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

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My best friend Kim stopped at the second bench on Sweeney Ridge on Sunday morning, and I have hiked that trail with her every single Sunday for eight years, and this is the third time she has stopped at a bench she used to blow past without slowing down, and I finally said something. We were maybe forty minutes into the hike. The fog was still down. The Pacific was gray behind us. Kim was in her navy fleece and her old Berkeley hat. She said, “Di, let me stop for a sec. I want to catch my breath.” We were at the bench under the eucalyptus. The bench where at mile marker 1.6 you can see the ocean below you on a clear day. In eight years of Sundays on this trail I have watched Kim stop at that bench exactly twice. Once when she twisted her ankle in 2019 and once when she was in the middle of a bad breakup in 2021 and she wanted to talk instead of walk. She has stopped there four Sundays in a row now. She sat down. She took a sip from her water bottle. She looked out at the fog. I sat down next to her. I said, “Kim.” She said, “Di, don’t.” I said, “Kim, I need to say something to you.” She said, “Please don’t.” I said it anyway. I said, “I have watched you stop at this bench four Sundays in a row. Before that I watched you stop at the third bench for six Sundays. Before that I watched you stop at the top bench and skip the little loop out to the point. I have been watching you get quieter on the phone for eighteen months. I have been watching you cancel dinner with me at least once a month since March. I have been watching you post the same three photos on Instagram in rotation since you stopped posting new ones in August of last year. I have been watching you wear the same three sweaters at every dinner we have had since Zoe’s birthday. And I have not said anything because I did not know how to say it. I am saying it now.” I stopped. My chest was tight. Kim did not look at me for a long minute. Then she said, in a voice I have not heard from her in twenty years, “Di, I do not know what is happening to my body and I do not know how to say it to anybody and I have not slept a whole night in eight months.” She put her face in her hands. I sat next to her on that bench with the fog just starting to lift and I put my hand on her back and I let her cry, which she has not done in front of me in maybe six years. When she was ready we walked back down. We did not finish the hike. We had coffee in her car in the parking lot. She could not stop crying for the first ten minutes. Then she said, “Di. I am so sorry.” I said, “Kim. Do not apologize to me. There is nothing for you to apologize for.” She said, “Yes there is. I have been lying to you for a year and a half. Not lying-lying. But I have not been telling you what has been happening. And you are my oldest friend. And I have been carrying this alone.” I want to back up. My name is Diana Nguyen. Most people call me Di. I am 45 years old. I live in Millbrae, California, in a small mid-century house that my husband David and I bought in 2016, six months before I got pregnant with our daughter Zoe. David is 46 and works as a product manager at a large software company. Zoe is 11 and in the sixth grade at a public middle school on the Peninsula. I have been a UX design director at a mid-size fintech in San Francisco for four years. I met Kim Peterson in the fall of 1998 in a triple in Unit 2 at Berkeley. We were both 18. I was intended-major undeclared. She was intended-major computer science. We had a third roommate named Priya who is now a nurse in Sacramento and who is going to appear in this letter later. We have been friends for twenty-seven years. Kim is 45. She has been the VP of engineering at a Series B fintech for two years. She is single by choice. She lives in a townhouse in San Bruno fifteen minutes from me. She has never been married and she is not going to be, and she has known this about herself since we were 22 and she is at peace with it in the way that only a person who has actually decided something can be at peace with it. She has been my closest friend for twenty-seven years. I did not see her getting worse until I did. I want to tell you what I have been watching, from the outside. Kim canceled our monthly Wednesday dinner in April of 2024. She said she had a work thing. She rebooked for the next Wednesday. She canceled that one too. She said she had another work thing. We rebooked for two weeks later. She canceled that one. That is when I stopped counting the canceled dinners. She stopped posting on Instagram in August of 2024. Before that she had posted every two or three weeks. Little things. A coffee. A meme. A photo from a work trip. Then she just stopped. She left up her existing posts. She has not