Any one of us can suffer with hair loss. When the body is under stress, whether from illness, bereavement or trauma it’s one of the first things the body let’s go of because it is not a vital function. But the mental side can be damaging for the person affected.
In this episode, I chat through my own experiences with hair loss, and how we work use bioenergetics at Simone Thomas Wellness to identify your triggers and support the body coming back together piece by piece.
This episode covers:
Learn more at https://simonethomaswellness.com/ and reach out on instagram https://www.instagram.com/simonethomaswellness/
Any one of us can suffer with hair loss. When the body is under stress, whether from illness, bereavement or trauma it’s one of the first things the body let’s go of because it is not a vital function. But the mental side can be damaging for the person affected.
In this episode, I chat through my own experiences with hair loss, and how we work use bioenergetics at Simone Thomas Wellness to identify your triggers and support the body coming back together piece by piece.
This episode covers:
Learn more at https://simonethomaswellness.com/ and reach out on instagram https://www.instagram.com/simonethomaswellness/
Simone Thomas 0:17
Hi guys, welcome to Living Life Well with Simone Thomas. Today I'm going to talk about hair loss and what we do at Simone Thomas Salon and how Simone Thomas Wellness works and kind of comes part of the salon and how we kind of look after people day to day with our kind of "outside approach" of treating what's kind of going on internally to then fix hair loss and kind of skin issues. Hope you enjoyed this guys any questions or anything you want to ask just send me a message or an email which you can find the details on Instagram or my website and I will come back to you and I look forward to hearing from you.
So a lot of people come to see me and my team, it's not just myself, kind of within the salon, we have two floors so downstairs, I kind of call it our "normal floor." So it's our cut, colour, blow dry sector and then upstairs is purely dedicated to nutrition to wellness to bioenergetics to homoeopathy, and to tricology. And it's up there, where we definitely change lives on a daily basis. So we have people that come to us that are suffering from hair loss from cancer, and they normally kind of come in for what we kind of call "wig in a box." So it's a bit like going to a shoe shop, trying on the right pair of shoes that you fall in love with, and then you kind of take them away. So that's what we kind of do a lot of, you know day to day, you know, we have a lot of people from surrounding areas, even from Devon that come to us for our kind of cancer support and our kind of, you know, hair systems that we do.
And then there's another side to kind of hair loss any one of us can suffer with hair loss and anything can trigger hair loss. It's not just because of cancer or you know, chemo or radiotherapy, it could be because of medication, it could be because of stress and trauma. It could be food, it could be allergy, it could be shock, you know, sometimes like bereavement, injuries, accidents, mould, bacteria, there are so many causes as to why your hair cycle would become disrupted. So when people come to us, we've got quite quite a long kind of medical questionnaire, because a lot of people don't think to look back of what they've gone through. So prime example, somebody would come in and say, you know, my hair started to shred I'm losing a lot more in the shower. It doesn't seem to be growing, but I actually feel really good now. And it's like, "okay, so you feel good now, why did you not feel good in the past?" And then you'll find out they've gone through a divorce or they have been unwell or someone has passed away, but they've now got through that experience. So, you know, they've dealt with the bereavement, you know, they've packed away a house, you know, and, you know, all of those kind of things. And, you know, they kind of feel that they've dealt with it, so why am I now losing my hair? And the body is very clever that it's kind of a bit like, like a ball that's, you know, really, really tight that your body just can hold on to everything because you're just stressed and you know, nothing wants to change. But the minute you actually take a breath and think "phew I'm okay, I'm going to get through this", the body then starts to go all over the place, hormones, imbalances, and then you get disrupted hair cycles, you get hair loss, hair, shredding, so it's always kind of looking at what someone has gone through.
So we always like to look at kind of six years of you know, what is it your body's gone through? What medication have you taken? For some people especially like now with the COVID we've seen a lot of people that have had it and they suffered with quite horrific hair loss. I was actually quite surprised last week, I had a lady, I did a zoom call that had been in hospital with it. She doesn't feel herself but she, you know, it's been discharged, she's been at home and literally her hair looks like it's been shaven, it has all fallen out. And she showed me the pictures where she had kind of documented over those couple of weeks. And it's basically the virus had attacked her immune system as it would do. And, you know, the immune system is not strong enough. And because hair is not a vital organ, when your body is running on empty your hair is one of the first things to kind of go, whether that's complete hair loss, you know, patches or just disrupted hair growth cycle. And I've actually seen a few more since then. But even kind of prior to that, you know, people with bad cases of flu that had been in bed for a couple of weeks or glandular fever or tonsillitis. Anything can trigger kind of an immune system response and disrupt it, you know, disrupt hair. And that's why, you know, when I was talking about hair and hair loss, because it's not vital, it's an attractive feature. It's there to just be do its thing, it's not actually providing anything to the body as such, when the body is running on empty a bit like a car that's, you know, shaking needs an MOT or it's about to run out of petrol. It's the first thing that it kind of says, "well, actually, I'm trying to control everything else that's going on here. I don't need you right now. I will come back to you, you know, when I'm stronger."
