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I almost ruined my daughter's wedding dress. Not on purpose. Not by spilling something. Not by tripping over the train when she was twirling in front of the mirror at the bridal shop on a Saturday afternoon in March. I almost ruined it by sitting down too hard on the little velvet bench in the dressing room and breathing the way I'd been breathing for the last 4 years, which is to say, like a woman who needed to lie down even though she'd just walked from the parking lot to the front door. The seamstress noticed. She didn't say anything. She just put down the pincushion she was holding and walked over to me and said, very softly, the way you'd say it to a child who was about to cry in public, "Ma'am, why don't I find you a chair that's a better height for you. The benches in here can be tricky." A better height. I want to tell you what those 4 words did to me. I want to tell you what happened in the next 11 weeks because of those 4 words. And I want to tell you about a fruit I'd never heard of until a 71 year old woman in a yoga class I almost didn't go to told me about it in a Whole Foods parking lot in May. My name is Lorrie. I'm 54 years old. I live in Mesa, Arizona, in a house my husband Ron and I bought in 2007 with a pool we don't use enough and a backyard with two grapefruit trees that drop fruit all over the patio in February. Ron's a project manager for a company that does commercial roofing. He's 56. We've been married 29 years this June. We have two kids, Jenna who's 27 and just got engaged, and Tyler who's 23 and lives in Tempe and is, in his own words, "still figuring it out." I work part time at a dental office on Brown Road. I'm the one who calls you the day before your appointment and reminds you to brush. I've worked there 14 years. I know everyone's kids' names. I know whose grandfather just had a stroke. I know which patients tip the hygienists and which ones don't. I have, or I had, a problem I could not name out loud. It wasn't one thing. That was the trouble with it. If it had been one thing I could've taken it to my doctor and pointed at it. But it was a thousand small things, all of them sliding down a hill at the same time, all of them dismissed as "you're getting older, Lorrie" by every doctor who'd looked at me since I turned 50. My energy was gone. Not "tired after a long day" gone. The kind where I'd wake up at 6:45 having slept 8 hours and feel like I'd been awake all night. I'd make it through work and come home and sit in the front seat of my car in the driveway for 10 minutes before I could make myself walk inside. My joints ached. Not in any pattern. My right knee on Mondays. My left hip on Thursdays. Both wrists when the weather changed. The little knuckle on my pinkie when I cried, which I had been doing more than I wanted to admit. My mind was foggy. Names of patients I'd known for 10 years would slide out of my head while I was looking right at their charts. I'd put my coffee cup in the freezer one morning and find it 3 days later, frozen solid, and I just stood there in front of the open freezer trying to remember a single thing I had done correctly that week. My body had changed in the mirror. I had put on 27 pounds since I turned 50, which I can tell you with that much precision because I weighed myself in 2020 to make a pre-op chart for a patient and I weighed myself again 2 weeks before Jenna's dress fitting and the difference was 27.4 pounds. And I felt, more than anything else, like the woman in the mirror wasn't me anymore. I want you to understand. I wasn't sick. I had no diagnosis. My bloodwork was, every doctor told me, "normal for your age." My blood pressure was a little elevated. My cholesterol was a little high. My A1c was a little high. None of it bad enough to put me on anything. All of it bad enough that I knew, the way you know when you walk into a house you used to live in and somebody else lives there now, that something was wrong. I told Ron about it in 2022. We were sitting on the patio. I told him I felt like I was disappearing. He said the kindest thing he knew how to say, which was, "Lorrie, you look beautiful to me. You're tired because we work too hard. We'll take a vacation." We took a vacation. I came back exactly the same. I told my doctor about it in 2023. She nodded and ran the same panel and gave me the same speech. "Your numbers are fine. Try walking 30 minutes a day. Try cutting back on sugar." I told my sister Donna about it in 2024. She lives in Scottsdale and she's 4 years younger than me. She said, "Honey, this is just what 50 feels like. It's not fair but it's true. You've gotta learn to slow down." Slow down. That word started to feel like a sentence somebody had passed on me without telling me. So when Jenna got engaged that December, and we made the appointment for her first dress fitting at a shop on Mill Avenue in Tempe for a Saturday in March, I had a quiet, nagging feeling for 3 months that I was going to ruin something. I just didn't know what. The morning of the fitting, I put on the only outfit I owned that still fit, which was a black wrap dress I'd bought 2 years before for my niece's quinceañera and worn exactly once. I drove to Tempe. I parked. I walked from the parking garage to the bridal shop, which was 2 blocks, and I was