Hayley Jones, Outreach Coordinator from Maple Holistics (a haircare company that makes products using organic and natural ingredients, cruelty free) reached out to me back in April of this year to see if I’d like to try a new shampoo they developed called Silk18 and review it. It took me three months to finish the 10oz bottle and now I’m ready to write my review.
One of my favorite things about Silk18 Shampoo was how it smelled. It smelled of cinnamon bun white glaze or a really yummy vanilla frosting on a cupcake. Reading the ingredients on the bottle they use natural vanilla fragrance to achieve that yummy scent.
It’s called Silk18 because it is infused with a blend of 18 silk amino acids which help fortify hair follicles and strengthen strands to protect hair from dryness, breakage, damage, split ends, and hair fall. It touts that it helps strengthen hair and make it smoother and silkier.
Me washing my hair.
My hair has a long way to go to get fully back to it’s lusciousness before I had a baby. While I loved how it felt washing my hair, I didn’t notice a difference in my hair. This I feel has a lot to do with
having a baby and hormones causing my hair to change
bleaching my hair to achieve Ariel from The Little Mermaid shade of red last year to look like Ariel for my baby girl on her first Disney Cruise.
So it’s going to take more than three months to rehab my hair. I would have to use Silk18 for probably two years to see a difference in my hair. I am happy to say that my hair lady Gretchen told me there’s a lot of hair growth going on with my hair, so that’s promising. I’m going to continue to trim my hair every six months, give or take, to grow out my natural hair and weed out the part of my hair that went through all that processing last August and October of 2018.
I would definitely recommend Silk18 because it does make your hair smoother and easier to handle after showering and it smells great, but to repair your hair it takes more than shampooing your hair with the right shampoo to rehab your hair. This is not to say the shampoo is lacking, it’s just being honest about what bleaching and coloring your hair, and having a baby, leaves you with.
No one likes to admit to something embarrassing, but I’m about to do that here.
Eileah and I at White Water Canyon Water Park in Tinley Park, August 18, 2018.
After my daughter Eileah was born I enjoyed seven to ten months of a skinny figure, thanks to hormone fluctuation and breastfeeding, both typical after having a baby. I had put on some weight after getting married, nothing terrible, I was actually a healthy weight, but I was slim for most of my life up until 25 years of age and I liked the way I felt and looked better at about 135-140lbs (I’m 5″10 by the way). So when I magically lost all the weight I had put on after getting married and then some (I didn’t really gain much weight during pregnancy, unusual right?) after Eileah was born, I thought to myself “as long as I maintain this weight I’ll never have to worry about my weight again.” Oh so naive was I.
When we started putting Eileah on a half formula/half breastfeeding regimen in October that is the point when things slowly started to change. After early January things sped up and today, July 5, 2019 I have gained 23lbs. since October 2018. Why God, why?
So my 30th birthday rolls around and I get this idea of trying some sort of diet pill. I had tried Zantrex-3 back in 2015, but it didn’t do anything at all. This time in my research I stumbled upon a diet pill called Dexaprine. The bad news was that the first result on Google for the search term Dexaprine was an USA Today article titled “Tests find risky stimulants in weight-loss supplement.” But me being me, desperate and impatient, I went ahead and ordered Dexaprine online anyway.
The bottle tells you to take up to two pills within 24-hours, for ideal results take on an empty stomach. That felt awful! I read online on some forums that it’s better to eat before taking the pills. Someone said they would throw up from the pills, me I felt nauseous, some times I’d have to have a bowel movement, and my heart was pounding so much I felt light-headed and as if I couldn’t do anything for fear of collapsing. After two days of going through this I decided to stop. I resumed Dexaprine the following week but instead took only one pill a day, which went better than taking two pills a day. But after a few days of taking one Dexaprine pill a day, as if it were accumulating in my system, I’d start feeling nauseous and not good; and so I stopped taking Dexaprine again.
After almost two months doing this off an on schedule I have come to the conclusion that it’s not worth it taking this diet pill called Dexaprine. Especially if you’re taking two pills a day. You could get a heart attack. The half life of Dexaprine is equivalent to that of an 8-hour work day. The theory behind why it was created is using heat, generated from the heart, to melt fat and speed up the metabolism, and also to suppress appetite and boost energy. Let me tell you, I didn’t feel much of an energy burst, but my heart felt out of control. If I had a typical desk job where I was away from home for 8+ hours I would have embarrassed myself and possibly been unable to work. Thankfully I have my own business and have the luxury to take a break here and there. I’m not sure what to do with the rest of the pills now, but I would advise moms especially not to try this pill. I didn’t lose weight and I didn’t feel good. Who would want to be sick for half the day?
Common wisdom must be right then, there are no short-cuts to weightloss. I’m going to have to work out regularly and curb my portions because diet pills are definitely not a safe or smart idea. Another thing I’ve been thinking about is maybe accepting that my mom body is supposed to be at a BMI of 22.7 instead of a BMI of 19.4. My mother-in-law says I have a figure now, my husband likes the way I look too, and I can lift my daughter up more easily since my arms have more meat on them. We can’t all look the way we did at 25 forever, and who’s to say that our 20’s were us at our prime? Maybe part of being a woman is realizing that our weight at our prime is actually more than what we think we should weigh. It’s important to be in a healthy weight range, but it’s also important to feel good in your size. I’m still figuring out whether to buy myself a new wardrobe or be more serious and committed about weightloss and maintenance. But I’ve definitely learned my lesson about short-cuts like using diet pills.
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