Midlife Wellness Report Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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My sister Julia stood up in the middle of my mother’s 75th birthday toast last month and walked out of the dining room, and she was gone for eleven minutes, and when she came back nobody at the table said a word about it, and I sat across from her empty chair for those eleven minutes and I understood in one full sweep that I had been watching her hide the exact same thing I had hidden for three years, and that I was going to have to say something before we lost her. It was a Saturday night at my mother’s house in Franklin. Just outside Nashville. My mother, Ellen, turned 75 on the third of the month. My father Robert had gotten a private room at the club and we all voted against it and said we wanted dinner at Mom’s, at her table, in the dining room she and my father had put in when they moved in in 1988. Eight of us at the table. My parents at the ends. Me and my husband Peter on one side. My sister Julia and her husband Ben across. Our brother Michael and his wife Sandy on the outside. My mother’s best friend Diane at the corner. Peter had just finished the toast. He is not a toaster by nature but he loves my mother and he had written something on an index card that morning and he had stood up and read it. Something about my mother teaching him to cook risotto at 26 when he came to Thanksgiving that first year. Everyone was laughing softly. My mother had her hand on my father’s hand on the table. And Julia stood up. She said, “Excuse me for a second.” She said it very quietly. She smiled. She folded her napkin and set it on her chair. She walked out of the dining room and down the hall to the guest bathroom and I heard the door close. Peter kept going with the toast for another sentence and then he stopped. He looked at me. I looked at him. I said, “Keep going, honey.” He kept going. He finished. My mother was crying a little. My father was smiling. My mother said, “Peter, that was beautiful.” Julia’s chair was empty. We had cake. My mother blew out the candles. My father cut it. My mother wanted to know if anyone wanted decaf. Diane went to help her in the kitchen. Julia’s chair was still empty. I want you to understand what I did next. I did nothing. I ate my slice of cake. I laughed at something my brother Michael said. I asked my mother if she wanted me to make her a cup of tea instead of coffee. I did every single thing you do at a family birthday dinner when a sister you love is sitting in a locked guest bathroom eleven feet down the hallway and has been for now nine minutes. At the eleven-minute mark she came back. She sat down. She said, “Sorry — my phone was buzzing, I had to answer something.” She had not been on her phone. Her phone was in her purse in the living room. I had seen her leave it there when we came in. Ben looked up. He said, “Everything okay?” Julia said, “Yeah, totally. Sorry, Peter, that was such a nice toast. Mom, happy birthday.” My mother said, “Oh sweetheart, don’t worry about it.” Nobody at the table said anything else about the eleven minutes. I want to back up. My name is Kate Weaver. I am 52 years old. I am a commercial real estate broker at Colliers Nashville. I live in East Nashville with my husband Peter, who is 54 and a partner at a mid-sized law firm downtown, and our two teenagers, Olivia who is 17 and Noah who is 15. My sister Julia is 44. She lives ten minutes from me in a bungalow in Lockeland Springs with her husband Ben. Julia is the marketing director at a healthcare tech company in Cool Springs. She is smart and funny and married the right man and has built a life that looks exactly like what she wanted at 22 when she was still at Vanderbilt writing me long earnest letters from her dorm room about what she was going to do with the shape of her life. Julia and I are eight years apart. We were not close as children because I was already in college when she started high school. We became close in our thirties, when I had my kids, and Julia lived through my early motherhood as the aunt who came over on Saturdays and slept on the floor of the nursery with a newborn on her chest. We have been very close for twenty years. I love my sister more than almost anyone in my life. And I have been watching her disappear into something for two years and I have not known what to do about it. I want to tell you what I have seen, from the outside. She started cancelling small things in the summer of 2023. She was 42. Just little things. Dinner with Peter and me on a Wednesday, moved to a Sunday, then not at all. My birthday brunch that year moved to a phone call because “work was insane.” I did not push. By early 2024 she was cancelling more. She dropped out of a book club she and I had been in together for four years. She skipped my father’s 78th birthday party and said she had come down with something. She had not come down with something. I saw her out at a coffee shop on West End two days later. I did not say