Pcos, Pre-diabetic And Hair Loss: Totally Screwed?

laura646

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Hi everyone,

I'm brand new to the board and experiencing some new hair loss that I'm hoping to get some feedback on. I'm sure there are so many people asking for help, but I genuinely don't even know where to start given my medical history.

I'll start by saying that I'm a 35-year-old woman and I'm fairly "healthy". I say this because I never knew I had some internal things going on until I tried getting pregnant. I had a very abnormal menstrual cycle when I was a teenager so at 17 my OBGYN put me on birth control. It wasn't until when I came off of it at 30 that I even knew anything was really wrong. Afer continuing to not have a normal menstrual cycle for many months, my OBGYN finally did an internal ultrasound and diagnosed me with PCOS. I was then confirmed to have PCOS with a Reproductive Endocrinologist when I went to get fertility treatment. I did 4 rounds of Clomid and was able to successfully conceive my daughter at 33 years old.

In my 3rd trimester, I took the glucose test and failed miserably and was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. I was super upset to hear this, and at the time didn't know that PCOS made me insulin resistant and that it was pretty common for those two to go hand in hand. But the good news is that I didn't have to go on medication at all and I was 100% able to control this with my diet. A few months after I gave birth my dr referred me to an endocrinologist to monitor my A1C, again something I didn't realize might continue to be a problem after giving birth. At three months after birth, my A1C was a 5.7 and I was officially diagnosed with pre-diabetes. At 9 months postpartum it had gone up to a 5.9 and continued to hold there. My endo said it wasn't terribly worried at that point, but to just "watch the carbs, lose some weight, and weight lift a few days a week".

I was 145 lbs. at 5'4" when I decided to try the ketogenic diet. Everything that I was reading told me that going low carb and high fat could be very beneficial for PCOS and pre-diabetes. For the first three months, I felt great. I was sleeping better, I felt like I had more energy, I was no longer feeling any food cravings, no longer felt starving throughout the day and like i had to eat RIGHT NOW, and in the process lost 10 lbs. Now, 10 lbs isn't much on this diet, some people have a lot to lose, but at 145 I didn't have a ton that I needed to lose. I know the 10 lbs is mostly water weight, but I was working out 4-5 days a week, doing 3 days of full body weight lifting workouts consistently that whole time, and feel like there was somebody recomposition going on.

Then after three months, everything seemed to change. I started getting constipated or having lose stool, I didn't feel like I was sleeping as soundly and I felt like I was losing my energy. I had eczema on my knees where I never had it before and it wasn't going away, and coffee all of a sudden made me feel sick and like it was burning my stomach. But the worst thing is that my hair was noticeably starting to come out - my hair was everywhere! I was shedding hair all day long, lots of it would come out brushing my hair and in the shower, but even just running my hands through my hair a bunch of strands would come out. Now my hair isn't coming out in big clumps, and it doesn't seem to be breaking, but full strands of hair are coming out at a very abnormal rate for me. Which brings me to this message board. I feel like all of a sudden my body has gone completely out of whack and I don't know what to do.

I went to the dr. to have labs run and explain my concerns. She said the hair loss could by thyroid so she would do a "full panel" on me, or it could be from being pregnant and breastfeeding (even though I stopped doing that a year ago....that didn't make sense to me), or it could be because I lost some weight, or it could be that I fell into the "3 Fs" meaning that I'm close to 40, fertile, and fair. Again, none of that made much sense to me apart from the thyroid possibility. But when I got my labs back, my thyroid checked out as "normal". This included TSH, T3, Free T4 and total T4. The only other notable thing to say is that my A1C went down from a 5.9 to a 5.8, but that's still in prediabetes range.

So, of course, this didn't explain the hair loss. In the meantime, I booked an appointment with a keto coach that I've been following on social media, and this person is the only person that's really talking about the diet but also with autoimmunity diseases, fertility issues, sleep cycles, cortisol, etc. She just really seems to know her stuff. So after I went through all of this in my consolation with her, she said all signs point to me having an issue with my thyroid, even if on paper the labs don't suggest that. She also said that I wasn't eating enough fat and that because I had gone low carb and inadvertently low fat, my body is basically running on fumes. She said the hair loss would be an easy thing to fix, but what concerned her is that when running my labs they didn't check my sex hormones, so no tests for estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, etc. Her advice was to go to an endo and an OBGYN and have them check that.

So I really just feel like I'm at a loss. This all seemed to be exacerbated with the keto diet, but what I've learned is that the keto diet doesn't make this stuff happen and there is usually an underlying problem people aren't aware of and it is all brought to the surface.

But the hair loss is really upsetting to me. I want to get to the bottom of it. Is there anything else you all would recommend that I do? Any specific doctor to go to or additional tests? I feel like I'm stuck with the diet as well - continue to eat carbs and have my A1C go up or go low carb and have my hair fall out. Is there something in between that would work? I want to avoid all medications if possible, and at the end of the day I really just want to be healthy and be able to manage whatever health issues I have.

I know this is a long one, so thanks to whoever stuck with me and has any advice for me. I appreciate it!
 
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