my peace of mind.

Ohh girl, I’m both a good and bad person to ask about this.
Good because I’ve been trying to do the same thing for 6+ years and have been researching it a lot, but bad because I haven’t yet found a successful way to get my hair to grow past my genetic natural breaking point.


I tried Ovation Cell Therapy for about eight months, and stopped that about three days ago and it was the best hair decision I ever made. My hair has still not grown one inch longer the whole time I was using Ovation (which is “guaranteed” to make your hair grow faster and quicker), but it left so much residue in my hair, no matter how thoroughly I rinsed, that for the past 8 months my hair has looked gross, stringy, thinner, and oily. I am so amazed at how much of a difference shampoo makes! I just bought some organic, vegan, sulfate-free shampoo that lathers, and I literally can’t believe how light, lovely and full my hair looks now!

Other than being careful to use organic, sulfate-free shampoos that are designed for your hair type (thin, oily, dry, damaged, etc), don’t use any heat on your hair, and avoid extensions. I’ve only used a bit of heat of my hair about three times in the past year or so, and I stopped wearing my clip-in extensions that I had been wearing for years (which was really damaging to my hair and would tear it by the roots).

Dying your hair (especially with typical hair coloring products vs. something like Henna) is super damaging. I still do it sometimes (with 28shampoo dyes), but I do it far less often than I used to (probably once every four months).

I know it seems counter-intuitive, but it’s essential to get your hair trimmed once every month or two to keep it healthy and keep it from splitting off. I need to this this more often and cut more off than I do. Personally I’ve been cutting about a quarter inch off every 3 months or so for the past year, but I need to take the plunge and start cutting off closer to half an inch to an inch until the dead hair is gone. I just have a hard time getting myself to do this, since my hair genetically grows so damn slowly (1/3inch every two months) but it breaks off faster than it grows.
(Oh, and to answer your other question: I have not actually CUT my hair since 2005, but I have my mom (or occasionally the $10 place up the street) trim it for me)

It’s important to get the proper complete amino acid chains, micronutrients, and essential fatty acids in your diet in order to build your hair strong (which is what will keep it from breaking off). Biotin and prenatal vitamins are known for helping with hair and nail growth. I’m about to order some MaxiHair off of Amazon (which is the number one hair/nail supplement recommended by Whole Foods.

Just remember to be patient, and that any change in your diet/vitamin intake will not show up in the roots of your hair until three months later. Keep an eye on your nails, and if they start getting stronger and longer, it’s a sign that your hair will soon follow suit.

It’s also good to do a healing and conditioning treatment on your hair a few times per month. I’ve heard of many good ones that include Olive, Coconut and Moroccan oils, yogurt, honey, avocado, keratin,e tc. Just do some research to find which masks will be most appropriate to your hair type.

I wish you the best!! Keep me posted on your progress!

questions, comments, concerns…

“equal but different”. She also says that a result of feminism is men beating their wives since wives are more independent and men are cowards due to the role changing. Of course I was angry mostly because a lot of people listen to her. She can brainwash people into thinking silly nonsense and it’s just sad. She also said that feminists aren’t feminine. I recommended that she read The Feminine Mystique but I don’t know if she will. I’m sorry this is so long by the way.
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Haha WOW! So much illogic in one paragraph, it’s baffling.
Firstly, who is this girl that so many people are blindly following what she says?

It’s extremely difficult to have reasonable discussions with religious people whose justifications for their repressive beliefs inevitably come down to “God says so” which is a brick wall in itself because belief in the validity of the Bible is a matter of upbringing, culture, socialization and personal beliefs.

The comment about men beating their wives because they’re scared of women having the power to choose…. I’m sorry, but that is absolutely absurd. I have a hard time believing that anyone legitimately believes that. It’s the epitome of the ‘Myth of Male Weakness’, which asserts that men are so weak when it comes to self control, sexuality, etc. that instead the woman is responsible for keeping the men controlled, and that the woman is to blame for anything he does wrong (you’ve heard it before: “he’s just a guy”, “guys only want one thing”, “you’re just asking to be raped in that outfit”) — my mentor has a great piece on the subject here:

http://www.hugoschwyzer.net/2010/03/09/divided-you-fall-the-myth-of-male-weakness-and-young-womens-internalized-misogyny/.

Men are fully responsible for their actions, and women are fully responsible for their own actions as well. In no world is it logical to say that men beat women because women have rights.