so winded by the time I got to the door that I stood outside for a full minute pretending to look at my phone before I went in. Jenna was already inside with her bridesmaids. Three of them. Beautiful girls, 26 and 27 and 28, all of them in jeans and white t-shirts and clean sneakers, all of them holding cold brews in plastic cups. Jenna saw me and her whole face lit up and she ran across the shop and hugged me and I held onto her for an extra second because I needed it. The shop owner, a woman named Esme, walked us back to a fitting room that was bigger than my first apartment. There was a raised platform with three full length mirrors. There were two velvet benches against the side wall. There was a chandelier. There was a tray of tea and lemon water on a little table in the corner. Jenna went into the changing area with Esme and the seamstress. The bridesmaids sat on one of the velvet benches and started looking at their phones. I sat down on the other one. I sat down too hard. I felt it in my hips and my lower back and my knees all at the same time. The bench was lower than it looked. I leaned back into the wall and let out a breath that was, I realize now, way too loud for the room. The seamstress came back out about 5 minutes later. She was a small woman, mid 60s, dark hair pulled back, glasses on a chain. She was holding a pincushion and a tape measure. She walked toward the platform to start her work. She glanced at me on the way past. She stopped. She looked at me for a second longer than was polite. Then she set down the pincushion. She walked over to me. She crouched down a little so we were eye level. And she said, quietly, just to me, "Ma'am, why don't I find you a chair that's a better height for you. The benches in here can be tricky." I want you to understand what hit me in that moment. She was being kind. She was being so kind that her kindness has stayed with me 11 months later and probably will until I die. She wasn't making fun of me. She wasn't being passive aggressive. She had looked at me and she had seen, in 4 seconds, what every doctor I'd seen in 4 years had refused to see. She had seen that I was struggling. She had seen that I was hiding it. And she had quietly, kindly, professionally, given me an out before my struggle became visible to the bridesmaids and to my daughter. I said, "Thank you. That would be lovely." She brought me a wooden chair from the back room. It had a cushion on it. The seat was about 4 inches higher than the bench. I sat in it and I watched my daughter come out of the dressing room in a white dress with lace at the neckline and 1,000 little buttons down the back and I burst into tears the way every mother is supposed to in that moment. Jenna thought I was crying because she looked beautiful. I was crying because she did look beautiful, and because I was sitting in a chair the seamstress had brought me because I couldn't get up off a bench, and I knew then that I had to do something. I just didn't know what. I drove home that afternoon. I didn't tell Ron about the chair. I told him Jenna looked beautiful and I told him I cried and that was true. That night I lay in bed at 11:30 and I did the math on my life. I was 54. My mom was 78 and lived in a memory care facility outside Tucson. My grandmother had died at 71. I had maybe, if I was lucky, 25 good years left. Maybe 15. The number didn't really matter. What mattered was that I had been spending the years I had like a woman with infinite time, sitting in the driver's seat of my car in the driveway, and I was running out. I cried for a long time that night. Ron held me without asking what was wrong, which is one of the reasons I married him. The next morning I did 3 things. I signed up for a beginner yoga class at a studio called Sage on Greenfield Road. I had never done yoga in my life. I'd seen the studio for 6 years driving to work. The first class was Tuesday night at 6:30. I poured the bottle of wine I'd been opening every night into the sink. Not because I was an alcoholic. Because I was using it to fall asleep and it was making me feel worse the next day. And I started writing things down. What I ate. How I felt. When I woke up. When I went to bed. Like I was a science experiment on myself. I'd never done that before either. I went to that yoga class on Tuesday. I want to tell you it was transformational. It wasn't. I couldn't get into half the poses. I cried in child's pose for reasons I couldn't explain. I left after 45 minutes. But I went back the next week. And the next. There was a woman in the class who was, I would later learn, 71 years old. Her name was Marguerite. She was tall and thin and she had silver hair she wore in a braid down her back. She was in better shape than any of the 30 year olds in that class. She did headstands. She did splits. She did a thing called crow pose that I have still not attempted. The first 4 weeks I just admired her from the back row. The fifth week, in May, she happened to park next to me at a Whole Foods in Gilbert. I was loading groceries into my car. She was loading hers into a green Subaru. She recognized me from class. She waved. We started chatting. I don't know what made me say what I said. Maybe it was the parking lot. Maybe it was that we weren't in the studio. Maybe it was that I had been holding it in for so