So that's how we deal with an array, but with it because hair loss, it's not a band aid when you go to treat somebody with hair loss. It's not about having a shampoo or conditioner or scalp spray, you know, I always call them a bandaid, you're just literally masking over what the actual initial trigger is. So that's why, a couple of years ago, we invested massively into bioenergetics, which is like a full health screen for the body. It's a more of a holistic approach, but it's an incredible approach because all of us have gone through something all of us have got baggage, whether it's through your childhood, through adult years or disturbances, as well as allergies, poor diet, poor lifestyle, toxicity and even foods nowadays, you know, where we buy foods believing that they are healthy because the packets yellow and it's green and it's got flowers on it and it sounds healthy. But when you actually read the back of it, it's loaded with sugars, sweeteners, preservatives, MSG msgs and actually the main ingredient, let's say it's a coconut flapjack that's meant to be this energising bar, when you actually look at the ingredients, there's probably 10% coconut, and the rest is just rubbish.
And the machine itself is able to basically it does a full scan, and kind of whatever the priorities are within the body that you wouldn't necessarily know because we live in a world nowadays where it's "Groundhog Day," we get up all naturally, you know, whether it's an alarm, we go to work or you know, we don't work or whatever. But we don't ever take a step back and actually listen to our body. You never kind of lie there on the floor for a few hours and think actually what pains have I got? What doesn't feel quite right? You know and if you suffer with inflammation in the stomach, you know go well I do suffer with IBS, it's because I had pizza last night but nobody should have to suffer. So the machine is very intelligent that it is able to identify all forms of imbalances things that should be there that aren't or things that that there that shouldn't be. So moulds, bacteria, too much copper, zinc, too much iron or not enough iron that you're able to give kind of like a full MOT for the body. And the machine actually tells you where you need to go next on somebody and it will ask you questions to ask them. And an example of this I treated a guy last year that's on TV to do with antiques, a presenter, and he was suffering with hair loss and he believed his male pattern baldness, but kind of going through his medical history and what was coming up on the machine. It was down to poor diet and lifestyle. So we changed that we put him on to the biotin wellness programme, which is biotin, for hair, skin and nails, supergreens to create kind of an alkaline body, and probiotics to obviously protect the gut of good and bad bacteria, but weirdly on his kind of emotional side, because he doesn't sleep very well, and I was kind of saying, you know how key sleep is for every part of the body. And he kept getting a recurring dream, but he hadn't actually told his wife who was in the room. And anyway, the machines that intelligent that was basically telling me that he keeps having horrific dreams about snakes, and they're causing such a imbalance in his body at night. You know, it's like hot flashes and everything that his body's just not able to kind of repair itself and switch off. So I asked him and said, you know, this is going to sound very strange and men aren't normally that open to these kind of things compared to women. Because sorry, guys, as women tend to talk about our emotions a bit more and we're a bit more fluffy and fairy like, I'd like to say to him, you know, what do snakes mean to you? Literally his mouth just dropped open and his wife was just thinking "what's this bloody crazy lady talking about?" We're here for his hair, what the hell has snakes got to do with anything? And he actually just turned his wife and said, "I've not actually told you this because I don't want you to think like I'm crazy or, or whatever." And I was thinking, oh my god, what the hell's going to come out now? And he keeps having this recurring dream that him and his brother are in the kitchen but this massive like Anaconda snake keeps coming at them and he just literally attacks it with a kitchen knife and I mean, like literally very, very graphic and very detailed, but in kind of homeopathy and bioenergetics that snakes relates to like deficiencies of certain vitamins and minerals of why you get reoccurring dreams or you get leg shakes.
