Cholesterol Wellness Hub Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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My sister flew in from Phoenix on a Thursday and had me at the kitchen table with a legal pad by Friday morning. She didn't unpack. She didn't take her shoes off. She walked in the front door of our mama's house, took one look at me sitting on the porch swing with a coffee, and said, "Bren. We're talking tomorrow. Just you and me. I'll come to your house at 8." Then she went inside to hug our mother. That's how Marilyn does things. She's been doing them that way since we were kids. She was the one who told me my first husband was cheating before I'd figured it out. She was the one who called me the day our daddy died and said "Sit down, I've already called Reverend Doyle, he's on his way over to you." She's the one who books the flights and picks the caskets and stands at the front of the room and gets everybody through the parts of life you can't get through alone. But I hadn't seen her in almost two years. Not since the pandemic pushed everything sideways and then Bill, her husband, got sick and then better and then sick again. She'd been living in Sun City, outside Phoenix, for 6 years by then. And I'd been here in Grinnell, Iowa, in the same house I'd raised my kids in, doing what I always do, which is get up, put the coffee on, and get through the day. She was in town for Mama's 85th birthday. The whole family was coming Saturday. She'd flown in two days early on purpose. I knew what the two days were for. I'd known before she even landed. My name is Brenda. I'm 57 years old. I've lived in Grinnell my whole life except for the two years I lived in Des Moines right after my first marriage fell apart. I work the front desk at a dental office off Highway 146. I've got two grown boys, one in Cedar Rapids and one who moved to Denver last year for a job I still don't understand. My second husband Wayne drives a truck for a fertilizer company out of Newton and he's on the road four nights out of seven. And for the last three years, my cholesterol numbers have been climbing like they were trying to prove something to me. I want to tell you what happened when Marilyn came to my house that Friday morning. Because it's the reason I'm sitting here typing this instead of getting my third round of bloodwork done next month with the same look on my face I've had for the last two years. But first I need to back up. The numbers started going up right around when I turned 55. My doctor at the time was Dr. Fenton, who's been at the same clinic on Main Street since before my boys were in kindergarten. He's a nice man. He also retired 6 months ago and I miss him. At my 55th physical he pulled up the panel and said, "Bren, your LDL's at 168. That's higher than I want to see it." I told him I'd walk more. I'd cut back on the butter. I'd start eating oatmeal in the mornings. He said, "That's a good place to start. Come back in 6 months." I came back in 6 months. It was 172. Then it was 178. Then 184. Every time I went in, I'd sit in that little exam room with the crinkly paper on the table and I'd promise him I was trying. And I was trying. I switched to skim milk. I started buying the ground turkey instead of the ground beef. I made oatmeal every morning until I couldn't stand the smell of oatmeal. I ate salmon twice a week even though I don't like fish. I walked the loop around the Ahrens Park every morning I wasn't opening the office at 7. Nothing moved. Or if it moved, it moved the wrong way. Dr. Fenton finally sat me down at my last visit before he retired and said, "Bren, I think we need to start you on a statin. I've been holding off because I know how you feel about them, but we're getting to a place where I can't keep holding off in good conscience." I told him I'd think about it. I didn't want to take a statin. Not because I'd read a bunch of articles. Because my mama had been on one for 11 years and she'd gone from the strongest woman I knew to a woman who fell asleep in her recliner at 6 PM and couldn't remember what day it was. And my daddy had been on one for 8 years before he died, and by the end he was rubbing his legs at night and saying they burned like he'd walked through fire. I don't know for sure the statins did that. Nobody knows for sure. But I watched them both fade, and I knew what they were on, and I wasn't in a rush to sign myself up for the same slow disappearing act. So I didn't fill the prescription. And I didn't tell Wayne. And I didn't tell Marilyn. That was the mistake with Marilyn. Because Marilyn had been calling our mama every Sunday afternoon, and our mama had been telling her everything, including the parts I'd told our mama in confidence over Sunday dinner. Which is how Marilyn showed up on my porch Friday morning at 7:52 with a legal pad, a Bic pen, and two large coffees from the Casey's on the way over. She sat down at my kitchen table. She put the coffees down. She took the lid off hers and blew on it. She said, "Bren. Show me your numbers." I said, "Mare, I don't know if I have them." She said, "Yes you do. You keep them in the drawer next to the microwave. Mama told me. Go get them." I got them. She spread them out on the table. The last four blood panels. She lined them up in order. She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. She's got the same glasses our mama had. Little gold frames. She said, "Brenda. This is not okay. And you know it's not okay. And you're not going to talk yourself out of this appointment with me the way you talked yourself out of the appointment with Dr. Fenton." I started to argue. I always argue with Marilyn. It's a thing we do. I've been arguing with her since 1974. She held up her hand. She said, "I'm not here to fight you. I'm here to tell you something. Because I love you. And I already lost Daddy. And I'm not losing you at 62 to something