Wellness Insider Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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I keep 3 paper fans in the top drawer of my desk at Parkview Magnet High School and I have used every last one of them in the past 2 years to hide something my body will not stop doing to me in front of teenagers. They're the kind of fans they hand out at Baptist funerals in the summer. Cardboard. A wooden stick stapled to the back. A picture of Jesus on one side and the name of the funeral home on the other. Mount Pleasant Baptist. Superior Funeral Chapel. My cousin's home going in 2021. My auntie's home going in 2023. I have been to too many funerals in the past 5 years and I have kept every single fan. They live in my drawer under the pack of Post-its and the little bag of jolly ranchers I keep for the students. I use one about 4 times a day. Not to be cute. Not because I like the picture of Jesus. Because if I don't get air on my face and neck the moment I feel the wave come up my chest, I will sweat through whatever I'm wearing in 90 seconds and every parent standing at the counter in the front office will see it happen. The move is quick. I open the drawer, pull out the fan, hold it low near my collarbone, flick my wrist 5 or 6 times, breathe through my mouth, put it back. Nobody who isn't looking for it sees it. I have gotten so good at the church fan trick that I could probably teach a class on it. I never wanted to be an expert at this. My name is Alma. I'm 54 years old. I have been the executive secretary at Parkview Magnet High School in Little Rock, Arkansas for 19 years. Before that I was 5 years at Little Rock Central. Before that I was 8 years at a law office on Main Street doing intake. I run the front office. I know where every teacher is at every hour of every day. I know which kids in the freshman class have older siblings who came through here. I know which parents are going through divorces and which ones are not to be seated together at open house. I know the alarm codes for 4 different rooms and the combination of the safe in the finance closet and the direct cell number of every school board member in Pulaski County. I am the woman who knows. That was the identity I built. That was who I was. I was not supposed to be the woman who has to duck into a supply closet at 10:47 AM to press a damp paper towel to the back of her neck. My husband Reggie is 57. He retired from the post office 2 years ago after 32 years on the same route in Southwest Little Rock. Now he fixes small engines out of our garage on Arch Street for cash and drives our daughter Camille's kids to karate on Wednesdays. Camille is 32. She teaches 5th grade in North Little Rock. Her twins are 8. I have been going to First Missionary Baptist since I was 6 years old. I have sung in that choir. I have taught Sunday school in the basement. I have served lemonade at 4 vacation Bible schools. I know every deacon's wife by name and every deacon's wife knows what I take in my coffee. I have never in my life been the kind of woman who hides. The flashes started when I was 51. They started small. A little wave. A little warmth. Nothing worth mentioning. My doctor said it was normal for a woman my age and told me to dress in layers and gave me a pamphlet. By the time I was 52 they were bigger. I was waking up at 2:30 in the morning with the sheets soaked through and I was changing my nightgown in the dark so I wouldn't wake Reggie. I bought a little battery fan for my nightstand. I bought sheets with the moisture wicking. I bought a cooling pillow that cost 68 dollars off Amazon and didn't work. By the time I was 53 they were bigger during the day than at night. I was sitting at my desk at Parkview one morning in September, back to school night was in 4 hours, I had a stack of enrollment forms to file. It was 9:15 AM. The building was cool. My blouse was navy silk. And out of nowhere the wave came up my chest and hit my throat and my whole face went hot like someone had opened an oven in front of me. I sat there gripping the arms of my chair. By the time it passed I had sweat clean through my blouse under both arms and down the middle of my back. I could feel my bra clinging to my skin. I could feel my hair damp at the nape of my neck. Miss Cheryl, the assistant principal, was walking by on her way to the copier. She said "Alma, honey, you okay." I said I was fine. I smiled. I went into the supply closet after she passed and I closed the door and I pressed my forehead against the cool metal of the shelving unit and I stood there for 4 minutes until I could breathe again. That was the day I started buying blazers a size too big. You would not believe the things I bought in the year after that. A little pack of blotting papers for makeup that I used on my chest. A silk scarf that I told myself was for style. A stick of clear antiperspirant I put on my chest and shoulders and the back of my neck every morning. A folding cardboard fan I ordered from Etsy because the church fan was starting to look worn out. Then a second one from a different Etsy shop that folded like a Chinese fan and lived in my purse. I ordered a spray bottle of "cooling mist" for 34 dollars that turned out to be water. I made an appointment with my doctor. She was young. She was kind. She had a poster on the wall of a smiling older woman doing yoga. She told me my hormones were in the range for a woman my age. She told me I could try hormone therapy if the symptoms became disruptive. I asked her what disruptive meant. She said if I couldn't function. I was functioning. I was doing