posted anything new in fourteen months. She started wearing a different silhouette in the fall of 2024. Boxy sweaters. Oversized cardigans. Loose pants. She had been a woman who wore fitted things for the twenty-five years I have known her. Kim in 2019 wore tailored blazers and slim jeans and dresses that fit at the waist. Kim in 2025 has been in variations on a loose sweater and something with a drawstring at every dinner we have had for the last year. She started skipping the parts of our hikes she used to love. There is a loop off Sweeney Ridge that goes out to a little viewpoint. It adds maybe eight minutes. Kim used to insist on it every Sunday. We would sit at the point and eat the trail mix she brought and we would talk. She stopped doing the loop in the summer of 2024. She said she wanted to save the energy for the descent. She stopped meeting me for breakfast at Rise in Burlingame. She had been coming every second Saturday for three years. She stopped in October of 2024. She said her Saturday mornings had gotten busy. Our friend Rebecca had her fortieth wedding anniversary party in Marin in April of this year. Kim came to the event. She sat at our table. She left before the toasts. She said her stomach was off. I want to be honest about why I did not push her. I did not push her because I have been Kim. I was 43 years old in 2023. I woke up on a Tuesday morning in September of that year and my stomach was different. That is the shortest way I can say it. I had gained maybe four pounds since Christmas. My digestion, which had been like clockwork for my entire adult life, had stopped being predictable. I was going every second morning. Sometimes every third. I was bloated by four in the afternoon. My jeans, which I had been buying at the same size since I was 30, would not zip. I told nobody. I want to tell you what I tried, because if you are Kim’s age or you have a friend who is, some of this is going to sound familiar. I did Whole30 in October of 2023. I did it strict. I lost three pounds. I felt no different. I gained the three pounds back within seven weeks. I did celery juice every morning for four months in early 2024. I did an $800 Instagram protocol from a wellness woman with 340,000 followers. She sent me a 47-page PDF. The PDF told me to eliminate things I had already eliminated. I did it anyway. I lost nothing lasting. I did an expensive functional medicine intake at a practice in the Presidio. Fourteen hundred dollars. The doctor ran a GI-MAP and a comprehensive hormone panel. She sent me the results in a bound report. I did not fully understand the report. She put me on a five-supplement protocol that cost another six hundred dollars for three months. My digestion improved marginally for two weeks. Then I went back to where I had started. I did probiotic rotation. I did four different brands over six months. The most expensive was $89 a bottle. I did an elimination diet under my own management because I did not want to pay a nutritionist. Dairy out for six weeks. Gluten out for eight weeks. Eggs out for four weeks. I felt marginally better without eggs for a week and then that stopped mattering. I bought a $2,000 detox program from a wellness company I saw on a podcast. Three months of shakes and coaching calls with a health coach named Erin who was very kind and who did not have any idea what was happening in my body either. I bought an Oura ring. I confirmed with data what I already knew — that I was not sleeping well and that everything was slowly getting worse. I gained thirteen pounds over eighteen months. I told David nothing. I told Kim nothing. I want to tell you the night I broke. It was a Thursday in April of 2020. Wait — I mean 2022. I always mix this up because it feels like a decade. It was April of 2022. David was at his parents’ house in San Diego for the weekend with Zoe. I was alone in our house in Millbrae. It was raining. I sat in the bathtub with the water running for a long time and I let myself think about Rita. I want to tell you about Rita Chen. Kim and I met Rita in the same freshman dorm at Berkeley in the fall of 1998. Rita was in the next triple over. She was intended-major biology. She was the funniest woman I have ever met in my life. She could imitate anyone in the freshman class. She was the person we called at 11pm when we needed a real conversation. There were six of us who stayed close after graduation. Rita, Kim, Priya, me, a woman named Alison, and a woman named Michelle. We had a group text called “Unit 2 Forever.” For a decade after college we saw each other at least three times a year. Rita got divorced in 2014. It was hard. Her ex-husband had cheated on her with a woman fifteen years younger than her. She lost the house in Oakland and she took a job in Denver in 2015. She moved. She got quieter. She stopped