anything. By mid 2024 she had stopped coming to Olivia’s field hockey games, which she had been going to for six years. She had stopped meeting me for our Thursday morning walk at Shelby Bottoms, which had been our thing since 2019. She got quieter on the phone. She stopped sending me the ridiculous memes she used to send at 11 PM. Her Instagram stopped updating in the summer of 2024. Before that she had posted once every couple of weeks — pictures of Ben, pictures of a coffee, a joke about her cats. Then it just stopped. At Christmas last year she wore a sweater I had not seen her wear before. Loose. Boxy. She has not worn a fitted piece of clothing in front of me in fifteen months. She has, twice in the last year, made a joke about her stomach that I do not think she meant to make. Once at a lunch, she pushed her plate away and said “yeah, I’m not really eating like a normal person these days.” Once at Thanksgiving, she said, of her own body, “I don’t know what she’s doing but I’m not in charge anymore.” She laughed both times. Nobody else laughed with her. I want to be honest with you about why I did not say anything. I did not say anything because I have been Julia. I was 47 years old in 2020. I woke up one morning in May of that year and my body was a different body. That is the only way I know to say it. I was six pounds heavier than I had been at Christmas. My stomach felt like it belonged to someone else. My digestion, which had been like a Swiss watch for my entire adult life, had stopped being predictable. I was going every second day. Sometimes third. I was bloated by 2pm. My jeans, which I had been buying at the same size since I was 32, would not zip. I told nobody. I want to tell you what I tried because if you are Julia’s age right now, or if you have a sister who is Julia’s age, some of this is going to sound familiar. I did Whole30 in the summer of 2020. I did it strict. I lost three pounds. I felt worse. I gained four pounds back within two months. I did celery juice every morning for four months in 2021. I did an $800 Instagram protocol from a wellness woman with a lot of followers. She sent me a PDF. The PDF told me to remove things I had removed already. I did it anyway. It changed nothing. I did an expensive functional medicine intake in 2022. Twelve hundred dollars. The doctor ordered a GI-MAP test. It came back with “some low-to-normal markers, some inflammatory markers slightly elevated.” She put me on a six-supplement protocol that cost another five hundred dollars for three months. My digestion improved marginally for the last two weeks. Then it stopped. I did probiotic rotation. Align. Culturelle. Florastor. Seed. Two spore-based ones. One I got from a naturopath in East Nashville that cost seventy dollars a bottle. I did each one for at least six weeks. I did an elimination diet under my own supervision because I did not want to pay the nutritionist again. I removed dairy for six weeks. Then gluten for eight weeks. Then eggs for four weeks. I lost nothing lasting. I bought an Oura ring. I tracked my sleep, my HRV, my recovery. I confirmed with data what my body already knew. Everything was worse than it had been. I did kombucha for six months. I did apple cider vinegar in the morning. I did aloe vera juice. I did the Squatty Potty. I gained a total of nineteen pounds between May of 2020 and August of 2022. I was 49 years old. I told nobody. Not Peter. Not my mother. Not Julia. Nobody. I want to tell you the specific night I broke. It was August of 2022. Peter was in New York for a trial. Olivia was at a summer program at Sewanee. Noah was at his best friend’s cabin at Center Hill Lake for the weekend. I was alone in the house. I sat in the bathtub with the water running for an hour and I let myself think about my Aunt Marie. My Aunt Marie is my mother’s older sister. She is 78 now. She was 63 in 2010 and she was the best-dressed woman at my wedding in 2001. She lived in a townhouse in Green Hills. She traveled to Italy every October. She had opinions and she wore red lipstick and she was the woman I hoped I would look like when I was in my sixties. She started to shrink around 2010. I do not mean physically. I mean, she started staying home more. She stopped traveling. She stopped coming to my kids’ baptisms and to Olivia’s christening and to my father’s retirement party. She got quieter on the phone. She moved out of her townhouse in 2013 into a smaller condo. She moved out of Nashville in 2016. She moved to Bradenton, Florida, into another smaller condo. She wears the same three shirts on every visit I have made to see her in the last nine years. The couch in her living room is still wrapped in the plastic it came in from Rooms to Go. I have been going to visit Aunt Marie once a year for the last decade and every year she is smaller and quieter and further inside herself and every year my mother says on the drive home, “Marie is just aging. It’s what happens.” I have been afraid, since 2020, that I was becoming my Aunt Marie. I sat in