Dry, Brittle, or Hair Falling-Out? Celiac Disease Could Be the Reason Ep. 219

Your hair health tells a bigger story than most people know - especially when you’re living with celiac disease.

In this episode, I’m breaking down what brittle, thinning, or falling-out hair might be trying to tell you about your gut health, nutrient deficiencies, stress levels, hormones, and more. If you’ve been wondering why your hair hasn’t bounced back since going gluten free, this is the episode you need.

You'll learn:

• Why certain nutrient deficiencies are so common after a celiac diagnosis
• How your thyroid, hormones, and stress can impact your hair
• Why gut healing plays a bigger role in hair health than any expensive product ever will
• What to do next if your hair just isn’t thriving on a gluten free diet

Ready for more support? Check out Ultimate Celiac System here  https://belindawhelantraining.com/ultimate-celiac-system and learn how I can help you regain your energy, confidence and find food freedom.

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Music Credit bensound.com 

Chapters

• 0:48 Hair Health Beyond Surface Treatments
• 1:41 Key Nutrients for Healthy Hair Growth
• 3:45 The Stress-Hair Connection Explained
• 5:29 Gut Health's Role in Hair Recovery
• 9:53 Resources for Healing From Within

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:24

Your hair. Health isn't just about what you put on your hair. It's about what's going on inside your body and if you are struggling with things like thin or brittle hair, hair that breaks or even hair that's falling out we're talking about that on today's episode and how it relates back to your gut health and the nutrients that you are putting into your body. When you have health issues on the inside, it often is reflected on the outside, and we can see it through things like our fingernails, our hair and often our skin as well. But on today's episode, I really want to touch on some of the main reasons that you could be suffering with hair issues because of living with celiac disease. Now, the first one that is always going to be my biggest focus would be what's going on with your diet and what are you lacking in. So there's a number of nutrients that actually affect your hair and how your hair grows and how healthy it is, and they are the most important things to look at first. So the first one that you want to be making sure of is that you are getting enough of the correct vitamins in your diet, whether that's through food or supplementation, depending on you know what's going on in your lifestyle how low you are in those levels. So I do recommend that you get yearly blood tests and this is an excellent chance to keep an eye on how things are progressing for you, and you can get your doctors to then have a look and see where you might be lacking in things. Now, iron is super important for hair health, so if you are lacking in iron, then that would be something you would talk with your doctor about whether you need to up your iron intake through food or whether you need to take a iron tablet, or some people even need iron infusions if they're really low in iron. So that's something you have to work with with your doctor. And then zinc supports hair growth. So if you're low in zinc, then you know if your hair is not growing as fast as you would like it to, it could simply be that you need to up your zinc levels as well. And then it's important to have certain b vitamins as well for your hair health.

Speaker 1: 2:37

And then, of course, there's protein. If you are not consuming enough protein, then this is what is used to create keratin. Now, keratin is so important for your hair and if you are not getting enough protein into a diet. This could be a contributing factor as well as to why you have not got healthy, amazing hair after your celiac disease diagnosis. Now, deficiencies in these areas that I've just spoken about are very, very common. So please know that it is quite normal for newly diagnosed celiacs to be low in these, and that's because, you know, when we are dealing with celiac disease and we're eating gluten and we haven't got a diagnosis yet, it's because our body is not absorbing those nutrients. Okay, so once you start healing and your body starts absorbing those nutrients again, it will start to improve and your hair should start to improve as well. So it's not like, you know, your hair is going to be breaking for the rest of your life. If you can get on top of these deficiencies, then that will certainly improve your hair health. You'll probably notice your nails start to grow as well and you'll start to feel so much better about yourself.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Now you have got celiac disease, it does increase your risk of Hashimoto's, so this is affecting your thyroid, and if you have thyroid issues, that can certainly affect your hair as well and make it quite brittle and dry. So that's something to rule out as well and again, you can speak to your doctor about ruling that out at your annual blood test and making sure that that's not something that you are struggling with as well. If this is an ongoing issue, that's definitely something to look into as well. And then, of course, I have to mention ongoing gluten exposure. So if you are not being super, super strict with your diet or you know you're getting accidentally gluten quite often I speak to some people that tell me they get gluten every single month this is not giving your body a chance to heal. So it's very, very important to make sure you're on top of your gluten-free diet, making sure there's no cross contact, making sure there's nothing sneaking in anywhere with medications or anything like that, so that your body does have a chance to heal, because you might be seeing it in your hair that your hair is just reacting and just going nope, the nutrients are not coming to me and we'll try and push those nutrients that we are getting anywhere else in the body. So that's very, very important. To make sure that you're on top of that is key number one.