I could have said something about at 57." That shut me up. That's Marilyn. Then she said, "I want to tell you about my neighbor Charlie." Marilyn's neighbors in Sun City are all retirees, most of them from somewhere else, most of them with a whole life behind them before they got to the desert. Charlie, she said, was a retired PA. He'd spent 34 years working in cardiology in a hospital in Cleveland. Two of those years at the Cleveland Clinic. He was 71. He walked past her house every morning at 6:30 with his golden retriever. She used to be out watering her cactus when he'd go by, and eventually the little wave turned into a chat, and eventually the chat turned into Charlie coming over for coffee on Saturday mornings when Bill was still napping. She said, "Bill got put on a statin after his second bypass. You remember. You called and I told you." I remembered. She said, "The statin did what it was supposed to do to his numbers. But his energy was gone. Six months in he was napping twice a day. His legs ached. He couldn't work in the garage anymore. He'd sit in his chair and just stare at the TV. And when I brought it up at his cardiologist, they told me those were normal side effects and we should manage them. Manage them. That was the word." She sipped her coffee. She said, "I mentioned it to Charlie on a Saturday. Not for advice. Just talking. And Charlie set his cup down and he told me something I've been thinking about ever since." She looked at me straight. "He said, 'Marilyn, most people don't understand what cholesterol actually is or why it becomes a problem. They think it's the cholesterol itself. It isn't. It's what happens to the cholesterol along the way.'" She said Charlie explained it like this. The cholesterol in your bloodstream isn't the villain by itself. It's a raw material. Your body makes it, uses it, sends it around. The problem starts when the cholesterol gets damaged on its trip through your bloodstream. Damaged how? By something called oxidation. And when cholesterol gets oxidized, it changes. It becomes sticky. It's the sticky, damaged form that grabs onto the walls of your arteries and starts building up. The healthy cholesterol just floats through. The oxidized cholesterol sticks. And here's the part that stopped Marilyn cold when Charlie said it, and stopped me cold when Marilyn said it to me at my kitchen table: Your body notices when cholesterol gets stuck to your artery walls. And what does your body do when it notices? It makes more cholesterol to replace what got stuck. Because your body needs cholesterol for a hundred different things. It's not going to just let the supply run low. So the number goes up. And the more that gets stuck, the more your body makes. And the more your body makes, the more there is to get oxidized. And the more that gets oxidized, the more that gets stuck. That's a cycle. That's the cycle nobody had ever explained to me. Every doctor I'd ever seen had told me my number was too high and I should lower it. Nobody had ever told me why it kept going up in the first place. Nobody had told me about the oxidation. Nobody had told me that lowering the raw cholesterol without addressing the oxidation was like emptying a bathtub with the faucet still running. The statin, Charlie told Marilyn, tells your liver to make less cholesterol. Which lowers the number. But it doesn't do anything about the oxidation. So the oxidation keeps happening. And your body keeps having to make cholesterol anyway. So the liver has to work against itself. And other things get sacrificed in the process. Your energy. Your muscles. Your memory. Your CoQ10 levels, which are what your cells use to make energy in the first place. Marilyn asked Charlie what people should be doing instead. Or on top of it. Charlie told her about a fruit. From India. He said the compounds in it help protect the cholesterol from oxidation in the first place. Which means less of it turns into the sticky form. Which means less of it gets stuck. Which means the body's replacement cycle can start to ease up. Which means the number can actually come down. Not because you forced it. Because the actual problem is being addressed for the first time. The fruit was Amla. Indian gooseberry. Marilyn had never heard of it. She wrote it down. She looked it up that night. She bought a bottle of a brand called Auniva. She started Bill on it and she started herself on it, because she said if it was that important she wasn't going to sit out. She looked at me across my kitchen table. She had that Marilyn look. The look that says she's about to hand me something and I'm going to take it. She reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle. Set it on the table between us. She said, "Bren. Bill's LDL is down 34 points. He got his last panel two weeks ago. He mowed the yard last Saturday for the first time in a year. He's back in the garage. He's not napping in the afternoon. His cardiologist actually asked him what he was doing different and Bill told him and the cardiologist wrote it down." She said, "I brought you a bottle because I knew you'd argue. I knew you'd say you needed to think about it. I knew you'd tell me you'd look into it and then you wouldn't. So I'm handing it to you. It's already here. All you have to do is take it." I sat there for a long time. Long enough for both our coffees to go cold. Then I said, "How long did it take Bill to feel it?" She said, "About 5 weeks for the energy. Cholesterol numbers took a full 90 days. But the energy came first. He was awake again by week 6." I picked up the bottle. Read the label. Two capsules a day. Marilyn said, "Please, Bren. For Mama. She's already outlived one of her kids and she cannot outlive two." I started that afternoon. I want to tell you what happened next in the order it happened. Not the summary version. The real version. Week 1, nothing. I took the capsules with my coffee