Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

The Unexpected Cost

I was standing in the shower, about two and a half weeks into my refeed, watching more hair shed than I had ever seen before and trying not to lose my mind.

It was one of those moments where something is so absurd your brain doesn’t know what else to do with it. Of course, this is how this goes. Forty days of prayer, fasting, discipline, rewiring my brain, and now I’m standing there wondering if I just traded emotional eating for going bald. I laughed out loud, watching it circle the drain like this was some kind of joke.

That laugh didn’t last very long. My stomach dropped so fast it felt like I missed a step on a staircase that wasn’t there. The humor vanished, instantly replaced by sheer panic. I’m just standing there watching it happen in real time, trying to figure out how I got from something that felt controlled to something that suddenly didn’t.

then there was more

And it wasn’t just shedding. It was literally changing. The hair was becoming curly in a way mine never had been before. Not a little wavy or slight difference in texture. Different hair.

My body had gone so deep into whatever it needed to do that it came back out, making entirely new creative choices. I was caught somewhere between absolute fascination and terror. I realized that this wasn’t just a mental or spiritual exercise anymore. The hair shedding didn’t conveniently stop after that first shower; it continued for weeks. Every single time it happened, there was a split second where the panic flared up again, forcing me into the deeply humbling realization that I didn’t get to control this part of the process, whether I was ready for it or not.

letting go of control

No one talks about this part. The part where you do everything right and then have to let go anyway. The few stories you do hear are usually terrifying cautionary tales about people violently rebounding and gaining everything back. So I found myself, having just executed an agonizingly precise protocol requiring an unbelievable level of restraint, and the very next directive is to completely let go of the steering wheel and trust my body to figure it out. That’s a really uncomfortable place to live.

the scale reality

The scale…well, I had no idea where it was going to land. But I had already made a decision before I got there that I was going to be okay with whatever happened, and that decision mattered more than I realized at the time. I didn’t go into this for weight loss. I had to keep reminding myself of that when the old instincts started creeping back in.

When the scale inevitably started bouncing, I chose to act as an observer; it was simply a physiological process unfolding in real-time as my body reintroduced nutrients and recalibrated itself. There was a level of scientific curiosity to it that surprised me, and at times even a quiet amusement as I waited to see where the math would eventually settle. It took a month and a half before I felt anything resembling baseline normalcy, and when the dust finally cleared, I landed about nine pounds heavier than my lowest fasting weight.

losing muscle

The body scans revealed the rest of the story, confirming that somewhere between five and ten pounds of muscle had quietly disappeared. I wouldn’t have known it from looking in the mirror or checking the bathroom scale, but I found out the exact same way every athlete eventually learns the truth: under the unforgiving weight of a barbell. I loaded two forty-five-pound plates, a working weight I had moved hundreds of times without a second thought, and the moment I pulled against the knurling, it felt heavy in a deeply humbling way.

That’s when I knew I wasn’t pushing forward. I was rebuilding. It wasn’t about capitalizing on what I had done. My body had just been through something that demanded recovery, and the smarter move, even if it didn’t satisfy the part of me that always wants to keep going, was to rebuild. Vitamins, protein, biotin, zinc, everything that supports recovery instead of depletion. I shifted my training back to lifting, not because intensity wasn’t available, but because I had learned the hard way that available and appropriate are not the same thing. There’s always a pull to do more and to push harder. For those sixty days, I had to let that go and trust the slower work. That required an entirely different, much harder flavor of discipline: the maturity to know exactly when intensity is the wrong tool for the job.

the truth about emotional eating

Then there was the other thing the refeed revealed, the one I hadn’t gone looking for and wasn’t expecting to find.

I have always known that emotional eating was a symptom. I just couldn’t find the wire it was plugged into. That wasn’t the discovery. I had done enough therapy, enough honest self-examination, to understand that food was never really about food. What I didn’t know was what exactly it was responding to, and I had spent years assuming it went back to childhood. That’s where I thought it lived for me. I did the work, serious, sustained work, and the childhood stuff got handled. I can talk about my early years the way you talk about a city you used to live in. It happened, it shaped things, it doesn’t have a grip on me anymore. So I was left with this pattern I could see clearly and a root I couldn’t locate, which is its own particular kind of frustrating.