that bathtub in August of 2022 and I said out loud, to nobody, “I am not becoming Marie.” I said it three times. Then, because I was 49 years old and had spent two decades reading things on the internet, I picked up my phone and I opened Instagram and I sent a DM to a woman I had gone to college with named Amanda Whitmore. I had not spoken to Amanda since her wedding in Chicago in 2020. At her wedding she had mentioned to me over the champagne that her mother had figured something out about her own gut in her fifties that I should ask her about someday. I had smiled and nodded and forgotten about it entirely. Two years later I remembered. I DM’d Amanda. I said, “Amanda, hi, this is going to sound out of the blue. At your wedding you mentioned your mother had figured something out about her gut. I need to know what it was.” She wrote back within ten minutes. She said, “Kate, I have been waiting for someone to ask me that. My mom found it through her OB, of all people. It has a specific name. It is not what any of us thought it was. Can I call you?” She called me. She talked to me for forty-seven minutes. She told me what her mother had told her. She told me about a specific condition — intestinal methanogen overgrowth, IMO — that a lot of what has been called “perimenopause gut” is actually the shape of. She told me about her mother’s OB in Milwaukee who had figured it out and told her mother about it because she’d read the research. She told me about the three-compound formula her mother had ordered. She said, “Kate. This is not going to be like the other things. My mom lost twenty-two pounds in eight months. She got her body back. She is 64 and she is not shrinking.” I ordered a bottle that night. I want to tell you the guarantee is what made me say yes. I had wasted so much money on things that did not work. Three thousand dollars, easy. When I read that Berbino would refund me every dollar if it did nothing in ninety days, I ordered a bottle for the first time in two years without hesitating. I want to tell you what I learned in the reading I did over those two weeks. Because it is the same thing I need Julia to understand, and it is the same thing I want the woman reading this letter to understand about herself or about someone she loves. Your gut worked fine for forty years. Then something changed. Not because of you. Not because you got lazy. Not because you failed to eat clean enough. Not because you didn’t work out. Because when your estrogen and progesterone start shifting in your forties, the environment inside your gut shifts too. The specific ecosystem that had been stable for forty years is not stable anymore. A specific class of organism starts to overgrow in the new environment. They are called archaea. They are older than bacteria. They produce methane as a byproduct. And the methane physically slows the smooth muscle contractions of your intestine. That is why your body stopped being a body you recognized when you were 43 or 45. It is not that you got old. It is that something specific happened that has a specific name, and no amount of Whole30 or celery juice or Instagram protocol was ever going to touch it, because none of them were addressing the archaea. Every diet, every probiotic, every functional medicine consult I had done had been trying to force my body back to what it had been. Force new inputs. Force cleaner food. Force better sleep. Force force force. None of them was addressing what was actually happening in my gut and paralyzing the movement. The three-compound formula does. Berberine, which addresses part of the microbial overgrowth. Allicin, from garlic, which addresses the archaea specifically — the ones berberine does not reach. Piperine, from black pepper, which dramatically improves how much of the other two get absorbed into your bloodstream. Together they address the coverage gap. When the source is addressed, the paralysis lifts, and your own motility comes back. Restore, not force. That is the frame that changed everything for me. Because for two years I had been trying to force my forty-nine-year-old body back to what my thirty-five-year-old body had been. Berbino was the first thing that let my body do what it was designed to do, on its own, once the thing that had been paralyzing it was addressed. I have been on Berbino for two years and eleven months. Week two I noticed I was sleeping deeper. Week four I noticed my stomach was not bloated at night. Week six the jeans zipped. Week ten the nineteen pounds started coming off, five over the next two months, another eight over the six months after that. I have not been to a functional medicine appointment since 2022. I have not bought a probiotic bottle in over two years. The Squatty Potty is in the garage. I did not tell Peter until week nine. I did not tell my mother until week fourteen. I did not tell Julia until I got home from my mother’s birthday dinner last month. I want to tell you what happened the day after my mother’s birthday. I drove to Lockeland Springs. I got to