and I waited for something and nothing happened and by Sunday I was already starting to doubt. Week 2, still nothing that I could put my finger on. But I noticed that I hadn't been reaching for the afternoon nap the way I usually did. I'd been coming home from the office and starting dinner instead of laying down on the couch first. I didn't think much of it. I chalked it up to spring weather. Week 3, something shifted. I woke up before my alarm on a Tuesday. That doesn't sound like much. It hadn't happened in probably two years. I was so surprised I lay there and stared at the ceiling for 15 minutes trying to figure out what was different. I finally got up and made coffee and went out on the porch and sat in the swing and watched the sun come up over the neighbor's roof. Week 5, Wayne came home from a run to Omaha and hugged me at the door and said, "You look different, Bren." I said, "Different how." He said, "I don't know. Awake." Week 6, I walked the Ahrens Park loop and I did it in 42 minutes instead of the 52 it usually took me. I hadn't been trying to walk faster. My legs just wanted to go faster. Week 8, I called Marilyn and I told her I felt like myself in a way I hadn't felt in probably 5 or 6 years. I hadn't realized how much I'd faded until the fade started reversing. Week 12, I got new bloodwork. My LDL had come down 28 points. I sat in my new doctor's office. Her name is Dr. Vang. She's about 40 and she talks fast and she doesn't have time to hold your hand but she looks you in the eye. She said, "Brenda, this is real. What are you doing different?" I told her. She wrote it down. She said she'd never heard of it. She said she wasn't going to tell me to stop. She said, "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. And come back in 6 months." I called Marilyn from the parking lot. I sat in my car and I cried a little and I told her I loved her and I told her thank you for being the sister who books the flights and picks the caskets and shows up at 7:52 on a Friday morning with a legal pad and a bottle in her bag. She cried too. Then she made a joke about how I finally listened to her for once and I told her not to get used to it. I'm on my 5th bottle now. Wayne started taking it about 8 weeks ago. He's been trucking for 22 years and his back and his numbers have both been telling on him. He says his afternoons on the road are different now. Less foggy. His last physical, his HDL had come up, which the company doctor told him he'd been trying to get him to do for years. Mama turned 86 this last April. Marilyn flew in again. We did the family dinner at my house this time. Marilyn and I stood at the sink washing dishes afterward, arm to arm, the way we used to when we were 12 and 14, and she looked at me sideways and said, "You look like you again." I said, "I feel like me again." That's what I want to tell you. If you've been sitting on a stack of bloodwork in the drawer next to your microwave and pretending you're going to fix it with oatmeal. If your husband has been on a statin for 8 years and he's not the man you married anymore. If you've been telling yourself the tiredness is just what your 50s and 60s look like and the number on the paper is just what it is. If nobody has ever explained to you what your cholesterol is actually doing in your body and why it keeps going up no matter what you eat. The thing my sister put on my kitchen table is called Auniva Amla. It's made from that Indian gooseberry Charlie told her about at his kitchen counter in Sun City. Two capsules a day. You can order it at the link below. They have a 90 day money back guarantee. If you take it for 90 days and nothing happens, you send back what's left and they refund you every penny. Marilyn told me about the guarantee when she was trying to get me to try it. She said, "Bren, what have you got to lose." I couldn't come up with an answer. You probably can't either. 👉 https://auniva.co/amla/33 P.S. About the guarantee. I want to say it again because it matters. 90 full days. Not 30. Not 60. 90. That's on purpose. Because that's about the timeline it takes for the oxidation cycle to actually start easing up and for your numbers to reflect real change. Nobody at the pharmacy has ever offered me my money back on anything. Not once in 40 years of being a grown woman have I gotten a refund from a pharmacy because a pill didn't do what it was supposed to do. Think about who is that confident in what they sell. P.P.S. If you're ordering, get the multi bottle option. I ran out at the end of month 3 and had to wait 6 days for the next bottle and I could feel the fade starting to come back in those 6 days. It was subtle. Slower mornings. A little foggier in the afternoons. I keep 2 bottles on hand at all times now. Marilyn keeps 3. She's Marilyn. P.P.P.S. If your sister is trying to tell you something and you keep brushing her off, listen. That's all. Listen. My sister flew across the country and sat at my kitchen table with a legal pad and refused to leave until I heard her out. And I got 20 more years back because of it. Maybe more. If somebody who loves you is trying to tell you something and you keep changing the subject, stop changing the subject. Sit at the table. Take the bottle. Try it for 90 days. You have nothing to lose except the fade. P.P.P.P.S. Mama says hi. She wants you to know she's proud of both her girls. She wants you to know she meant to say something years ago but she was scared to interfere. She wants you to know it isn't too late. Not for you. Not for your husband. Not for anybody sitting there staring at a bloodwork report wondering if this is just what the rest of it looks like. It isn't. It's what it looks like right now. It's not what it has to look like from here. 👉 https://auniva.co/amla/33

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Feel Like Yourself Again

"This actually worked, thank you so much." - Emily T.