Holistic Hair Care: How to Grow Healthy Vibrant Hair and Prevent Hair Loss [Episode #868]

This week’s topic is: Holistic Vibrant Hair: How to Grow your Healthy Hair Back and Prevent Hair Loss, Thinning and Breakage

 

Looking for tips on how to grow vibrant, healthy hair while preventing hair loss? Listen in as Kimberly explores the connection between hair and overall health and how your emotional wellbeing and stress management are connected to the health of your hair. Kimberly also shares the benefits of specific herbs and foods for hair health, such as amalaki and cruciferous vegetables. She also explores energetic practices, including scalp massage and visualization, and the use of….

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Question Answered]

MaryEllen – Louisianna

In the past year I’ve been healing from an eating disorder and have lost a lot of hair because of it. I’ve been doing what I can to restore it, however, I’m concerned about my overall hair health. Can you share any tips or suggestions on what I can do?

 

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Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly Snyder (00:00.982)
Namaste loves and welcome back to our Thursday Q&A show. Today we’re gonna be talking about hair and specifically holistic hair care, how to grow vibrant healthy hair and to prevent hair loss. So when we’re talking about hair, just like every other topic that we talk about here on our podcast, we’re going to be addressing it from a holistic standpoint. Hair is of course something that is a part of our appearance.

It is around our face. We all want to have beautiful, vibrant, thick, healthy hair, but also on the deeper level, just like with our skin, our hair can give us cues as to what’s going on inside of us. And as we start to build our vitality, our energy, our prana throughout our entire system, we will start to notice a difference in our hair.

So I’m very passionate about sharing about this topic. I’ve gone through many different journeys with my own hair back when I had a lot of anxiety, a lot of digestive issues, a lot of constipation. My hair simply wasn’t growing. I had it in a little bun at the nape of my neck and it was very coarse. I also went through some hair loss following my two pregnancies with my sons and was able to bring the hair back.

So I know that hair, just like the rest of our body, is dynamic where we all have this incredible intelligence inside of us. And so the hair can restructure, it can be re-nourished. That being said, it does take a little bit longer to see shifts in our hair versus our skin, which is overturning, our skin cells are overturning every month.

But within some weeks and within some months, as we start to re-nourish our hair, as we start to take this holistic approach across our Four Corner Stones, you can start to see a difference in your beautiful locks. Now even in ancient iconography, if we look back at the images of Shiva, not Taraj, which is the dancing Shiva, if you’ve seen this beautiful image in a temple or a lot of yoga studios have this image, it said that out of this…

Kimberly Snyder (02:18.006)
dance of creation, all the yoga asanas, all the yoga poses came to be. And one of the foremost aspects of that image is the flaming hair, is this image of the beautiful hair of the Shiva Nataraj. And that is said to represent the life force. It’s said to represent the energy inside of us. So again, hair is aesthetic, but it’s energy, just like everything else. And hair has a lot of power in it. It’s one of the reasons that some of the yogis didn’t cut their hair, they didn’t cut their beards through different spiritual traditions because they believed there was energy and even receptors in the hair. So I’m very excited to dive deeper into this topic. Before we do, little reminder that over on our website, mysaluna.com, S-O-

Mysolluna.com is our hub for other podcasts. I think you would enjoy articles, thousands of articles, in fact, hundreds of plant-based delicious recipes, guided meditations and more. Our digestive focused supplements. There’s so much on there. So I encourage you to check it out. And also reminder that. We see me waving to you on the screen. We have our podcast up now on YouTube on our channel. So you can check it out there or you can continue of course to listen to this on iTunes or, um, or Apple rather, Spotify, wherever you listen to our show. All right, so all that being said, let’s get right into our show today around holistic hair care.

And our question today, if you see me looking down, I’ve got my other laptop here with the research and the notes. Our question comes from Mary Ellen who lives in Louisiana. Mary Ellen, thank you so much for being part of our community and bringing this topic forward. You write, in the past year, I’ve been healing from an eating disorder.