So when I kind of explained what the dream meant, and did he you know, find that he was getting night terrors, dripping with sweat on the stomach, does his left leg shake uncontrollably sometimes, it was all piecing together. And it was all to do with imbalances. And yeah, he couldn't believe and neither could she at the time, and since then obviously I've heard from him to say that actually his hair's growing back, he's sleeping well, the machine actually makes remedies. So if you think of is it "Calms?", you know, when you sometimes take it for anxiety, it works all to do with homoeopathy, so it's able to make you know the liquid or the pills that are needed. And in some cases people need actual supplements. So like Simone Thomas Wellness programmes, or they might need, you know, like liquid iron, magnesium, some for women, you know, like Epsom bath salts when they've got kind of lady problems going on. And that's kind of how we approach hair loss. It's not just "Oh okay, so you've got telogen effluvium," which is hair shredding, or "Okay, you've got alopecia areata." That's great. Like, you would probably be able to find that out for yourself on Google, you know, you just type in what it is that you can see. But why have you got that? Why is there a trigger?
And it doesn't matter if you've had it from a child because you find a lot of children suffer with alopecia areata And they still live with it in their later years. But a lot of it is imbalances, a lot of it is gut bacteria. A lot of the time you have to kind of rebuild the stomach. So it's kind of like doing a flush, where you're kind of rebuilding the good and the bad bacteria. And it can stem from, let's say, when they were, you know, being carried by their mother, that the mother might have been unwell, she might have been on antibiotics or even when they were born, they might have been unwell themselves as a child and had to have a lot of antibiotics or even immunizations can cause imbalances that then same caused, you know, the forms of hair loss. And the great thing about the machine is I could have somebody in to see me today, let's say it's 55 and it would tell me that they've had glandular fever, and that might be when they were 10. You know, it's incredible because our bodies by maps, you know, and like for myself, you know, I don't remember a lot of my childhood, but it's there. And I'm sure if I had the time and I delved into things I would start to kind of Peel the layers off and my body would start to remember things Your body holds on to everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, the physical, the non physical. And we're very, very clever nowadays of just masking over, especially some of the bad stuff, but your body doesn't forget. And it's a bit like you know, if you haven't been home for 10 years, you're still gonna remember the way, you kind of doubt yourself but you still actually know how to kind of get there or if you haven't ridden a car, you know abroad. It's a bit nervous at first but your body and your brain does remember and this is why it's so great when we're, you know, when we're looking at hair loss, it's like "okay, I get the hair loss picture, but let's see what your body's gone through and then let's flush that out. Let's get rid of the bad let's you know have a cry because you know the majority of them do and let's rebuild a better you." You know, and that does come from food. It does come from exercise. It does come from routine. So typically, we all go to Starbucks, Costa you know we have a cappuccino with a vanilla, whatever. 600 calories Well, those 600 calories aren't doing anything for the body and they're most definitely not going to do anything for your hair or for your skin or for your stomach. So it's all about balance and kind of making the right choices and I always kind of say to people, you know, because a lot of people will eat chocolate at night or biscuits and I say, "Okay, well do you need it? Or do you want it?" If you need it because it's going to do something for you then have it but if it because you want it just be conscious that that's your choice. And if you can be 80% good with your kind of food choices, your exercise choices, then it's fine to be 20% bad. I'm not a huge advocate for meal planning in the sense where people on a Sunday do all these meal preps in plastic containers. I couldn't think of anything worse. I like to cook I like that smell that getting involved you know cooking nightly. What I fancy now, I might not fancy tonight. So why would I want to come home to the same bit of chicken broccoli that I cooked on Sunday. I just there's just no need for it. And the thing that people don't realise is our bodies need diversity. So a bit like life, you know, you don't want to be doing the same thing all day every day. It'd be boring, you know, you just feel blue. And it's the same with food. You know, your stomach needs an array of good and bad bacteria. It needs different vitamins, it needs different minerals, your hair, your skin, your organs, everything does you know and there's a huge saying, you know, you have to nourish to flourish, you know, and it's very true, but don't have the same things every day. You know, a lot of people have porridge every morning. Okay, that's great, but kind of mix it up. And that's what I try to do, you know, within our household and don't get me wrong, I have weeks where I'm on fire. Like I feel like Wonder Woman, I'm exercising, I've got my smoothie, ready dressed to go by 8am. And then other days I'm like, "oh, bloody, hell like I just don't even want to be doing anything today." And even so of late, you know, we've just opened our salons and clinics and I haven't been able to exercise. I've gone from lockdown of cycling everywhere. being motivated. In the garden and to kind of the last three or four weeks of not being able to do anything, and I get angry with myself, I get frustrated. I don't feel like me, but I've only got myself to blame because I have got hours that I could do it, I could get up an hour early or I could do it when the boys go to bed. So it's all about excuses and not having those excuses. So everything's kind of possible, but it's just one not being too hard on yourself but also being hard on yourself that you do actually get out there and kind of make those changes.