Julia’s house at 10:47am on a Sunday. Ben was at a soccer match. Julia was in her kitchen in a boxy sweater, making coffee. I sat down at her kitchen table. I put a bottle of Berbino on the table between us. I had bought it that morning. I had paid for it. I had brought it with me. I said, “Julia. I want to tell you something I have not been able to tell you for two years and eleven months.” She looked at me. I saw her body go still. I said, “I have been where you are. I have been where you have been for the last two years. I did every single thing you have been doing. Whole30. Celery juice. The Instagram woman. The functional medicine consult. All of it. I did all of it before you did. And none of it worked for me either. And I have been Aunt Marie in my head for the last two years, terrified I was becoming her.” Julia’s hands stopped moving. She was holding the coffee scoop. I said, “I found something in the summer of 2022. I have been on it since. My body came back. And I am telling you about it now because I watched you leave that table last night and I know exactly where you were and I know exactly why and I am not going to keep pretending I do not know.” I pointed to the bottle on her kitchen table. I said, “This one is paid for. I bought it for you. I want you to take it for 90 days. It has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If it does nothing for you in three months, I will refund my own money and I will never bring it up again. That is the deal. You do not have to talk to me about it during those 90 days. You do not have to tell me you’re taking it. You do not have to text me anything. You just take it every morning and see what happens.” She was quiet for a very long time. Then she said, “Kate. How did you know.” I said, “Because I have been you.” She sat down. She said, “Kate, I have been so ashamed. For two years.” I said, “I know.” I want to be plain about one thing. **Julia was not on any prescription medication for this. She had been trying over-the-counter things and diets and expensive supplements from wellness people on Instagram. If you are on any prescription right now, do not stop it based on this letter. Any conversation about your prescriptions belongs between you and your doctor, not between you and a story on the internet.** I want to say that clearly because it matters. Julia took her first two capsules that Sunday morning at her kitchen table with a fresh cup of coffee I had made her. I sat and drank the coffee with her. I want to tell you what I have watched over the last twelve weeks, because it is Julia’s story and she has told me twice now that if it helps somebody else’s sister, tell them what happened. Week one, nothing. She texted me on day six and said “I don’t think it’s working.” I told her to give it four weeks minimum. Week two, she called me on a Tuesday afternoon. She said, “Kate, I slept for eight hours last night. Straight through. I have not done that since I was 41.” Week three, I got a text from her at 8:03am on a Wednesday that said: *I fit in my jeans this morning. Do not make a big deal of this to Peter or Mom. I just wanted to tell you.* Week four, she showed up at Olivia’s field hockey game. Unannounced. She stood on the sideline with Peter and me. She stayed for the whole match. She had not come to a field hockey game in two years. Week six, she and Ben came to Sunday dinner at my mother’s. Julia sat through the entire meal. She did not stand up once. She did not fold her napkin and disappear down the hallway. My mother did not notice anything. My father did not notice anything. But I saw Ben notice, halfway through the meal, that his wife was staying at the table. He looked at her for a long moment and then he looked at me across the table and I looked back at him and we did not say anything. Week eight, Julia texted me: *Kate, I made an appointment with my OB for next month. I want to ask her about it.* Week ten was the OB appointment. Julia asked me to come with her. Her OB is Dr. Rani Bhattacharya at a practice in Green Hills who has been Julia’s doctor for eleven years. Julia told her the whole thing. The two years. Berbino. The last ten weeks. The transformation. Dr. Bhattacharya listened. She said, “Julia, this is consistent with a shifting hormonal environment in the perimenopause window. What you are describing is not uncommon. What is uncommon is that anyone told you what was actually happening. Whatever you are doing, keep doing it. I do not want to run additional tests right now because I do not want to disrupt what is working. Come see me in six months and we will see where we are.” Julia sat in Dr. Bhattacharya’s office chair for a minute after she left the room. She did not cry, exactly. Something in her shoulders released that had been up around her ears for two years. Week twelve, she said yes to a trip. Our mother turns 76 in three weeks. My father wants to take her to Charleston for a long weekend to celebrate. He wanted the four of us — my parents, me, and Julia — to go with him and