Speaker 1: 5:08

Now there's three stages of hair growth, and what happens when we are in a huge state of stress is one of those important stages of hair growth stops and it just goes in like a resting phase. So if you are constantly in this stage of stress, your hair will stop growing. So, of course, if your hair is not growing, you will be noticing that lots of hair is falling out, because that is just part of hair. Hair falls out constantly. We always lose hair, but we're also growing new hair. So if your hair is not growing, then your hair is falling out. That is where you will notice the thinning in your hair.

Speaker 1: 5:51

So it's super important to get on top of your stress as well. I know it is very, very stressful initially when you get a celiac diagnosis, because there's so much you know, there's so much to learn. There's so much you know, there's so much to learn. There's so much to to think about and to worry about. But it might not just be that your stress is about celiac disease. It might be stress in another area of your life. So it's important to you know, put some steps into place to lower your stress where possible. We all have levels of stress. I'm not going to say that we don't. But if you have so much stress that your body is constantly in this fight or flight mode, your hair will stop growing. So that's something to think about as well and super important to focus on and lower your stress levels.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Now, having celiac disease and gut issues can set your hormones off like crazy. You can have imbalances and it causes many, many issues with our health. And this is a big problem if you are low in healthy fats and this is why I teach my students or my clients inside the Healthy Celiac Collective to focus on consuming healthy fats so if you are not eating healthy fats, this can be a huge, huge contributing factor to your hair as well. So that is something to focus on a hundred percent, so, so important. And then if you're in the wonderful stage of life such as perimenopause, you might be low in're in that period of life where you have low estrogen. So that's something to focus on as well, whether that's talking to your doctor about HRT or looking at other ways to naturally balance out your hormones.

Speaker 1: 7:36

Now we did touch on gut health a little bit, but gut health is super, super important for your health. Now, when we improve our gut health, that improves everything, because our body is able to absorb all the beautiful nutrients that it needs to from our food. And if you can improve your gut health, that has the most amazing flow on effect. So I certainly love supporting people to improve their gut health because it makes such a massive difference to your overall health, like I mentioned. So if that's something that you're thinking, yeah, that's probably a bit of an issue. You know, if you're eating a lot of processed, packaged foods or you're stressed or you're not taking a probiotic or you just haven't healed after your celiac disease diagnosis, then that is something that is highly, highly, highly important as well. So, definitely something to focus on. There's lots of things to think about, but you can kind of start to see that this is not a long-term problem. This is, this is something that you can fix quite rapidly by focusing on a whole heap of different things in a short amount of time.

Speaker 1: 8:42

So, you know, improving your diet, improving your gut health, lowering your stress, looking after your body with beautiful, nutritious food has this flow on effect to make your hair, you know, super healthy and thick, and you know my hair is super healthy these days. I am able to color it, I lighten my hair. I get it done quite often. Color it, I lighten my hair, I get it done quite often, and my hair is still super, super healthy, even though that I do that. So it's amazing what we can do by, you know, fixing ourselves from the inside out.

Speaker 1: 9:15

It's not always about hair products and what we can put on our hair. It's more important to focus on what's going on the inside than what's going on the actual hair itself. So I hope this has inspired you. If you have been suffering with issues with your hair and you think there's no light at the end of the tunnel there a hundred percent is and if you would like my support further with cleaning up your diet and getting on top of all of these things that we mentioned, then I highly recommend that you sign up for the wait list for the next round of the Healthy Celiac Collective and I can help you with your tailored support within that program. But otherwise, thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode and I look forward to talking with you again on next week's show. Have a great week. Talk to you then. Bye.