answering the group text as fast. She started missing our birthdays. She missed our 10-year Berkeley reunion in 2018. She said she could not get away from work. She started posting less on the group text over the next few years. She would like our photos and not comment. She showed up at our 20-year Berkeley reunion in September of last year. I want to tell you what I saw when Rita walked into the bar at the Claremont on that Friday night in September. She was in a loose sweater. Oatmeal colored. Two sizes too big. She was in loose pants. She was carrying a small brown leather purse she did not put down for the entire two hours she was there. She held it against her stomach the whole time. She had not put a drink to her mouth for more than a sip. Her wine glass sat mostly untouched at her elbow. She did not sit with us. She stood at the edge of our little group. She smiled and she asked polite questions and she did not tell us a single thing about her life that was not the exact same thing she had said at the 10-year reunion planning email three years earlier. She left before nine. She said she had to catch an early flight. Kim and Priya and Alison and Michelle and I sat at the bar after Rita left. Nobody said what we were all thinking. Nobody could. I texted Rita the next morning. I said, “It was so good to see you last night. Can we talk this week? Coffee call?” She did not answer. I texted her the next week. She did not answer. The group text has been silent since October of last year. I sat in that bathtub in April of 2022 and I let myself think about Rita and I said out loud, to nobody: “I am not becoming Rita.” I said it three times. Then I picked up my phone and I sent a WhatsApp to Priya, our third roommate from the Berkeley triple. Priya is now a nurse at a hospital in Sacramento. Her father had died three months earlier. I had been at the memorial service in Sacramento in February. At the memorial service Priya had mentioned, quietly, over a plate of samosas at the reception, that her mother had figured something out about her own gut in her sixties that had changed her mother’s life. I had smiled and I had said, “That’s wonderful, Priya, I want to hear more sometime.” I had forgotten about it entirely. Two months later I remembered. I sent Priya the WhatsApp. I said, “Priya, hi, I know this is out of nowhere. At your dad’s service you mentioned something about your mom figuring something out about her gut. I need to know what it was.” She called me back within twenty minutes. She was on a shift at the hospital. She stepped outside. She told me. She told me her mother had had a version of what I had been describing for six years. She told me her mother’s GI in Sacramento had figured out that it was a specific condition — intestinal methanogen overgrowth, IMO — where a class of organism called archaea overgrows in the intestine and produces methane that physically slows the smooth muscle contractions of the gut. She told me the mechanism was specific and researchable and that she had read the papers herself because she is a nurse and does not accept things at face value. She told me her mother had come off six years of Miralax dependency in ninety days on a three-compound formula. Priya said, “Di. This is not the thing that failed you the last four times. This is something else. Please look into it. My mother is 68 years old and she took her first trip in eight years last summer.” I ordered a bottle that night. I want to be honest — the 90-day money-back guarantee is why I said yes when I had said no to so many things before it. I had spent thousands of dollars on wellness protocols that had done nothing. I was not going to spend sixty more without a way to get my money back if it did nothing. I want to tell you what I understood over the next two weeks of reading. Because it is the same thing Kim needed to understand, and it is the same thing I want you to understand if you are 42 or 44 or 46 and you have been hiding the shape of your own body from every person who loves you. Your gut worked fine for forty years. That is not in dispute. You were not always this way. You were always a person whose body did what she asked it to do. Then the environment inside your gut changed. This is not a moral event. This is not a discipline problem. This is not a signal that you should have eaten cleaner or exercised more. When your estrogen and progesterone start shifting in your early to mid forties, the environmental conditions inside your intestinal tract change. The 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 not bacteria. They are older than bacteria. They produce methane as a byproduct. And the methane physically slows down the smooth muscle contractions of your intestine. That is the paralysis at the source. Every diet, every probiotic, every functional