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A client sat down in my chair on a Tuesday in February and I didn't recognize her. I'm not exaggerating. I had to look at the appointment book to make sure it was her. Denise Whitlow. 6 PM. Cut and color. Same appointment she'd had every 6 weeks for the last 12 years. The woman in my chair was Denise. Same eyes. Same nervous way of asking if she should grow out her bangs. But she was 14 pounds lighter than the woman who'd sat in that same chair 6 weeks earlier. Her cheekbones were back. The puffiness around her eyes was gone. Her skin had a color in it. Her hair, which I had been touching every 6 weeks for over a decade, felt thicker between my fingers. She caught me staring at her in the mirror. She smiled. A weird, knowing smile. She said, "Tina. Sit down. We need to talk." I pulled the stylist stool over and sat. She said, "Honey. I think I had something living in me." My name is Tina. I'm 54 years old. I cut hair for a living at a small place called The Coastal Cut on the south side of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I've been doing hair since I was 21. Same town. Same chair. Same kind of clients, mostly women between 40 and 70 who come in every 4 to 6 weeks and tell me everything about their lives while I trim their ends and touch up their roots. I know my clients better than I know most of my own family. I know when their husbands are cheating before they do. I know when their kids are in trouble before their kids tell them. I know when somebody's sick before they've gotten the bloodwork back. I am also, I want to be honest with you, a woman who has been falling apart for about 6 years. Not in any dramatic way. Just slowly. Quietly. The way most women I know fall apart. My pants don't button by 2 in the afternoon. I have two sizes of jeans in my closet and I rotate through them depending on the day. My belly is bloated in a way that has nothing to do with what I eat. I cut out gluten for 4 months last year and it didn't change anything. I cut out dairy. Nothing. I tried that cabbage soup thing my cousin told me about. Nothing. I wake up at 3 in the morning almost every night. Not anxious. Not having to pee. Just awake. Eyes open. Looking at the ceiling. I usually fall back asleep around 5 just in time for my alarm at 6:30. By 4 in the afternoon I would punch a hole through the wall for a Reese's Cup. I keep a bag of those mini ones in my station drawer. My boss thinks they're for the clients. They're not. They're for me at 4:15 when I cannot stand up one more minute without something sweet hitting my bloodstream. My hair, the thing I make my whole living off of, has been thinning at the part for 3 years. I see it every morning when I do my own hair before work. The skin showing through. The piece I have to comb a little differently now to hide it. My memory has gotten foggy in a way I blame on perimenopause. I forget names. I forget what I came into the bathroom for. I lose my train of thought mid-sentence with a client and have to play it off like I was just thinking. I went to my doctor about all of this 2 years ago. She did bloodwork. She said everything looked normal. She said, "Tina, this is just what happens to women in their 50s." So that's what I told myself. This is just what happens. I had no idea it wasn't supposed to. Denise is 56. She's a paralegal at a law firm downtown. She and her husband have a lake house at Grand Lake that they go to almost every weekend in the summer. She has two grown daughters and three grandkids and she is one of those women who I always thought just naturally had it together. She showed up every 6 weeks. She booked her next appointment before she walked out the door. She tipped me 25% every time. In our 12 years together I had watched her change in the slow, gentle way most of my clients change. A few pounds here. A little more salt in the hair there. A little more tired around the eyes some months. But the woman in my chair that Tuesday was not the woman from December. I picked up a strand of her hair and rubbed it between my fingers. I said, "Denise. What did you do." She said, "Tina, you know me. You know I don't do anything dramatic. I haven't done a diet. I haven't done a cleanse. I didn't get on one of those shots." I said, "Then what." She took a breath. She looked at me in the mirror like she was deciding how much to tell me. She said, "I'm going to sound crazy. So just hear me out." I said okay. She said, "About 4 months ago my sister in Houston came to visit. Hadn't seen her in 2 years. She walked into my house and she looked at me and she said, Denise, what is wrong with you." She said, "I thought she was being rude. But she sat me down at my kitchen table and she went through this list of things. Like she had it memorized. Are you waking up at 3 in the morning. Are you bloated by lunch. Are you craving sugar in the afternoon. Is your hair thinning. Is your skin puffy. Are you tired even after you sleep." She said, "Tina. She named every single thing I had been ignoring for 5 years. Things I had never even told my husband. Things I had decided were just my age." She said, "And then she told me what she thought was going on. And I want to tell you what she told me. Because I think it's the same thing happening to you. I've been watching you for 12 years. You've been getting more tired every appointment for 3 years now." I just looked at her in the mirror. I didn't even pick up my scissors. I said, "Tell me." Denise said her sister had been through the same