my mother. Julia had already told him she couldn’t make it. She called him last Wednesday and told him she had cleared her schedule and she was coming. We fly out in eight days. I want to tell you what Julia said to me on Sunday, sitting on my back porch. She said, “Kate. I have been telling myself since I was 42 that it was stress. That I needed to eat cleaner. That I needed to work out more. That it was work. That it was hormones but the normal kind. I knew it was not any of those things. I knew and I did not want to be old yet. I did not want to be Aunt Marie. And so I said nothing to anyone and I hid it and I became someone I did not recognize.” She looked at her tea for a long moment. She said, “You said something to me that Sunday morning at my kitchen table that I have been thinking about every day since. You said you had been me. And nobody had ever said that to me before. Not one person in two years.” She said, “Kate. Thank you for being the sister who said it.” I did not say anything. I could not. I want to tell you why I am writing this letter. If you have a sister — younger or older — who has been quietly canceling things for a year or two, whose body has been changing in ways she is not talking about, who has been in a boxy sweater at every family dinner for eighteen months, who has stood up mid-toast at your mother’s birthday and disappeared for eleven minutes and come back with a lie about her phone — I see you. If you are that sister — I see you too. I have been you. I know the exact shape of the shame. I know what it feels like to be 44 or 46 and to look in the mirror and see somebody who is not you. I know what it feels like to think you are becoming an aging relative you were afraid of your whole life. I know how much it costs to hide it from every single person who loves you. I want you to know that the reason you have not been able to fix this yourself is not that you are broken. The reason is that everything you have been trying was addressing the wrong thing. Whole30 and celery juice and $800 Instagram protocols do not touch the archaea. They cannot. They are trying to force your body to be what it was, and force is not the answer here. Removing what is slowing your gut is. The three-compound formula I have been on for almost three years, and that Julia has been on for twelve weeks, is called Berbino. Berberine, allicin, piperine. Two capsules a day, with breakfast. Available at berbino.com. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, which is the reason I ordered it, the reason Julia said yes, and the reason it is worth trying for you or for someone you love who is 44 and hiding. If it does not work, you send the bottle back and you get every dollar refunded. I read the policy twice before I ordered mine in 2022. Julia read it once. It is real. And one more time, plainly. **This is not medical advice. Nothing here tells you to change or stop any prescription. Anything about your medications is a conversation between you and your doctor, not between you and this letter.** **👉 berbino.com** P.S. Julia and Ben and I and Peter and my parents fly to Charleston in eight days. Julia is going to sit in the middle of the row on the plane, and she is going to walk on the beach with our mother, and she is going to eat dinner at seven o’clock at a restaurant on Meeting Street, and she is going to stay for the whole thing. That is what I got back for her. That is what Amanda’s mother’s OB in Milwaukee gave to me when Amanda sent me a DM at 11pm on a summer night in 2022. P.P.S. The 90-day money-back guarantee is real. I read the policy twice before I ordered my first bottle. If it does nothing for you in three months you send it back and every dollar is refunded. That is a longer guarantee than any elimination diet or Instagram protocol ever came with, and it is why the risk of trying it is genuinely close to zero. P.P.P.S. Berbino runs out. I have had to wait for a shipment twice. I keep two bottles in my kitchen now. Julia keeps one at her house and one at mine. After the last two years, we are not going to run out. P.P.P.P.S. My Aunt Marie is still in Bradenton. She still wears the same three shirts. Her couch is still wrapped in plastic. I flew down to see her in April. She and I sat on that couch for an afternoon and she told me she was tired. I did not know what to say to her. She is 78 years old and she has been shrinking for fifteen years and nobody ever told her that some of what was happening to her body had a name and could be addressed. I do not know if it is too late for her. I know it was not too late for Julia. If you have a sister or a friend or a colleague who is 42 or 44 or 46, and you have been watching her get quieter and smaller and stop coming to things, please send her this letter. Just the link. Somebody else’s sister is going to sit through the whole birthday dinner next year because of it. I would like it to be yours.

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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