Everything you’ve shared with me about her anti-rights viewpoints sound eerily reminiscent of slavery and segregation, don’t you think? Right down to her “separate but equal” doctrine. Is she also against African Americans having the right to make their choices, leave their former role as slaves, hold the same jobs as White people, work hard and aspire to be financially stable? Is it okay to say “White people beat Blacks because now they’re free”? The Bible approves of and outlines the logistics of buying and owning slaves, so aren’t we going against the word of God by letting Black people make decisions like everyone else?

Viewpoints on both slavery and gender roles are suppressive and antiquated. Why would she uphold one, but not the other?

questions, comments, concerns…

Breakfast is a glass of orange or apple juice. Lunch, glass of either juices ^ and a mixed fruit salad consisting of, orange, pineapple, peeled apple and kiwi. Dinner being a glass of water and apple.
The calorie count being somewhere around 500. Do you think theres something special about the foods being eaten or would it matter if you just stuck to roughly 500 cal of other healthy foods and It’d have a similar effect?
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A similar effect? Yeah, they have the effect of shutting down your metabolism, slowing digestion, raising and crashing your blood glucose levels, forcing your body into starvation mode so that it burns fewer calories and stores fat easily, guarantees you’ll gain all the weight back and then some, causes you to binge, leads to anemia, shuts down your organs, thins your hair, makes your nails brittle, and breaks down metabolically active muscle tissue.

The foods on this “Russian Gymnast Diet” (by the way, I guarantee you no legitimate gymnast eats this way because it’s impossible to build or maintain muscle when all your eating is simple sugars) are specifically awful for permanent weight loss. Proteins help build up the muscle (and make you more toned and boost your metabolism so weight loss is easier), and essential fatty acids allow your body to release it’s toxic fat stores rather than reserving them. Simple sugars (not to mention depriving your body of all the materials it needs to LIVE) are only going to make you binge more and gain more weight in the long run.

I’m not pro-ana, and I could never in a million years lie to someone and tell them that this was a good idea or that it would result in ANY permanent weight loss at all. I know you know that it’s important to exercise regularly, and go for netting at least 1200 calories per day to keep your metabolism going and keep your body burning fat stores (rather than leaving you drained, squishy, and with fat that flies back on the second you binge).

questions, comments, concerns…

Absolutely. Of course you’re going to feel a bit bloated at first. You’ve been dehydrating yourself, so your body intentionally retains all the water it can. It’s just like how when you bring your body into starvation mode, it tries to hold on to all the fat that it can. Once you’re drinking water regularly (and eating plenty of high-water fruits and veggies), your cells will have all the hydration they need and your body will have no reason to retain the water, just as long as you continue to drink it regularly.

Drinking enough water detoxifies your body, boosts your metabolism, helps clean your system, nourishes your cells, gives you energy, suppresses your appetite, warm water satiates you, it helps all of your organs run more efficiently, etc.

questions, comments, concerns…

The workouts being: jumping jacks, knee touches, push ups, crunches, leg raises. Doing about 50 or so of each. Do you think I’m going to be able to lose the weight I want with doing these workouts at the same time as eating healthily?
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It’s not true at all that you can’t lose weight and tone, in fact it’s the ideal way to lose weight. What is true is that you cannot build a significant amount of muscle mass while you’re on a calorie deficit because building muscle requires a lot of calories. The thing to do is work out regularly, eat plenty of protein, and do strength training so that your body breaks down your adipose tissue and glycogen stores in order to fuel and build your muscle. Muscle will make you look slimmer and toned, and it is also metabolically active, which means that the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism will be, and the more calories you burn just living your day to day life. It will make it much easier to lose weight if you’re burning more calories all throughout the day.
Those are great exercises, especially if you do them all in a row so that you get your heart rate up. It’s only when your heart rate is between 70-80% of is max rate than you’re going to be burning pure fat and notably improving your cardiovascular and respiratory health.

questions, comments, concerns…

     Last week, the UK lingerie chain Ann Summers launched a new campaign using what the company claims are “real women” from across England as its models. Theirs is the latest example of authenticity advertising, a trend that dates back to 2004, when Dove launched its iconic “Real Beauty” campaign. In the 21st century, “realness” is now a marketing mainstay. But it’s also become a divisive concept, as those who fall short of what’s “real” are inevitably derided as “fake.”