And it's one part that we do when people come into to see myself or Debbie or Georgie or Sheikah it's kind of like a six week programme. A lot of us now live in a world where you see on social media, "get these amazing abs in 14 days" or "loose two stone with these teas." It's not going to work, but a lot of us are very lazy. We just want these quick fixes and lifestyle changes are for life are forever. You've got to work on yourself daily. It's not a quick fix, and we change as we get older. You know, I'm not the same person I was when I was 22. And I'm 32 now 40 you do change. And weirdly, I'm writing an ebook for next year, which is about the big 40. And, you know, if I was when I was 20, you asked me, I'll be like, "Oh my god, now I'm gonna be like a wrinkly old horrible lady. Like, I don't even want to be alive at 40 that's really old." But now, you know, being that age, I feel the best I've ever felt I feel better now than I did in my 20s. Yes, I still have insecurities, and all those other things, but that's all part of growing up. So it's kind of something that you have to work on, you know, daily or, you know, have small goals.
And in one of my podcasts I talked about, with one of my good friends, Holly about having vision boards, you know, setting some time aside at Christmas or the New Year to say, "what would I like to achieve?" and that might be weight loss, or it might be, you know, not having that coffee in the morning from Starbucks and making a smoothie which seems a crazy thing to have on your vision board, but it's all about change and what it is that you would like to achieve. And I know when anyone's poorly, you know, hair loss, skin condition, stomach issues, it is your diet and lifestyle. And that's what you have to work on it's not getting a prescription drug over the counter because it's a bandaid, it's not going to go away, you're just masking. So you really need to kind of work on what's going on internally. And that's what we kind of do at Simone Thomas, you know, with with the incredible team. We all work really closely but a client might actually see two or three of us because one of us thinks "Okay, well it's definitely this but actually I think they could benefit from you know having this as well." So we have a great approach with our clients and the great thing is for anybody that is kind of a hair loss client, they then eventually become a normal clients in the sense of they're then confident to go downstairs to be with the Cinderella's and the Rapunzel of the world with the most amazing hair to sit there in that chair, not be behind screens and actually have their hair done.
And yes, it might take a year it might take three. But for a lot of them, that's an incredible journey to actually go into a salon and not feel different or feel that people are looking at them. And that's what brings us so much joy that you're changing people's lives. And a lot of people that have got hair will say, "well, it's just hair, like how can it affect you?" Trust me until you have gone through losing your hair or hair loss or hair thinning, you don't actually realise how much it affects you. And you know, I say to clients, it doesn't matter if you drive a Range Rover, a Bentley or a Fiat. It doesn't matter if you've got a Chanel handbag or a Primark handbag or whatever it is that you like, if your hair is not quite right, you just don't feel like you. And I know that massively because obviously when I come in here to do recordings, the team here always like to take pictures. And I'm like "those pictures are not going anywhere" because I normally have hair extensions, but I'm just trying to just let my own hair grow after 20 years of wearing wigs and extensions and I just realised that actually just let it grow, let it do its thing and embrace it. But I hate every single picture of me and, Kelly, who's actually here today in the room with me, she's kind of laughing, you know, behind the microphone because she'll send me pictures and I'm like, "you're not bloody putting that one out? No!" And then she's like, "this is a really nice one Simone" and I'm like, "No, delete, delete, delete!" And for me, you know, people would look at me and be like, "there's nothing wrong with your hair." But it's a confidence and an issue that I'm never gonna get over. You know, I still see myself all those years ago with hair loss. And I love hair. You know, like I talked in one of the other podcasts, I talk about boobs, I love hair as much as I do boobs. So for me, you know, hair is what gives me confidence. So if I do go out, I wear wigs, you know, I don't mind wearing wigs, I absolutely love them. But yeah, I definitely get when people come in when they're losing hair, how it makes them feel. Because yeah, it still affects me today. You know, and I've got a full head of hair. People would love to have my hair I'm sure, I'm sure that a few people I could pay to say that. But it definitely does affect you. So in Simone Thomas salons, we try to approach it in such a way that we're able to get that person to be confident and love themselves with their hair and everything else as well.
Thanks for listening. If you want to send me your questions, emails do, you can follow me and the podcasts and social media. You can find me on Simone Thomas Wellness. I'm also Facebook Simone Thomas Wellness World and I just really love to hear from you.