Kimberly Snyder (04:27.102)
and have lost a lot of hair because of it. I’ve been doing what I can to restore it. However, I’m concerned about my overall hair health. Can you share any tips or suggestions on what I can do? So Mary Ellen, thank you once again for bringing this topic forward. And it’s part of our conversation around hair loss, hair thinning, aging of the hair essentially. And if you’re experiencing any of this, you are not alone.

Estimates say that around 20 million women right now are experiencing unprecedented hair loss in the United States to varying extents. So there’s a lot of factors going on here. You mentioned an eating disorder. I will say where there is some sort of disruption to our normal biological system, to our pathways, nutrition will get pulled away from the hair, which is not considered a vital organ. So this could be going through a period of eating disorders, which I knew well from high school, bulimia, throwing up your food or anorexia, a type of self-starvation. If you’ve gone through a period of stress, if you just turned in a big work project or you’re working on your doctoral program or your MBA or you just had a child or you are going through a divorce or you moved across the state or across the country, whatever it is.

There are many ways in which the stress response, which is an imbalance of hormones, includes an imbalance of hormones and it means there’s going to be more cortisol production, there’s less DHEA, there’s lots of things happening in the body when we go into stress responses. And that has an impact on your hair. As I mentioned, everything in the four cornerstones, our emotional state, our moods, our connection to self, the foods that we’re eating everything impacts.

So right away we want to, and of course COVID, we’re still in the aftermath of that. And that was when there was a lot of sharing out in the open about people’s hair loss. And it was one of the trends that we covered in the Well and Goods trend report, because there was so much of it happening. So again, you’re not alone, but everything is cyclical. Everything is

Kimberly Snyder (06:54.89)
First of all though, I want to start with that. Let’s start talking about emotional wellbeing. It’s a good thing to be in touch with yourself and to notice how much reactivity there is in an everyday basis. These reactions end up draining our energy. So we need to come into our day in a more resilient place, setting an intention, simple, hands on heart, breathing easefulness into your heart as you start the day carving out some time for your practical enlightenment meditation, your guided meditations, which I provide for you on the site.

Soon we will have the Heart Aligned Meditation, which is the heart coherence based method that we did a formal study with, which was said to really bring coherence, harmony, prevent stress responses by 29% in four weeks. So we’re not going to be able to prevent the events.

In fact, I’ll say this is the second time I’m actually recording this show because the file got corrupted. Instead of getting angry and frustrated and lamenting about having to do it twice, I chose to take some breaths. A couple of years ago, I probably would have done that, right? But we know that even two minutes of frustration can start to put into effect 1400 biochemical processes which ultimately drain our energy. So I had the choice, right? I’m gonna have to record the show anyway. Am I gonna drain myself even more or am I gonna just go with it? This is life, we flow, we pivot.

The more we flow and the less we get entangled, the less we get stressed. We just sort of see life as this flowing river. And that lesser amount of stress is also going to show up in your skin It’s also going to show up in less depletion in your hair So I want to start off right there. We just want to take stock. Do we get really out of sorts when there’s traffic? Right. Do we get really out of sorts if our child has a tantrum? If so, there’s probably a little bit of accumulation day by day week by week

Kimberly Snyder (09:12.246)
So we wanna take some time to breathe, to meditate, to be by ourselves, you know, go into stillness, take a nice bath, go into nature, whatever it’s gonna take to start to reset your energy and to do that on a regular basis, step by step.

Now let’s talk about some herbs and foods. So we’re gonna go around all the cornerstones, not in a particular order per se, because they’re all important, but I’m going to be calling out some research that I’m really excited about. So the Indian Journal of Biochemistry in 29 found that extracts of Amalaki, which had significant antioxidant activity, potentially benefited the hair by protecting against oxidative stress. Amalaki is known as the fountain of youth herb and Ayurveda. I love Amalaki. I’ve been incorporating it. It is a sour fruit known as Indian gooseberry. And I bring this up to show that herbs can be a really powerful concentrated plants, really powerful way when we choose them with intention and we incorporate them into our bodies, we can start to assimilate that energy.