medicine consult, every wellness protocol, every celery juice month I had ever done was trying to fix something at a different level. They were trying to change the inputs into a system that had a specific problem at a completely different level. They could not touch the archaea. They could not address the methane. They could not restore the motility because they were not addressing what was preventing the motility. The three-compound formula does. Berberine, which addresses part of the microbial overgrowth. Allicin, from garlic, the specific stabilized active form, which addresses the archaea that berberine does not reach. Piperine from black pepper, which dramatically increases how much of the other two get absorbed into your bloodstream instead of passing through. Together they address the coverage gap. When the source is addressed, the paralysis lifts, and your body’s own motility comes back. Restore, not force. I have been on Berbino for three years and one month. Week two I was sleeping deeper. Week four my stomach was not bloated at dinner. Week six the jeans fit. Week ten the thirteen pounds started coming off, slowly, four over the next three months and another five over the six months after that. I did not tell David until week eleven. I did not tell my mother until week twenty. I did not tell Kim until Sunday. I sat with Kim in her car in the Sweeney Ridge parking lot with the coffee cups going cold in the cup holders and I told her everything I have just told you. She listened. She did not interrupt me once. When I was done she said, “Di. Why did you not tell me.” I said, “Kim. Because I have been in so much shame about it for three years that I have not been able to say it out loud even to David. And because I did not want you to have to know what your best friend was hiding. But I have been watching you carry the same thing for eighteen months and I cannot keep pretending I do not know.” She said, “I have been carrying it for twenty months. I started counting from the day I couldn’t zip a pair of jeans in February of 2024.” I said, “Kim. Come to my house tomorrow morning. I want to give you something. I have already ordered it. It is coming tomorrow.” She said, “Di. What is it.” I said, “It is a bottle of what I have been on for three years. I bought a second one 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 refund my own money and you never have to think about it again. That is the deal.” She was quiet. She said, “Di. Okay.” I want to be plain about one thing. **Kim was not on any prescription medication for this. She had been trying wellness protocols and diets and supplements from the wellness industry. If you are on any prescription medication, do not stop it based on this letter. Any conversation about your prescriptions belongs between you and your doctor, not between you and me and not between you and the story of what happened to my best friend on a bench on Sweeney Ridge on a Sunday morning.** I want to say that clearly because it matters. Kim came to my house on Monday morning at 7:15am before her first meeting. I gave her the bottle. She took her first two capsules at my kitchen counter with a coffee I made her. She said, “Di, I hope this works.” I said, “Kim, take it for four weeks before you decide anything.” I want to tell you what I have watched over the last twelve weeks. Because it is Kim’s story and she has said, twice now, that if it helps somebody else’s friend, tell them what happened. Week one she noticed nothing. She texted me on day six: *nothing yet. holding the line.* Week two she called me on a Wednesday afternoon at three. She said, “Di. I slept for seven and a half hours last night. Straight through. I do not remember the last time I did that.” Week three she showed up at Zoe’s soccer game on a Saturday. Unannounced. She had not been to one of Zoe’s soccer games in eight months. She stood on the sideline with David and me. She stayed for the whole match. She wore a jacket that was hers from three years ago. Not the boxy sweater. Week four I got a text from her at 6:47am on a Thursday: *first fitted shirt in a year. do not comment.