the church fan trick 20 times a day and I was functioning. I thanked her and I left. I want to tell you about one specific day because I think about it a lot. Camille's oldest, Marcus, had his 3rd grade Christmas program in December of last year. Camille had asked me weeks in advance to come. I sat in the second row of the school gym with Reggie on my left and Camille and her husband on my right and Marcus's twin sister Micah on my lap. The program started. The lights dimmed. The kids came out singing. And I felt it start. Not a small one. A big one. The kind that starts in the middle of your chest and moves up your throat and then it's in your face and you know you have about 20 seconds before your neck starts to shine. I didn't have my fan. I had left my purse in the car. Micah was sitting on my lap. I could not get up without making a scene. I could not open my little program and fan myself with it because everyone would see. I sat there and I felt the wave hit my face and I felt my collar go damp and I felt Micah's little arms slide down my forearm because my skin was too slick for her to hold on. She said "Grandma, you're wet." She said it out loud. The woman in front of me turned around. I stared straight ahead at the stage with tears in my eyes and I sang "away in a manger" with the second graders and I did not move for the rest of the program. Reggie didn't know what to do. Camille didn't know what to do. Micah went back to her mother's lap 5 minutes later without saying anything else because 3 year old girls are actually much more careful with grown women than we give them credit for. I went home that night and I sat on the edge of the tub in our bathroom and I cried for a long time. I told Reggie the next morning I wanted to skip Easter. He said "you don't skip Easter." I said "I don't want to sit in the church in a good dress and have this happen in front of every person we know." He said "Alma, you have been going to Easter service since you were 6." I did go to Easter service. I wore a linen dress in a light color that would show sweat less. I sat in the back pew instead of my usual place near the deacons' bench. I did not raise my hands during praise. I want to tell you about June. My cousin Everett passed on a Sunday in early June. Everett was 63. He'd had a stroke in his sleep in his apartment in Pine Bluff and his daughter had found him the next morning. It was sudden. It was the kind of loss that comes without warning and knocks a whole family sideways for a while. The funeral was at Mount Pleasant Baptist here in Little Rock the following Saturday because that was Everett's mother's church and she wanted him buried near her. June in Arkansas. The forecast was 91 degrees. The church did not have great air conditioning. The service was at 11 AM. I wore a navy dress with 3 quarter length sleeves and a pair of low heels and I brought 2 fans in my purse. I sat with Reggie in the fifth pew from the back on the aisle. I could see the whole church. The service started. By the time we were 20 minutes in I had used 1 fan and I was on the second and my navy dress was showing wet where my back was against the pew. The woman two rows in front of me had a battery operated hand fan going the whole time. The man behind me was mopping his face with a handkerchief every 90 seconds. Everyone in Mount Pleasant Baptist that morning was sweating. Except one woman. She was sitting in the pew directly in front of me. I hadn't noticed her when I sat down. Older woman. Maybe 63 or 64. Salt and pepper hair pulled back into a low neat bun with a pearl clip. Straight back. Small pearl earrings. A wide brim black hat that she'd taken off and set beside her on the pew. She was wearing a wool suit. A full 3 piece wool suit in navy blue. Skirt to just below the knee. Fitted jacket. Silk blouse buttoned to the throat with a little pearl pin. Stockings. Closed toe pumps. I stared at the back of her neck for the whole 50 minute service. She did not sweat. Not a drop. Not a shine. Not the little glisten at the hairline that even the coolest people had going by that point. The little curl of hair at the back of her neck where the bun didn't cover was completely dry. I could not stop looking. The service ended. The pallbearers came forward. We stood and we sang. My dress was ruined. Her wool suit sat on her shoulders like it had been pressed that morning. We filed out into the fellowship hall for the repast. I told Reggie to fix me a plate. I walked across the room with my purse in my hand and I found her standing near the sweet tea station holding a small plate with 2 deviled eggs and a piece of pound cake. I said "excuse me ma'am, I don't mean to bother you." She smiled at me. Kind eyes. Deep laugh lines. A small gap between her front teeth. She said "you're not bothering me, baby. Sit down." We sat at one of the round tables in the corner near the coat rack. I did not know how to ask what I was about to ask. I fumbled with the strap of my purse. I looked down at my dress. She said "you want to know how I'm not sweating." I looked up at her. She laughed. She said "sugar, I have been getting that look at every funeral I've been to for the past 8 months. You are the first one to actually come over and ask me." Her name was Odessa Fields. She was 63. She lived in Pine Bluff. She had known my cousin Everett since they were both in high school at Merrill 45 years ago and that's why she had made the drive up that morning. Her husband Nathaniel had passed 6 years earlier. She had raised 3 children and was a retired guidance counselor from a middle school in Pine