And again, this research showed that it was really powerful for your hair.  Amalaki is something that was also featured in the Journal of Pharmacology and Phytochemistry in 2014, helping to enhance collagen production. Collagen is essential for maintaining the structure and strength of hair follicles, and its enhancement may support healthy hair growth. So Amalaki is a wonderful herb that I highly encourage you using.

Kimberly Snyder (11:00.562)
It’s something that I will be sharing more about. I’m very passionate about some of these powerful herbs. And these come, amalaki has been used in Ayurveda for thousands of years. So we hear about these popular Ayurvedic herbs. We hear a lot nowadays about ashwagandha and turmeric, of course, but there are others that are starting to be more studied. And we are able to take advantage of this ancient nutrition and this wisdom.

and bring it forward more and more. And so I wanna call out some of these plants because it’s a wonderful practice to start to incorporate them into your own regimen. You can add them into your smoothies, you can add them into hot water, make a tea. There’s many different ways to use them. Now let’s talk about food. The Journal of Cosmetics in 2021 showed that a compound present in broccoli and cauliflower increased

Nearly 7% of the hairs and participants suffering from alopecia. So alopecia, I’ve worked with clients that have had this illness, which affects your hair. Your hair falls out. So something in these cruciferous vegetables, the broccoli and cauliflower is helping to bring life back into the follicle. So you don’t have to have alopecia to benefit from this. Let’s work these foods in. And I’m smiling.

Because cauliflower is a favorite veggie among my children. In fact, when we’re playing chess, which we play quite a lot, or Monopoly, I’m very excited, my son has his first chess tournament next week. We will cut the, I will cut the broccoli in half. They love this. And I wash it and they’ll gnaw on it. They’ll eat a lot of it while we’re playing games. They see in the fridge, they get so excited. So they have pretty hearty digestion. They take probiotics.

They digest really well. They have a lot of that agony. But if you have a little bit of issues, you get bloated or gassy with raw cauliflower, broccoli, please of course, steam it. You can saute it. I love sauteed broccoli. I love to add it into my lentil pastas. For instance, I add it into my soup. You can cook it in different ways, but work it in. This is a powerful hair food. Now another…

Kimberly Snyder (13:20.878)
powerful food that I also incorporate. And I’ve been talking about this since my second book, Beauty Detox Foods. It was one of my top beauty foods, pumpkin seeds. And I remember way back when, this book was like 10 years ago, I remember learning about this amazing food, learning about the strength of the hair of the Native Americans and how pumpkin seeds amongst particular tribes were very

important and prevalently consumed. And now we find that in the Journal of Trichology in 2014, pumpkin seed oil was used with men that were experiencing male pattern baldness and they experienced about 30% more hair growth than those taking the placebo. Now you don’t have to take the oil.

What I have read in other research is it’s about the equivalent of four or five pumpkin seeds, well chewed, ideally soaked, sprouted. You can also get sprouted pumpkin seeds overnight. Now, I eat seed crackers and there’s a brand I like a lot called Top Seeds. There’s also Mary’s Gone Crackers and a lot of these seed crackers, of course, incorporate pumpkin seeds. So, you don’t need to eat a ton of it to get benefits.

but just a few pumpkin seeds a day, you can grind it up. We have a mortar and pestle. My younger son loves to grind things. You can put them on your salads. It is a wonderful food to incorporate for your hair and I highly recommend it and also delicious, of course. Now, another study I wanted to bring up from 2008 in the archives of dermatological research found that using bring Raj oil,

This is topically into the hair follicles helped to prevent hair loss more than Rogaine. It did say that there was, there needed to be more human research on this and it was not yet fully conclusive, but it did show promise. Now Brinraj is a Arjuvedic oil. And so this is a practice of hair massage, excuse me, like this, right?

Kimberly Snyder (15:45.394)
You’re watching me. It feels really good. You can do it yourself right now. You can touch your scalp and you can use different oils to stimulate circulation as well, along with your touch. Now, Dr. J, my Ayurvedic teacher also touts good old sesame oil, rosemary oil, diluted. You can even use, um, apple cider vinegar is more for cleansing debris off the scalp, sort of a cleanser.