long that the first kind face that wasn't my husband or my daughter was going to crack me open. I told her, standing there with a bag of oranges in my hand, that I was 54 years old and I felt like I was 80, and that I had watched her in class for 5 weeks and I needed to know what she was doing because I didn't want to live the rest of my life feeling the way I felt. Marguerite put down her grocery bag. She leaned against her Subaru. She thought about it for a long time. Then she said, "Lorrie. I'm going to tell you about a few things. The yoga is one of them. The thing I eat for breakfast is another. And there's a third thing, and I want you to take it seriously because I almost didn't, and it's the thing that made the biggest difference." She told me about a fruit called amla. I had never heard the word. I asked her to spell it. She wrote it on the back of my Whole Foods receipt with a pen she pulled out of her purse. She told me she'd been introduced to it by her son in law, who was Indian, originally from a town outside Mumbai. His mother had been giving it to him his whole life, the way American mothers give their kids vitamin C in the winter. When Marguerite had hit her late 60s and started feeling the kind of slow, low grade decline that I was describing, her son in law had said, gently, the way good son in laws say things, "Mama, I want to send you something. Don't say no until you've tried it." Marguerite had been on it for 4 years. She said, "I'm not telling you it's a miracle. There aren't miracles. I'm telling you it's the floor of how I feel. The floor came up. The bottom of how bad my bad days are got higher. And then over time the average of how I feel got higher. And then over more time the ceiling got higher. And one day I was 70 years old in a yoga class doing crow pose for the first time in my life." She told me the brand she used. She wrote that on the receipt too. It was Alevia Amla. I drove home with the receipt in my purse. I sat at my kitchen table that night and I read about amla for 4 hours. Here is what I came to understand. And I'm going to explain it the way a woman who books dental appointments for a living explains things, which is plainly. What I had been experiencing for the last 4 years, the energy, the joints, the brain fog, the weight, the feeling of my body becoming a stranger, wasn't 8 different problems. It was one problem with 8 faces. The problem, as best as I could understand it from what I was reading, was at the cellular level. It was about oxidative stress. It was about chronic low grade inflammation that doesn't show up on standard bloodwork. It was about the slow decline in mitochondrial function, the little engines inside every cell of your body that produce energy. When those engines slow down, you don't feel one thing wrong. You feel everything wrong. Because every system in your body runs on the energy those engines produce. Your joints. Your brain. Your metabolism. Your skin. Your sleep. Your mood. Your weight regulation. That's why my doctors had no answer. My bloodwork wasn't measuring the thing that was wrong. It was measuring the surface. The thing that was wrong was happening underneath, in the soil, not in the leaves. Amla, from what I was reading in the actual research, was interesting because it seemed to work on that soil. It's been studied for its antioxidant properties, partly from its naturally high vitamin C content but also from a class of compounds called polyphenols and tannins that are concentrated in good standardized extracts. It's been associated with reductions in inflammatory markers like hs-CRP. It's been linked to support for healthy mitochondrial function, healthy lipid profiles, healthy glucose metabolism, and healthy endothelial function, which is the responsiveness of the blood vessel walls. In plain English: it's not aimed at any one symptom. It's aimed at the cellular environment all of those symptoms grow out of. That made sense to me in a way nothing else had made sense in 4 years. I ordered a bottle that night. It came on a Wednesday. I took my first 2 capsules with breakfast on a Thursday in late May. Week 1, I felt nothing. I told Ron I'd probably wasted my money. He said, "Lorrie, you spend 60 dollars a month on candles. Take the vitamins." Week 2, I noticed I was sleeping all the way through the night. I had not slept all the way through the night since 2019. Week 3, I noticed my coffee cups were in the dishwasher. All of them. None in the freezer. None on the bookshelf. None in the bathroom by the sink. Week 4, I went to yoga and I did a downward dog without my wrists screaming at me. Week 6, Ron asked me if I had done something to my hair. I hadn't done anything to my hair. I'd lost 4 pounds without trying. I'd stopped eating the way I'd been eating, not because I was on a diet, but because I wasn't hungry the way I'd been hungry. The 3 PM crash that used to send me into the break room for a Diet Coke and a granola bar was gone. I'd just eat lunch and then it would be 5 o'clock. Week 9, I picked up a 40 pound bag of dog food at PetSmart and walked it to my car without setting it down. I stood at my trunk and I cried in the parking lot. The opposite kind of crying from the bridal shop. The kind where your body just remembers what it used to do. Week 11, the wedding. Jenna got married