The fast showed it andthe writing that was surfacing after proved it. It wasn’t childhood at all. It was my early twenties. A relationship where I slowly learned, without fully realizing it, that being chosen came with conditions. That being enough wasn’t a given; it was something I had to continuously earn and re-earn, and the terms could shift without notice. I absorbed that framework without understanding what I was agreeing to, and by the time I understood it, it had already become the operating system. I moved to Minnesota, built a solid life, and created enough geographical and emotional distance that I genuinely believed the chapter was closed. But it wasn’t finished; it had simply gone into the background until I stripped away enough daily noise to finally hear it.

It lived in how I approached relationships, in the opportunities I delayed, and in the years I spent telling myself I needed to become some upgraded version of myself before I was allowed to have what I wanted. The day I finally created a dating profile, I understood exactly how long I had been waiting in the wings. My heart recognized the profound shift before my brain had even finished processing the data. The fast finally showed me the invisible master it had been responding to all along.

food noise

While I was finally untangling the psychological root of the problem, something else was happening in parallel.

Every time I ate what the health world would classify as a perfectly reasonable food, sweet potatoes, oatmeal, rutabaga, a plain potato, something woke up. I call it the dragon. It’s that internal noise people sometimes call ‘food noise’; the mental static that makes food feel loud, urgent, and consuming in a way that has nothing to do with actual hunger. I had lived with it for so long, I had accepted it as just how my brain worked around food. Thirty days of logging, watching, and noting what came before and what followed. And what kept showing up, over and over, was a correlation between high-glycemic-index foods and the dragon coming back to life. Not sugar or junk food. Foods that carry a health halo, foods that sit in meal plans labeled as clean and wonderful.

Those foods, for my specific physiology, were stirring up something that lower-glycemic choices didn’t. Correlation is not causation, and I know that, but it was consistent and clear enough that I couldn’t look away. So I made a decision. I wasn’t going to keep eating in a way that made the battle harder than it had to be. Carbohydrates stayed in my diet, but at significantly lower levels, and the types shifted completely. In the two months since the fast ended, I have had three emotional eating episodes. Three. I cannot possibly overstate the magnitude of that victory, or how much of that profound behavioral shift came down to basic chemistry rather than sheer willpower or spiritual fortitude. The food itself was actively antagonizing my system, and removing the trigger altered a destructive pattern in a matter of weeks that years of dedicated therapeutic work had barely managed to dent.

the medical unknown

And then there’s this part, though I want to tread carefully because I genuinely lack a medical explanation for what happened. Roughly two months after the fast ended, my comprehensive blood work came back. Not only were all my levels normal they were good. All of them, including my thyroid, which had been functioning poorly enough that surgical intervention was a legitimate topic of discussion, had completely normalized. My doctors stared at the lab results without a single logical explanation, and I certainly didn’t have one to offer them. All I can report is that it’s now normal and educated professionals whose literal job it is to understand endocrinology were just as baffled as I was.

The exact same inexplicable phenomenon happened with my hormonal cycles, which returned to a state of normal, predictable ovulation after being wildly inconsistent or entirely absent for a very long time. Nobody has an answer for that either, so I am simply learning to sit quietly in the intersection of what I can scientifically prove and what I must simply accept as a gift. I am carrying the tangible costs, like the missing muscle and the shedding hair, right alongside the benefits that defy medical logic.

who I am now

The reality of my current life isn’t that every flaw is permanently fixed or that my old patterns have been entirely eradicated. The profound difference is that now, I actually see them coming.

It wasn’t about the scale. It was about me refusing to keep tying my worth to numbers, timelines, or anyone else’s opinion. It’s about being the kind of person who sees something that needs work and gets to work, not out of punishment or fear, but because I know myself well enough to know the difference.

If the food needs to change, I’ll change it. If a pattern shows up that needs humility to fix, I will fix it. If something needs to be said before it’s too late, I’m going to say it.

That’s what forty days bought. A different relationship with my own judgment.

For the first time in my life, I’m not trying to earn my way into being enough. I already am. I’m learning how to live like I already am.

P.S. Is my hair a little thinner? Absolutely. Is anyone else on the planet actually going to notice it? Probably not. As long as I can still secure a quality blowout, we’re moving forward. It’s growing back, so all is well.

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Dear God,

Thank You for the lessons that didn’t come easy, for the growth that came with resistance, and for the blessings that only showed up because I stayed in it. Help me honor what I’ve learned in how I live, not just in what I say, and keep me grounded in what’s true even when it would be easier to quit. Let this matter beyond me. Let me carry it in a way that actually helps the people I come into contact with, not because I have it all figured out, but because I’ve been willing to do the work. Thank You for the small moments that carried more weight than I understood at the time. Keep me steady and keep me moving forward.

Amen.