And then we want to bring in some of those beautiful oils to stimulate. I have a little dropper. I admit I don’t do this super often, but I do it sometimes. He says nine drops on the scalp. So not on your hair, which would make it really oily on your scalp, which is not what you’re, where you want your hair to be oily on your hair. You want it to be on your scalp and then you want to massage it in. So we want to work in all the different ways, right? We want to work on.

what we’re applying topically, what we’re ingesting. We wanna work on our stress resilience. And we also wanna work on our spiritual growth, which affects everything. When we’re more resilient, when we’re in touch on the inside, we’re automatically more resilient because we have this inner world. The outer world doesn’t have to be so serious. We don’t have to be so stressed about trying to get validation from outside, trying to get other people to agree with us. Our goals working out in the exact timelines that we want. There’s a deeper reality. There’s this fullness and this abundance on the insight, which is the power of meditation as we consistently walk that path little by little. Even if your meditations are quite full of thought, the more we do this.

And with my new meditations, the heart align, when you drop into these deeper places inside of you, like your heart, you start to feel more harmony across your life. And harmony across your life also means coherence, it means connection. And this means that there’s better organ coherence, better organ harmony, better organ functionality inside of you. So that means better blood flow, better circulation.

Kimberly Snyder (18:05.238)
Better distribution of nutrients, and eventually this will manifest in more healthy, beautiful hair. So let’s go into some of these points a little bit more deeply. when we’re looking into foods on a daily basis that we want to incorporate. We talked about some of these seeds. We wanna make sure that we are incorporating some healthy fats as well. Fats and minerals and that is what is, so the perfect combination of seeds includes these. Excuse me, I am getting over a little cold, which both my kids have and my dad has in the home.

You can feel them a little bit nasally. Passing quickly though, lots of hot water with lemon and ginger is really getting me through and our probiotics twice a day. That’s my cold regimen. So pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds. This is a top hair food. This is something that Dr. J and Dr. Suhas, another amazing Ayurvedic doctor who’s been on here have also touted. My favorite way to get sesame seeds in is tahini.

Kimberly Snyder (19:26.818)
Tahini is ground sesame seeds. You can find it at your market. You can find it raw or roasted. I like to get the raw one, I can. And I make a salad dressing a couple times a week with four ingredients, tahini, water, lemon juice, and sea salt, and that’s it. The water thins it out. If you get the raw tahini, that’s quite thick, along with the lemon juice, which is really important for your body to absorb the Nanhim iron from the leafy greens on the salad. And iron is also important for circulation and glowing skin, circulation getting to your hair follicle.

So I highly recommend that you incorporate this tahini dressing a few times a week. It is wonderful. Or tahini in other ways. You can make tahini sauces. You can use tahini in your truffle recipes. I have my classic cacao truffle recipe that includes coconut oil and raw cacao and sea salt. You can use tahini in there. You can use tahini in other desserts. There’s lots of ways to use tahini, but it’s definitely an ingredient that I have all the time in my home. And then also protein is a very important thing for your hair. Again, we are what we assimilate and digest, not what we eat. So it’s very important that we get proteins in that we can easily assimilate.

I’m a huge fan of the Power Protein smoothie. I’m also a huge fan of drinking amino acids. I actually have some right here, right next to me. Let me pull this up. Ta-da! It’s a funny orange color. It looks a little bit like Gatorade, but these are branch chain amino acids that your body can just uptake and absorb. So I mix it into the water in the morning. I also have a lot of wonderful plant-based sources of protein. We have a lot of lentils, organic, non-GMO tempeh, beans we have in the home, lots of leafy greens, again, seeds, nuts. I mean, there’s tons and tons of protein. And I touched on another thing, hydration. Your hair needs a lot of adequate hydration so it doesn’t break and fall off. It needs hydration to be really healthy. Same thing with your skin. I recently read a…

Kimberly Snyder (21:49.438)
a study about how much more wrinkling there was in skin when we were dehydrated. And it seems so basic, hydration, but it’s amazing how many people are still dehydrated. So it’s important that we bring up these so-called basics because they’re not that basic. They’re important. They’re vital to our health, to our wellness, and yes, to our hair health.