thing 2 years before. Her sister had moved to Houston from Mexico City when she was a teenager. Had grown up drinking tap water her whole childhood. Had eaten street food. Had owned dogs and cats her whole adult life. Had loved sushi. Had walked barefoot on grass and on beaches. So have I, by the way. So have you. So has every single person who's reading this. Her sister had told her that the things you pick up over a lifetime, the tiny things, the microscopic things, the things you got from a glass of water on vacation in 1998 or a piece of bad chicken at a wedding in 2004 or a kiss with the wrong person in college, those things tend not to just leave on their own. They settle in. Mostly in your gut. Sometimes in your tissues. Wherever your body is warm and dark and quiet. And they don't sit there as bare little visitors. They build a layer around themselves. A slimy coating. Like a fort. They get inside, they build the wall, and they live behind the wall. Your immune system, which is supposed to find things like that and address them, walks past the wall every single day and doesn't see what's behind it. Denise's sister called it a biofilm. I'd never heard that word before in my life. Denise said, "Tina. They're in there pulling nutrients from your food before your body absorbs them. That's why you can eat a real breakfast and be exhausted by 10. That's why you can sleep 8 hours and feel like you slept 3. They're putting out byproducts that mess with the signals between your gut and your brain. That's why you wake up at 3 AM. That's why you crave sugar at 4. They're not feeding you. They're feeding themselves, with what was supposed to be yours." I was just sitting there with my hand on her chair. She said, "And here's the thing. Most cleanses, those teas, those detoxes, that fasting stuff, those go right past the slime. The slime is the whole point. The wall is the whole point. If something doesn't touch the wall, it doesn't matter what it does in your gut. The wall stays. What's behind the wall stays." I want to slow down here. Because I want you to understand what was happening to me in my own head while Denise was talking. She wasn't describing somebody else's problem. She was describing me. Every line. Every single thing she said. The bloating. The 3 AM wake-ups. The 4 PM sugar pull. The hair thinning at the part. The skin going puffy around the eyes. The fog. The tired that sleep didn't fix. I had a name for every one of those things. The bloating was my hormones. The 3 AM was my age. The sugar was my willpower failing. The hair was genetics. The skin was lack of water. The fog was perimenopause. The tired was just being 54. I had a perfectly reasonable explanation for every single thing that was wrong with me. And I had never once, not one single time, considered that all of them might be the same thing. One thing. Something I was carrying around that I'd never thought about. The pieces clicked into place in my head while Denise was talking. The way a puzzle clicks when you finally see what the picture is supposed to be. I said, "Denise. What did you do about it." She reached into her purse and she pulled out a small white bottle. Set it on the counter next to my hairspray. She said, "Tina. I want you to listen to me. Because I know how you are. I know you're going to roll your eyes when I tell you what this is." I said, "Try me." She said, "It's garlic." I started to laugh. She said, "I knew it. I knew you'd laugh. Just shut up for a second and hear me." I shut up. She said, "Garlic, the kind people have been eating in Central Asia for 5,000 years, has a compound in it called allicin. Allicin is a tiny sulfur molecule. And out of basically every natural thing people have ever studied for this problem, allicin is one of the only ones that has been shown to actually interact with that slime layer. Not float past it. Interact with it. Help your body break it down." She said, "When the slime starts coming apart, your body can finally get to what's been hiding. The things you've been carrying around for years. The things that have been quietly taking from you." She said, "And the things people report, in that order, are exactly what I had. The bloating gets better. The 3 AM wake-ups stop. The sugar cravings calm down. The fog lifts. The skin clears. The hair behaves." I said, "Denise. I cook with garlic every Sunday. I make pasta sauce with 5 cloves in it. If garlic worked I'd already be cured." She smiled. She said, "That's what I said too. Sit down. Let me tell you the rest." Her sister had explained this part to her and Denise explained it to me in the chair. Allicin is fragile. It is one of the most fragile compounds in the natural world. Heat destroys it. Cooking garlic destroys most of it before it gets anywhere near your body. Drying it for the spice rack destroys almost all of it. The pre-minced jarred garlic at the grocery store has basically none of it left because it's been sitting in oil for months. Even if you eat raw garlic cloves, which nobody does, because they burn your stomach and clear a room, your stomach acid destroys most of what's left before any of it gets where it needs to go. The way it was eaten for thousands of years in places where people lived to be 90, was raw, every single day, multiple times a day. That's how you got enough of it in your system to do anything. Nobody does that anymore. Not me. Not you. Not anyone. So we all walk around with the same body that human beings have had for hundreds of thousands of years, and we have removed one of the