact hair loss in women has on an individual's self esteem and pysche.   
So my story.... Fine hair runs in my family.  Fine in the literal sense (vs. using the word fine as a tactfully correct way to say ultra thin hair).  I actually had gorgeous hair.  It was fine, but I had a good amount of it.  I remember during my whole childhood people always, and mean always, wanting to touch my hair because it was so incredibly soft and shiny.  When I was in my early teens, I remember getting my haircut one time and specifically recall the hairdresser telling me I had the most beautiful hair and to never do anything to ruin it.  Well, famous last words.
     When I was a sophmore in high I befriended two girls.  One was anorexic the other bulemic.  I never started looking at my body image in a negative matter until I met them.  I actually had a great figure, but due to the poor influence around me, I fell into the same mental disorder that these girls had regarding their body image.  I became severely anorexic.  The summer of my sophmore year I basically stopped eating.  Without going into detail, I consumed a few hundred calories a day of food that had little-no nutrition and exercised excessively.  I dropped 20 lbs in 2 months (120 lbs to 100 lb and I was about 5' 5").  I was a stick.  Needless to say, my hair started falling out like crazy.  I remember taking baths and the entire bottom of the tub would be covered with hair.  By the end of the summer I had lost about 3/4 of the hair I started with.  I was so young I did not make the association between the hairloss and the nutritional issues. I kept begging my parents to help me and was extremely distraught over the hair loss.  Looking back it still stirs up hard feelings that my parents (one a physican and the other with an extremely high IQ) never put 2 and 2 together either and never intervened with my eating disorder.  It was if they put blinders up that their perfect daughter could actually have issues that needed to be addressed.  It is still hard not to think, if only they had intervened, my life would have been so different.  When, I got back to school my junior year, I remember one of my male friends asked me what happened to my hair? He also was nice enough to tell me that I was so beautiful before and that I was now way to thin and needed to stop losing weight.  The anorexia did not persist to the extent it did that summer, but I did continue to eat an insufficient amount of poor quality calories and exercise excessively.  The hair loss persisted.
    My freshman year in college I caught mononucleosis during summer school and had it for about 1 year because my body was so worn down.  I was never the same after that.  I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, severe migraines multi-weekly and severe myofascial pain.  Just making it to take a shower was almost an unbearable task.  I somehow managed to claw my way through undergrad and then into grad school and graduate to become a veterinarian.  I missed a lot of classes in grad school and made frequent trips to the hospital due to severe migraines.  My life post graduate school became work and then sleep every other minute just so I could gather up enough energy to work again.  I continued to try to get to the gym 2-3 times weekly for short work-outs to keep my body active in some manner.  I gained weight by the start of graduate school (110-112 lbs).  I was still pretty thin, but not emaciated. My nutrition was descent (no worse then most of America), but I am a type A personality so not being able to be 100% through veterinary school, be top of the class etc. was extremely stressful for me.  The chronic fatigue, pain and mostly the hair loss put me into a really severe depression.  
     Over the last 10 years post graduate I have done a lot changes to try to improve my energy and well being.  I stopped using chemicals (in make-up, shampoos, lotions etc.) and changed to natural products.  I juice often and only eat organic for the most part.  Lots of fruits, vegetables, lean meats, whole grains etc.  Because of my long hours at work and type A personality, I am still very stressed and tired mentally as well as physically.  But most poeple unfortunately are mentally and physically exhausted these days.  I have blood work run left, right, up and down numerous times for endocrine issues, autoimmune problems, you name it.  Totally normal.  It was not until I went glutan free that my energy has greatly improved.
So this brings me back to the hair.  With all this being said, it is the hair loss that has been killing me since the summer of my sophmore year.  It is an every minute obsession and depression since then because I keep thinking that it did not have to be this way and only if I hadn't starved myself etc.  I know I am blessed with so many things and am overall an attractive woman, but without a "normal" hair thickness I feel worthless and abnormal.  I feel like everyone is staring at me thinking "look at how thin that girl's hair."  The women selling hair extensions and flat irons at the mall always single me out of a crowd to point out how thin my hair is and it so demeaing and embarassing.  The hair stylists always comment on how extremely "fine" my hair is.  It is to the point I did not get my haircut for over a year until just recently.  I had to chop it off into a short cut because it is paper thin, which was also devastating.  As a matter of fact, just today a technician at my work stated to me that "your hair is soooooo thin."  I wanted to run out of the building and into my house out of the sight of the public.  I cringe everytime someone touches my hair now, because I know the what the comment comming is.  I know stress can play a substantial role in hair loss, but I see so many people under such extreme stress that have thick gorgeous hair so why does my hair keep getting rapidly thinner and everyone else directly around me who is also under stress gets to keep their hair.  My nutrition is really good now.  It is better than 90% of the American population, but still thinner hair while everone around me who eats McDonalds for every meal has "normal" hair.  Over the last 2 years my weight has gone from 115 lbs to 125 lbs on average and my body weight is very healthy now.  
    So why does my hair not grow back? I figured maybe once a person got healthy again, the hair follicles may restimulate growth? Or is it too late from being unhealthy and overstressed too long? This is really killing me and wow this is a really long blog.  I guess I needed to get this out since I have not been able to talk to anyone that can relate!  I am trying to be a happy person and appreciate everything else going for me and around me, but this is really affecting my feeling of self worth.  I can not even make a pony tail barely with the hair I have left.  It will only get worse from here.  
    Does anyone have any answers on why my hair does not grow back? Is there any hope? Tips? Similar stories with successful regrowth outcomes? Does anyone know if hair follicle cloning and transplantation is going to be available in the near future? Thanks so much for reading my blog!

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