The greathair diet

Can what you put in your mouth affect what grows out of your head? Writer

Rebecca Harrington, who’s made a speciality

of reporting on (and trying out) celebrities’ eating regimens, takes on a diet that just might

transform your hair.

I’ve never thought my hair was a particular strength of mine. It’s a melange of several nondescript colours. It pus out in the back in startling and unexpected lumps no matter how much I brush it. It has never grown longer than my shoulders, despite years and years of good-faith e ort. And then I got pregnant.

For 40 weeks (OK, maybe just the last 20), my hair looked awesome. It was also the only thing that looked awesome on me, so I paid a fair bit of attention to it. It seemed like it had decided to be brown. It was very shiny. I was so pleased that I spent enormous amounts of energy attempting to blow-dry it with a round brush. I even bought an expensive metal headband. And then I had the baby.

The baby was so great that at first I actually didn’t notice that my hair had gone back to its old ways: dull, unshapely, extremely puy. The di erence was that now I had seen the promised land. I knew what truly great hair looked like, and I knew I could have it if I just used a round brush and was pregnant. Could I ever go back to my former glory without gestating a new human? According to doctors and the Internet, I could. I just had to eat very specific foods and forgo some aspects of eatingrelated joy.

This, according to science: “The most important thing for hair health, above all, is a balanced diet,” says dermatologist Dr Patricia Farris. She pins lustrous hair on a steady diet of protein sources, like lean meats, beans and Greek yogurt. High ORAC-value foods (that means foods that are very high in antioxidants) also aid the cause. This includes expected things such as berries and dark chocolate, and unexpected things such as oregano and cloves, which you can dump in and on anything.

Everything is fun and games until the doctor tells you sugar must be avoided at all costs. “Sugar upregulates inflammation throughout the body. We now know that inflammation plays a huge role in hair loss,” says Dr Farris. Sugar also indirectly affects metabolism of hormones, which, we also now know, is a bad thing for hair.

Armed with this empowering new information, I decided I would radically overhaul my diet in search of excellent hair. Maybe it wouldn’t help, but it never hurts to try. And it sounded a lot better than many other diets I had tried in my life of doing diets as a job, which, by the way, is my job as a columnist at a magazine. This one would be di erent, mostly because of all the oregano.

PREPARATION

As a new mom, I didn’t really have time to spare sourcing meals that represented every colour of the rainbow. I barely had time to shower, so I decided to sign up for a mealdelivery service that delivers plantbased, high-protein, high-ORAC meals directly to your door. I would also make salmon as much as humanly possible for dinner, no matter how sick of it I got. And I would dump oregano on everything that wasn’t particularly antioxidant friendly as a precautionary measure. Supermodels and other beautiful civilians love to take biotin supplements and report excellent hair as a result, but I was breastfeeding and cautious of pills. Instead, I would eat seeds and mushrooms. I would also invest in styling lessons for flourish. Soon my hair would resemble that of Gisele Bündchen, who has had two children and yet still boasts cartoonishly beautiful hair, probably because she eats only leaves and nuts. (I ate like Gisele and Tom Brady for four full days in 2016 and felt ravenously hungry, if marginally more like a human trophy, because of it.)

“Beauty is already pain – it shouldn ’t require an additional aftertaste”

WEEK 1

My delivery meals came twice a week in a very nice black cooler bag that I wanted to save for a fun outdoor picnic, even though I’ve never gone on a picnic in my entire life. After I had accumulated three cooler bags, I started throwing them out. It’s kind of against the ethos of the thing, but whatever. I know myself. I don’t like eating outside.

For breakfast, you either had some kind of parfait of avocado mixed with seeds, or granola made out of seeds, or some very seed-based thing that resembled a mu–n. Mu–ns would be studded with pumpkin seeds instead of sugar. Breads would be so laden with chia that they were actually very heavy when I cut into them. If a ‘bread’ is actually a mixture of seeds, is it really a bread? This is a philosophical question that I would like you to consider for the remainder of this story.