     It’s been nearly a decade since the release of 2002’s Real Women Have Curves, the film that made America Ferrera a star and served as likely inspiration for what Dove would soon develop. As charming as the movie was, the darker implication of the phrase was hard to miss: if real women have curves, then perhaps women who don’t are “less real.” A new double-bind for women was born: those who met the skinny ideal could now be labeled “unreal,” and those who were still shamed for being heavy were now encouraged to take some sort of comfort in being more “legitimate” than their slender sisters. As a result, the real/fake dichotomy became as common — and in some ways, as toxic — as the old virgin/whore dynamic.

     For the teens I work with, “fake” has multiple meanings. It can mean someone who is smarmy or excessively nice. But it also is often used by young women to describe someone who is too concerned with external appearances. When I asked some of my students for explanations of how they use the word, Anna, 18, said, “A girl is fake when it’s obvious she’s trying too hard to be pretty or to fit in.” When asked to define “real,” Anna gave away another aspect of the problem. “To me, being real means showing you’re comfortable in your own body. If you’re beautiful, what makes you real is that your beauty seems effortless.”

     I’ve heard similar definitions of these terms from other students. If “real” means the apparent absence of anxiety about one’s appearance, and “fake” means an obvious eagerness to look good and fit in, then women who — for whatever reason — can’t pull off a show of “effortlessness” get labeled inauthentic. As my friend Shawna, 36, put it: “I can’t help feeling that terms like real and fake are just new ways to make pretty people feel superior. I feel more comfortable wearing makeup when I leave the house; does that make me less ‘real’ than the supermodel lookalike down my block who can get away with going out bare-faced?”

     “Fake” and “real” are particularly common terms to describe women who have — or haven’t had — cosmetic surgery. But of course, breasts that have been enhanced with silicone are still real, just as a molar with a gold filling is still a real tooth. Nonetheless, there’s been a notable backlash against plastic surgery in recent years, with a dramatic drop in cosmetic procedures performed on teens. (The drop even slightly precedes the downturn in the economy, suggesting that the decline is as much due to a changing culture as to economics.) Good news, perhaps — but also another opportunity to use accusations of inauthenticity to criticize women who, for perfectly good reasons, choose to go under the knife. For women who do still choose boob jobs, for example, there’s pressure to come up with a “real good” reason (other than vanity) for having surgery. Margaret, 40, wrote: “Sometimes I lie and claim that I had them done as part of a reconstruction from a mastectomy. That seems somehow more ‘legitimate’ a reason.”

     Men are not immune from the pressure to be “real.” It’s been nearly 30 years since the tongue-in-cheek bestseller Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche spoofed an earlier generation’s Guy Code. But today, the “real men” trope is everywhere. “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” is Ashton and Demi’s campaign to shame pedophiles, replete with the unspoken implication that “real men” never have to pay for sex with women of any age. On Monday, Herman Cain forgot how he was supposed to feel about Libya but did remember his firm conviction that real men like meaty pizzas. And in keeping with the title of the movie that started the authenticity craze, the slender-shaming Facebook group unhelpfully known as Real Men Like Curves, Only Dogs Go For Bones has well over 100,000 fans.

     When I ask my students at the beginning of my Men and Masculinity course about “real men,” I get responses like, “real men aren’t afraid to show affection,” or “real men like to dance,” or “real men can cry in public and not care what anyone else thinks.” My students want to subvert the traditional “sturdy oak” model of masculinity. They mean well. But all they’re doing is swapping one unattainable ideal for another. Just as “real women have curves” delegitimizes countless slim women, “real men aren’t afraid to cry” shames those men who for any number of reasons are awkward about public displays of emotion. The contemporary “real man” ideal presents itself as inclusive, but it’s just another cultural straitjacket.

     For teens and twenty-somethings raised on computer-generated images and “reality TV” that is anything but, authenticity is a particularly elusive and compelling ideal. When so many things — from politician’s promises to their own Facebook profiles — seem fake to this generation, it’s not surprising that the “real” has taken on a special allure. But like everything else, that allure has been commodified. So when a company like Ann Summers promises to run ads featuring “real women” who are not “professional models,” it’s worth remembering that all of the other models in the world — even those who wear size 0 —are genuine people too.

—Hugo Schwyzer


(A fabulous post from Jezebel written by my mentor and professor, Hugo Schwyzer. I am SO tired of hearing that real women have curves. Body types are genetic, and I am no less of a woman because I don’t have boobs and wideset hips.)