Kimberly Snyder (22:18.366)
So one of the things that Arya Veda talks about from an energetic standpoint is that pitta energy rises up in the body to the head and the scalp. This is the fire. So you may see people who have a predominant fire energy, a predominant pitta, tend to get baldness faster in their 30s. We all have Pitta, I think, living in the modern world and the urban environments. And it’s exacerbated as we become inflamed with stress, irritation, frustration, not eating too much spicy foods, garlic, whatever it is. So we want to pull, it’s sort of like a house, the heat goes up, we wanna pull the heat down.

And one of the practices that Dr. Suhas has taught us, which we’ll link to his podcast in the show notes is to put castor oil on the bottom of your feet. Cooling oil, energetically, Ayurvedic believes it helps to pull the heat down. So when they’re overheated, it’s like searing, it’s aging, it’s aging your hair, it’s not allowing the proper hair growth. So again, everything works synergistically. We can cool the body with oils, and we can also cool this heat by not getting so stressed out in the first place.

So internally, I want to touch on the herb practice again, because I love the Ayurvedic herbs, Amalaki, Manishta, Manjista, Rinraj, not just in the oil, but these are certain compounds to incorporate that are very good for your hair. Now, you don’t want to just mix your own formulas per se. This was one of my jobs at the Ayurvedic clinic. They need to be very carefully balanced.

So I recommend that you see an Ayurvedic practitioner or you can source organic Amalaki. But when it’s used in conjunction with other plants and herbs is when it can be particularly helpful. So you can look for balanced formulas out there as well. I also recommend warm oil. This is also a very important practice of Abhyanga. There’s actually the scalp massage aspect. And along with using these

Kimberly Snyder (24:38.858)
You know, just regular scalp massage. We talked about the rosemary oil and the sesame oil, even more so when the oil is warm. Right. Warm oil on the skin is considered a highly rejuvenative practice. And you can apply that warm oil and massage it into your scalp to bring that circulation, bring that beautiful, healthy hair growth back in.

I also think it’s really important to visualize, to imagine energetically as you sit in your meditations, imagine your thick, beautiful, healthy hair coming back. Too much we focus on lack. I think we look in the mirror and we hyperfixate and we look when there’s a magnifying glass about every hair that’s missing. And it’s sort of just, in my opinion, keeps that lack energy and it keeps us hyperfixated.

And it doesn’t help to bring in that abundance, that wholeness energy, which is so healing in so many ways. It brings healing to our hair. It brings healing to our system. It brings a magnetic energy out that helps us to attract more opportunities. So let’s not hyper fixate and look in the mirror. Connect in your meditations to this wholeness inside of you and imagine it pouring out into

move forward into taking inspired action, into choosing beautiful foods, hydrating, having your seeds, having your healthy fats. I forgot to mention the avocados, the coconut oil, Udo’s oil, which is a raw oil I love as well. You can put it on your salad dressings. You can put it on top of your soups after you cook them. Healthy hydration, oils, minerals, proteins, stress management, meditation, all of this.

is wonderful for bringing your hair back. So I hope that you are inspired to try some of these tips. You can leave me a comment, you can write in, you can let me know any other questions you have around this topic or others, or any of these practices that you tried, some of them that were your favorite. And I will continue to read your questions. I love when you write to me, I love to support you. So keep everything coming.

Kimberly Snyder (26:55.466)
You can reach me at mysaloonin.com. There’s a tab for the podcast questions. You can also reach me on social at underscore Kimberly Snyder. And I will be back here Monday as always for our next show. Till then take great care. Take care of your beautiful luscious locks, but more importantly, the true self that you are, your unique energetic blueprint and all the gifts that you and you alone can bring to this planet.

with much love and gratitude. Namaste.