In the end, however, chia seeds are extremely high ORAC-value foods, and mu–ns in general are not, so I dealt with it. After all, I only had approximately 30 seconds to eat anything at all before the baby decided she needed a change of scenery, and I wasn’t going to waste my critical faculty parsing how it tasted. (It

tasted like seeds.) After a couple of muns, I even started to prefer the seed-based baked goods. They were much less labour-intensive than putting milk into the prepackaged granola.

The lunches were usually salads or bowls full of vegetables with a dressing-like sauce on them. These were full of high-ORAC, green leafy vegetables. Eating them also kind of kept me awake, although I can’t really say why. Perhaps it was the bitter taste of all that uncooked spinach.

For dinners, I made salmon with a mustard glaze, salmon with four spices, and just regular old salmon. I ate chicken with lots of parsley on it – a high ORAC-value herb – and I had sides of sweet potato constantly. By the end of the week, I was feeling pretty good, although I still hadn’t brushed my hair and thus couldn’t really see whether my diet was making any visible di„erence.

WEEK 2

My mother came to my apartment to visit the baby. I decided, although she hadn’t asked me, to get even more prepared meals so that she too could live the meal-delivery life. Deranged with exhaustion, I was an evangelist by this point. Organic delivery food had become my religion.

“Mom, it’s so great. You’ll love it!” I said over the phone to her. My mother tentatively agreed to try a couple of meals.

She was not impressed. “Why does this mun taste like seeds?” she kept asking me. “Get me a croissant.”

“This is a croissant made of seeds! It’s the same thing.”

It was no use – she had been defeated. We went to get burgers instead, but I doused my burger in tomato sauce, even though I hate tomato sauce, because it has a high-ORAC value. As if by magic, she organically complimented my hair (I had brushed it).

WEEK 3

Experts say it takes two to three months to witness the aesthetic fruits of a high-ORAC diet, but they are all unequivocally wrong – my diet was in its third week, and my hair was resplendent. It was shinier than before, plus it had more body. My styling, however, was a mess. All I did was scrape it back into a tight ponytail. An onlooker couldn’t even tell the glories of the high-ORAC diet. Salmon alone doesn’t a great head of hair make. But how could I achieve an e„ortless daily hairdo that didn’t require a round brush, the proper use for which evades me? Would I ever bear a passing resemblance to Gisele?

I headed to a spa in the city. I told the stylist I wanted a cool yet insouciant style that required no e„ort, and she told me how to get French-girl hair. I had never in my life been cool enough for French-girl hair. Still, I suppose, the mark of really beautiful hair is the ability to both embody the French spirit and not look completely itinerant.

This is how you do French-girl hair, apparently: you constantly brush your hair whenever there is a break at any time, like when you’re watching TV or preparing a burger made entirely out of beetroot. Then you’re supposed to go into the shower and shampoo your hair but not put any conditioner in. Finally, you’re supposed to not brush your hair, and let it air-dry with salt spray in it. This last part seemed particularly insane to me. How was I supposed to not brush my hair? What would it even look like? A cat’s back? A banana bread made only of seeds? I decided I couldn’t even think about it. I went home and ate out of stress.

WEEK 4

I returned to my hometown for Easter, which is a tough festival for maintaining a high-ORAC, low-sugar diet. There’s so much candy around and so few antioxidants. I put a lot of cloves on my ham, but did that really o„set the many sweets I was eating? I also decided to attempt French-girl hair here, in a more relaxed and less judgmental environment. I brushed my hair obsessively, and then shampooed and liberally applied beach sprays. Then, critically, I didn’t brush it, although the temptation was strong.

As my hair dried, however, I realised: this diet works. My hair was so much silkier even without a brush. I might keep myself on high-ORAC foods forever, just maybe not the random spices. I was planning to put oregano on my ham, and I chickened out. Beauty is already pain – it shouldn’t require an additional bitter aftertaste.

“Experts say it takes months to see results, but they are wrong – m y diet was in its third week, and my hair w as resplendent”