on a Saturday in June at a venue called Whispering Tree, on the outskirts of Mesa. Outdoor ceremony. Reception under a wooden pergola with string lights. I wore a long blue dress. Not a wrap dress. A real dress, with a fitted bodice that I had laughed at the saleswoman for suggesting and then had tried on and had stood in front of the three way mirror in for 4 minutes without speaking. I walked down the aisle behind the bridesmaids. I sat in the front row. I stood through the ceremony without once thinking about my back or my knees. I danced. I want to be specific about that. I danced 3 songs in a row at the reception. The first song was a slow song with Ron, which doesn't count. The second song was a fast song with Jenna. The third song was an even faster song with Tyler, who is 6 foot 3 and swung me around like I was 25. I danced with my husband and both of my children and I did not sit down. At one point, around 9:45 PM, I went to use the restroom. There was a woman in the lounge area, not at the wedding, just there at the venue, who was sitting on a low couch and struggling to get up. I watched her try twice. She was probably 60. She had on a beautiful coral colored dress and she was holding a small clutch. I walked over. I crouched down a little so we were eye level. I held out my hand and I said, very quietly, just to her, "Let me help you. Those couches are tricky." She looked at me with the same expression I had given the seamstress 4 months earlier. She took my hand. I pulled her up. I didn't strain. I didn't grunt. I didn't put my hand on my back afterward. She said, "Thank you, sweetheart." I went back to the reception. I danced 2 more songs. I drove home with Ron at 11:00 PM and I sat on the patio with him and I drank a glass of water and I watched a grapefruit fall off the tree and I cried a little because I had not realized, until that moment, how far I had come. I'm 9 months in now. I want to tell you what I want you to take from this story. I am not telling you that amla cured me. There was nothing to cure. I was not sick. I was a 54 year old woman whose body was telling her something every doctor she saw was refusing to listen to. I am not telling you that amla replaced anything. I still go to yoga. I still eat better than I used to. I still drink water and sleep 8 hours and walk in the morning before it gets too hot. I am telling you that amla was the floor. The thing Marguerite said to me in the Whole Foods parking lot turned out to be the truest thing anyone had said to me in 4 years. The floor came up. The bottom of how bad I felt got higher. And from that higher floor I had the energy and the clarity and the lift to do the other things that I had been too tired to do for half a decade. That's what it does. It works on the soil. The rest grows out of better soil. The brand I take is called Alevia. The product is Alevia Amla. It's made in the United States. It's 2 capsules a day with breakfast. They have a 90 day money back guarantee. You order it. You take it for 3 months. If you feel nothing, you mail the bottle back, you get your money. That's it. If you've been told it's just your age, I see you. If you've been told your numbers are fine when you know they're not, I see you. If you've sat in your car in your driveway because you couldn't make yourself walk inside, I see you. If a stranger has been kind to you in a way that broke your heart because it told you the truth about your body, I see you. There is a fruit on the other side of the world that has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for 3,000 years. The Western world is finally catching up to it. You don't have to disappear in your 50s. That's not how it has to be. P.S. The seamstress's name was Carmen. I went back to that bridal shop 6 weeks before the wedding to thank her. I brought her a bouquet of white tulips. I told her what had happened. She cried. She told me she had said the thing about the chair to a hundred women in her career and I was the first one who had ever come back. P.P.S. I told my sister Donna about the amla in August. She laughed at me and said it sounded like a scam. In September she came over for dinner and she watched me carry a watermelon from the car to the kitchen. She didn't say anything. She bought a bottle the next morning. She's on month 4 now and last week she walked 6 miles with her dog without stopping. P.P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is the part that mattered to me. I had spent so much money on so many things that didn't work that the idea of trying one more thing was almost more than I could stomach. The guarantee made it not a gamble. You take it for 3 months. If you don't feel different, they refund you. There's nothing to lose. The thing you have to lose is the next 25 years feeling the way I felt for the last 4. That's the gamble that should scare you. P.P.P.P.S. I picked up my granddaughter at a barbecue 2 weeks ago. She's 3. Tyler had her over from a friend's daughter, the long story isn't mine to tell. She's not blood. She might as well be. She put her arms up at me and she said, "Up." I picked her up and I held her on my hip for a long time. Marguerite was at that barbecue. She watched me from across the yard. She didn't say anything. She just smiled. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33