Bluff. She had been having the flashes since she was 51. She had had them worse than I did. She said hers used to come in twos. Back to back. The kind where you'd finish one and start another before your dress was dry from the first one. She said she had tried everything. She had tried the herbs from the natural food store on Main Street. She had tried a soy powder her sister sent her. She had tried the hormone patch her doctor prescribed and had come off it after 4 months because it gave her migraines. She had tried the little battery fans and the cooling mist and the wicking clothes. She had gone to Everett's cousin's 60th birthday party 9 months earlier and had gotten so hot in the middle of the toast that she had walked out of the restaurant and sat on the curb in her Sunday dress. That was the night she'd made up her mind to do something different. Her sister-in-law, a woman she'd known for 40 years who lived in Monroe, Louisiana, had told her about something months earlier and she'd brushed it off because it sounded like every other thing she'd tried. But that night on the curb she called her sister-in-law from her car and said "tell me about that thing again." I asked her what it was. She said pomegranate. I laughed a small laugh. She waited for me to be done and then she said "I know what it sounds like. Let me tell you what it actually is, because it's not what you're thinking." She took a sip of her sweet tea and she set the cup down. She said your body has a whole set of blood vessels whose job is to control your temperature. She said when you get warm, those vessels are supposed to open up in a certain way to release the heat. When you get cool, they're supposed to tighten in a certain way to keep the heat in. The whole system runs on a signal your body makes called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide tells the vessels when to relax and when to constrict. It's the switch. She said when the switch is working right, your body handles temperature the way it always has. When it's not working right, the vessels can't respond the way they're supposed to. They flush all at once. They can't get their signal to calm down. And that's what you feel when a flash comes. That's not just your hormones being crazy. That's your vessels not getting the signal to settle. I sat forward. She said the reason the switch stops working right is oxidative stress. She said the same word gets used for what happens to metal when it rusts. Rust. Your body does the same thing on the inside. It rusts. And the little signal molecule that tells your vessels when to open and close, that nitric oxide, gets attacked by the rust the moment your body makes it. The signal doesn't reach the vessels. The vessels don't get the message. And they flush without warning. She said menopause makes it worse because your hormones change and put more stress on the whole system, but the flashes themselves are your vessels not being able to talk to the switch anymore. She said what she'd been taking supported the switch. She said it was an extract of pomegranate. Not the juice. Not the seeds. The peel. She said the peel of a pomegranate has compounds in it called punicalagins. She said the word slow so I could catch it. Pyoo-nih-kah-lah-gins. She said they don't exist in the juice or the fruit. They exist in the peel, which nobody eats and which most companies throw away. She said the punicalagins support the nitric oxide signal by quieting the oxidative stress that had been destroying it. When the rust eases, the signal survives. When the signal survives, the vessels can respond to it the way they used to. When the vessels can respond, they don't flush all at once. They handle the heat the way they used to handle it. Small waves. Small adjustments. Not the tsunami that had been running my body since I was 51. She said her flashes had gotten small first. Not gone. Small. Then further apart. Then further apart still. She said she had put on her wool suit that morning at 7 AM in her house in Pine Bluff and she had driven 2 hours to Little Rock and she had sat through a 50 minute service in a hot Baptist church and she had not felt a wave one time. She said 8 months. Then she said one more thing before she told me what to look for. She said most of the pomegranate supplements you'll find at the drugstore or online are standardized to something called ellagic acid. She said ellagic acid is one of the things your body makes when the punicalagins in the peel break down. So it's downstream. It's the leftover, not the source. She said companies use it because it's cheaper to standardize to. It sounds fancy on a label. But it's not the same as taking in the actual peel extract with the actual punicalagins in it, because the peel gives your body the whole raw material to work with, not just one downstream piece. She said "if you're going to try something, try the thing that's actually the peel." She said the one she took was called Alevia. She said it was 2 capsules in the morning with her coffee. That was the whole routine. She'd been taking it every morning for close to 8 months at that point. She reached in her purse. She pulled out an orange bottle with a dark green cap and she set it on the table between the deviled egg plate and my sweet tea. She said "I carry a spare. In case a woman like you comes over at a funeral and asks." She slid it across the table. She said "you take that home. If it works for you, order your own next month. If it doesn't, throw it away and forget I said anything." I sat there with my hands in my lap. I said thank you. I said it 3 times. She