things our body was getting every single day for most of that time, and we wonder why everything feels off. Denise put the bottle in my hand. The label said Alevia. She said, "Tina. The reason I have this one and not some other one is because this is odorless. I cannot have garlic breath. I work in a law office. I sit in conference rooms with men in suits. I cannot smell like a Sicilian restaurant. This bottle, I take 2 capsules every morning with breakfast, and I do not smell. My husband doesn't smell anything. My coworkers haven't said a word. My skin doesn't smell. I asked my hygienist about it last month at my cleaning and she just looked at me like I was crazy. No smell. None." She said, "It's made in the USA. The capsules are formulated so the allicin actually gets where it needs to go, instead of getting destroyed in your stomach like raw cloves would. There are 60 capsules in a bottle. You take 2 a day. A bottle lasts a month." She said, "And the company puts a 90 day money back guarantee on it. If you take it for 60 days and you feel exactly the same, you put what's left in the bottle, send it back, they refund you. That's how confident they are." She looked at me in the mirror. She said, "Tina. I lost 14 pounds in 11 weeks and I didn't change anything else. I didn't go to the gym. I didn't go on a diet. I didn't cut out anything. My pants started fitting different around week 5. My hair started feeling different around week 4. The bloating was gone in the first 2 weeks. The 3 AM wake-ups stopped around week 3." She said, "I am 56 years old. I look in the mirror in the morning and I see my face. Not the puffy version. Not the tired version. My face. The one I had at 42 before all this slowly turned me into someone else." She paused. She said, "I bought you a bottle. It's in my purse. I want you to take it. Don't pay me. Just try it." I want to be honest with you. I had every objection that you are having right now, sitting wherever you are reading this. I have tried supplements before. I have a cabinet at home with probably 14 different bottles in it. Probiotics, fish oil, ashwagandha, magnesium, biotin for my hair that I have been taking for 2 years that has done nothing, B12, vitamin D. A graveyard of small bottles I bought on the recommendation of a podcast or an Instagram ad. None of them did anything I could feel. So I sat in that chair with Denise's bottle in my hand and I thought, here's another one. Another bottle. Another thing that will sit on my counter for 6 weeks until I forget about it. Except. Except this one was different in a way I couldn't argue with. The probiotics were giving my body more of something. The fish oil was giving my body more of something. The biotin was giving my body more of something. Every other bottle in my cabinet was about adding things in. This one was about something that was already there. Something that wasn't supposed to be. Something I was working around without knowing it. A completely different mechanism. I thought, if this worked, my doctor would have told me. And then I sat there in my own chair and I remembered my doctor telling me Tina, this is just what happens to women in your stage of life. Which was the same thing she'd said to my mother. Which was the same thing she'd said to my aunt. Which was the same thing they tell every woman who walks in there with a list of things that don't make sense. My doctor was not going to find this for me. Not because she's a bad doctor. Because this is not what 12 minute appointments are for. I thought, garlic, won't I smell. And Denise had just sat in my chair for 90 minutes and I'd had my face 12 inches from her hair the whole time and the only thing I'd smelled was her perfume. I thought, this is too simple. A vegetable. Something we put in spaghetti sauce. How can the answer to 6 years of bloating and waking up at 3 AM be a vegetable. And then I remembered what Denise had said. It's not the vegetable. It's a specific compound inside the vegetable. A compound that we have been removing from the way we eat it for the last 200 years. A compound that humans got every day for most of human history and almost none of us get anymore. The vegetable was the wrapper. What's inside was what mattered. I took the bottle. I started the next morning. 2 capsules with breakfast. Tuesday, February 13th. I want to walk you through what happened, the way Denise walked me through what happened to her. Because I had no idea what to expect and you probably don't either. Week 1 was nothing. I'm not going to lie. I felt the same. I waited every morning to feel different and I didn't. I almost stopped on day 5 because I thought, here we go, another bottle for the cabinet. Then on day 8 something weird happened. I was at work doing a foil on a regular client and I looked at the clock and it was 4:30 and I hadn't thought about the Reese's Cups in my drawer once. Not once. I had been at the salon for 7 hours and the 4 PM sugar pull had not come. I stood there with foil in my hand and I thought, did I forget breakfast. I had not forgotten breakfast. The sugar pull just hadn't come. Week 2 my belly stopped being bloated by 2 PM. I noticed it on a Saturday. I was wearing the jeans I usually have to unbutton at lunch and I sat down on the couch at 4 PM to fold laundry and they were still buttoned. I sat there for a minute trying to figure out what was different. Nothing was different. I had eaten the same lunch I always eat. I just wasn't blown up by it. Week 3 I slept until 6:14 AM. I lay in bed when my alarm went