* Week five she and I hiked Sweeney Ridge on a Sunday. She did not stop at the second bench. She did not stop at the third bench. We hiked the whole trail. She insisted on the little loop out to the point. We sat at the point and she had a granola bar and she looked at the ocean for a long time. Week seven she and I went to Rise in Burlingame for breakfast on a second Saturday. She had eggs and avocado on toast. She had a second cup of coffee. She stayed for an hour and forty minutes. Week nine she called me at 8:03am on a Tuesday. She said, “Di. I signed up for the Half Moon Bay Half Marathon in September.” She had said no to that race for two consecutive years. Week ten she went to see her primary care doctor. Dr. Nakamura at a practice in San Mateo. Kim told her about the last ten weeks. Kim told her about Berbino. Kim told her about IMO. Kim asked her what she thought. Dr. Nakamura said, “Kim, I have been reading some of the literature on the archaeal overgrowth pattern. What you are describing is consistent with what the research suggests. Whatever you are doing, keep doing it. I want to see you in six months and we will take another look at where you are.” Kim called me from the parking lot of the practice. She said, “Di. My doctor did not tell me I was wrong.” She said it like it was a miracle. I want to tell you what happened last Sunday. Kim and I were at the bench under the eucalyptus at mile marker 1.6. Not stopping. Just walking past. Kim said, “Di. Can I tell you something.” I said okay. She said, “For twenty months I have been terrified that I was becoming Rita. Every morning for twenty months I have looked in the mirror and I have seen the outline of her sweater at the reunion. That is the specific image I have had. I have not been able to say it to anybody.” I said, “Kim. I have been terrified I was becoming her too. I have been carrying the same image.” She said, “Why did neither of us call her.” I said, “I do not know. I still do not.” She said, “I want to try to call her. In the next month. I want to try.” I said, “Okay. When you are ready.” We finished the hike. She insisted on the little loop out to the point. We sat at the point for eleven minutes. I want to tell you why I am writing this letter. If you have a best friend who has been quietly becoming smaller and quieter and more careful for a year or two, whose Instagram stopped updating in the summer of last year, who has been in the same three sweaters at every dinner you have had, who has been stopping at benches she used to blow past — I see you. If you are that best friend — I see you too. I have been you for three years. I know the exact shape of the shame. I know what it feels like to be 44 and to look at yourself in the mirror and to see somebody who is not you. I know the specific fear of becoming a person you used to know who slowly became invisible. I know what 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 cannot touch the archaea. They cannot. They are trying to force your body back to 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 three years, and that Kim has been on for twelve weeks, is called Berbino. Berberine, allicin, piperine. Two capsules a day. Available at berbino.com. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, which is the reason I ordered it in April of 2022, the reason Kim said yes on Sunday, and the reason it is worth trying for you or for someone you love who has been sitting on benches. If it does not work, you send the bottle back and every dollar is refunded. I read the policy twice before I ordered mine. Kim read it once. It is real. And one more time, plainly. **Nothing in this letter is medical advice. Nothing here tells you to change or stop a prescription. Anything about your medications is a conversation between you and your doctor, not between you and a story on the internet.** **👉 berbino.com** P.S. Kim’s half marathon is on the twenty-first of September. It goes along the coast at Half Moon Bay. David and Zoe and I are going to be at mile eight with a poster we are making together this weekend. She is going to finish. She said last Sunday she thinks she can do it in around two hours and ten minutes. She has not run a half marathon since 2022. P.P.S. The 90-day money-back guarantee is real. Read the policy before you order. If it does nothing in ninety days you send the bottle back and every dollar is refunded. That is a longer guarantee than any wellness protocol I bought in the three years I was hiding, 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 in three years. I keep two bottles on my kitchen shelf now. Kim keeps one in her townhouse and one in her office at the startup. After twenty months of hiding, she is not going to run out. P.P.P.P.S. Rita Chen has not answered our group text since October of last year. I do not know where she is. I do not know if she is okay. Kim said last Sunday that she is going to try to call her in the next month. I do not know if Rita will pick up. But if you are reading this and you have a woman in your life who has quietly stopped answering things, please send her this letter. Just the link. Somebody’s Rita is going to open a package on her doorstep and take her first two capsules with her morning coffee, and six months from now she is going to answer the group text for the first time in a year. I would like her to be the one who has been on your mind. **👉 berbino.com**

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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