said "sugar, don't thank me. Just don't hide anymore. I hid for 12 years and I'm not doing it another day." I want to tell you what happened and I want to tell you the way it actually happened. Week 1: Nothing. I mean nothing. I took 2 capsules with my coffee at 6:15 in the morning at my kitchen table. I still had the flashes. Same as before. I almost stopped because I thought Miss Odessa had given me a placebo. Week 2: Still nothing on the flashes. But I noticed I was sleeping through the night on a Tuesday and I couldn't remember the last time that had happened. I hadn't woken up soaked. I hadn't changed my nightgown in the dark. Week 3: The daytime flashes were the same size but I was having fewer of them. I counted them one Thursday. Six for the whole day. I usually had 12 to 15. Week 4: The waves started coming shorter. They still came. But instead of lasting the full 90 seconds they were 30 seconds and gone. My blouse stayed dry more often than not. Week 5: I sat through a 3 hour staff meeting at Parkview and I did not open my desk drawer once for the fan. Week 6: My daughter Camille called me on a Sunday and said "mama, you look different in the photos from Micah's birthday. Are you sleeping better." Week 8: I wore silk to church. A pink silk blouse under a white linen blazer. I sat in my regular pew near the deacons' bench. I raised my hands during praise. I did not have a fan in my hand. The pastor called the greeting time and I hugged 4 women I hadn't hugged in months. Week 10: Miss Cheryl at Parkview walked past my desk on a Wednesday and said "Alma, what have you been doing, you're glowing." I laughed. I said "sleep." Week 12: My grandson Marcus had his end of school program on the last Thursday in May. I sat in the second row of the gym with Reggie on my left and Micah on my lap. Micah's little arm rested on my forearm the whole 40 minutes. My skin was dry. She kept it there. And when the program was over she looked up at me and she said "Grandma, you smell like flowers." I want to say something to the women who might be reading this. You are not vain for wanting your body back. You are not weak for having tried a lot of things. You are not making it up. What you are feeling is real. Your doctor's shrug is not the last word. There is a switch inside you that has been getting worn down for a long time. The switch controls how your body handles heat. When the switch works right, you feel like yourself. When the switch is worn down, your body ambushes you in public and you spend all day hiding it. The switch can be supported. It's not gone. It's not broken. It just needed something that no shampoo or spray bottle or hormone patch was ever going to give it. Alevia is what Miss Odessa gave me at Mount Pleasant Baptist in June. Alevia is what I take now. It is the actual peel extract with the actual punicalagins in it, not the cheaper ellagic acid stand-in that most companies use. Two capsules with your coffee. That's the whole routine. They have a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you try it for the full 3 months and you don't see a difference, you send the bottle back and they refund every penny. Miss Odessa told me about the guarantee before she told me anything else and I want to do the same for you. Give it 90 days. Give the switch time to catch up. If it does nothing, you send the bottle back and you are out nothing. If it does what it did for Miss Odessa and what it did for me, you are going to know before the 90 days are up. The first thing you will notice is your sleep. The second thing will be the fan in your drawer. You will realize one afternoon that you haven't opened the drawer in a week. 👉 https://alevia.com/pom/5 P.S. About the peel. When you look at other pomegranate supplements online or at the drugstore, they'll put pomegranate on the front of the bottle and then somewhere on the back they'll list ellagic acid. That's the tell. A company that gives you the whole peel extract will tell you about the punicalagins on the front because they know what they've got. A company that's cutting corners will hide the ellagic acid on the back and put a pretty red fruit on the label. Look for the peel. Look for the punicalagins. If the front of the bottle doesn't say punicalagins, put it back on the shelf. P.P.S. I did not change anything else. I did not start hormone therapy. I did not go on a diet. I did not add a new supplement stack. I did not buy a different pillow. All I did was take the 2 capsules in the morning with my coffee. I want to say that clearly because I know a lot of us have tried a lot of things and are tired of adding more things to the routine. This is one thing in the morning. That is the whole ask. P.P.P.S. Alevia has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you try it for the full 3 months and nothing changes, you send the bottle back and they refund your money. That's it. There is no fine print I could find. Miss Odessa carried a spare bottle in her purse to hand to women like me because she believed in it enough to put it in someone else's hand. I don't carry a spare in my purse yet but I keep an extra in the kitchen cabinet in case one of the women at Parkview asks me what I've been doing. And they do. They do ask. I've had 4 conversations in the past month standing over the copier that ended with me writing this same website down on the back of a Post-it. Let the guarantee do what it's supposed to do. Let it be the thing that lets you say yes. 👉 https://alevia.com/pom/5

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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