off at 6:30 and I thought, did I dream that I woke up at 3. I had not woken up at 3. Not at 3:15. Not at 3:47. Not at all. I had slept straight through. That had not happened in 6 years. Week 5 my hair stylist friend Marisa who cuts my hair at her place on Sundays lifted a section at the back of my head and she said, Tina. What did you start doing. This is thicker. I told her about the bottle. She wrote it down on the back of a magazine. Week 7 I stood in front of my own mirror in the morning before work and I did my own makeup and I looked at my face. The puffiness around my eyes was gone. Not less. Gone. My skin had a color in it I had not seen in years. Tighter. More like skin. I was looking at my own face for the first time in 6 years. I have been taking Alevia for 4 months now. I lost 9 pounds in the first 11 weeks. I did not try to lose weight. I did not change my diet. I did not start working out. The weight just came off because whatever had been holding it there was not holding it there anymore. I wake up before my alarm now. Most mornings around 6:15. I lay in bed for a few minutes and listen to the birds outside before I get up. I had forgotten that mornings could be quiet. I do not need anything sweet at 4 PM. The bag of Reese's Cups in my station drawer is the same bag from February. I have not opened it. My hair at the part is filling back in. Slowly. But it's filling in. I can see it when I do my own hair in the morning. I had three clients in the last month tell me I look like a different person. One of them, a woman I've cut for 8 years, asked me what work I'd had done. I told her I hadn't had any work done. She said, "Tina, then what are you doing." I told her. I told her about Denise sitting in this chair in February. I told her about her sister in Houston. I told her about the slime. I told her about the bottle. She bought one that night. Three weeks later she came back in and we both stood in front of the mirror and she said, "Tina. I slept until 6:30 every morning this week. I haven't done that in 12 years." I am telling you this because I sat in my own chair for 6 years and watched myself slowly stop being myself. And nobody told me what was happening. And the doctor told me this is just what happens. And every supplement I bought made me feel a little more like a fool for trying. If you are waking up at 3 in the morning. If your belly is bloated by 2 every day. If you are pulled toward sugar at 4 in the afternoon like a magnet. If your hair is thinning at the part. If your skin looks puffier than it should. If you are tired in a way sleep does not fix. If your doctor has told you this is just your age. You might not be old. You might not be falling apart. You might be carrying something you never knew you were carrying. Alevia's Garlic is an odorless garlic extract. Made in the USA. 60 capsules per bottle. 2 a day. A bottle lasts a month. The capsules are formulated to deliver the allicin where it needs to go instead of letting your stomach acid destroy it on the way through. You order a bottle. You take it for a month or two. If you do not feel different, if you wake up at 3 just like you used to, if your pants do not button, if the sugar pull still hits at 4, you ship what's left back to them within 90 days and they refund you. Every penny. No argument. That is how confident they are in what's in the bottle. I am 54 years old. I am a hair stylist in Tulsa. I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist. I am the woman who has been touching the back of your head and listening to your stories for the last 30 years. I am telling you what Denise told me sitting in this chair on a Tuesday in February. Don't wait. The longer you carry something, the longer it takes for your body to catch up when you finally do something about it. 👉 alevia.com/garlic/7 P.S. The guarantee is for 90 days from the day you get the bottle. You don't have to use the whole thing. You don't have to finish it. If after 30 days you don't feel a single thing different, you ship what's left back in a padded envelope and they refund every penny. That's their promise. I asked Denise about it before I took the bottle she gave me because I wanted to know what I was getting into. She'd checked it before she ordered her own. The guarantee is real. It's just one of those things where you have to actually return the bottle to get the refund. Fair enough. P.P.S. If you are a hairstylist or a nurse or a teacher or any woman who spends her whole day on her feet and her whole life taking care of other people and you have been telling yourself that the exhaustion you feel at the end of every day is just because you work hard, I want you to consider that maybe you don't work harder than the women in this town who are sleeping through the night and not bloating up by 2 PM. Maybe the only difference between you and them is something you are carrying that they have addressed. Maybe your body is doing its best with what it's been given and it just needs the one thing it has been quietly missing. P.P.P.S. Denise came in last week for her regular appointment. She brought me a card. Inside the card she wrote, "Tina. The day you said yes to taking that bottle changed your life and you didn't even know it yet. That's the kind of yes you only need to say once." I put the card in my station drawer next to the unopened bag of Reese's Cups. Every time I see it I think about how close I came to laughing her out of my chair. And how the smallest yes I ever said gave me back my whole self. 👉 alevia.com/garlic/7