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My husband left me in March for a 29 year old. Two weeks ago he texted me asking if he could come home. I've been debating posting this for about two weeks. Four different people have asked me what I did and I'm tired of typing it out one at a time, so I'm just going to put the whole thing here. It's long. Sorry. I'm not a writer and my daughter is going to be mortified. Last March I came home early on a Tuesday and heard the shower running upstairs at two in the afternoon. I'll spare you the rest of it. I didn't scream at anyone, I just closed the door and went back downstairs and sat at the kitchen table until it got dark, which sounds dramatic but I genuinely did not know what else to do. That night I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself properly for the first time in about three years. I'd been avoiding mirrors for far longer than I’d like to admit. Perimenopause hit me at 47 and never let up. 40 pounds in two years and I did not change one thing about how I ate. My stomach sat on top of my jeans no matter what I bought. My face was puffy every single morning. My jaw had sort of melted into my neck. My skin was gray under that bathroom light. And I was hungry all the time. I'd eat a full dinner and be hungry again by 8. I'd stand in the kitchen at 9pm eating out of the fridge without even being hungry, just doing it, then hating myself while I did it. I thought about food all day. Every day. It never shut off. Standing there that night, I understood why he did it. That's an awful thing to admit and I know how it sounds but it's the truth. I didn't recognize her either. I'd tried everything for three years. Counted every calorie for eight straight months. 10,000 steps a day. Pilates four times a week and then cardio on top when Pilates stopped doing anything. Apple cider vinegar gummies. Magnesium. Those berberine capsules everyone talks about, I took those for two months (about $40 down the drain). Nothing moved. Not one pound in three years. I want that to sink in because I know somebody reading this is in year two of it right now. I went to my doctor twice about it. The second time she looked at me for maybe two minutes and told me it was just my age and I should try eating a little less and moving a little more. I cried in the parking garage afterwards. I was already eating like a bird and walking every day and she just told me to eat less? The night it all happened I called my sister Jen. She's a nurse practitioner at a women's health clinic and she's four years older than me and she is not a gentle woman. She listened to about ninety seconds of me and said she was flying out Thursday and not to argue with her. She got here, didn't hug me, didn't cry with me. Put her hands on my shoulders and said okay, we have work to do, you're not staying like this. Two days later she put a bright pink drink on my kitchen counter. It looked exactly like those starbucks drinks my teenage daughter loved. I had to laugh. I said: “Jen, I gained 40 pounds, I don't need a pink drink, I need to stop eating.” She didn't react at all. She asked me three questions instead. Are you hungry again an hour after you eat? Yes. Do you get shaky and irritable if you go too long without food? Yes, constantly. Do you think about food when you're not even hungry? All day, every day. She said then this isn't about what you're eating. Your body quit sending you the full signal a few years ago, that's all this is, and you've been at war with it ever since without knowing. And then she said the thing I still think about. She said you can diet for the rest of your life and you'll never win this, because you're not fighting food. You're fighting your body.. when you should be working with it. I told her I'd already tried berberine and it did nothing. She sort of laughed and said the capsules are the wrong delivery, that most of it never gets absorbed, and it has to go in as a drink. There are four things in it and she went through them one at a time like I was one of her patients. Berberine, which is the one that turns the fullness signal back on. 5-HTP, because estrogen is what made your serotonin for thirty years and when it quits, that's your 9pm craving, and this gives it back. Chromium, which stops the blood sugar crash that has you starving an hour after dinner. And yerba mate for energy without the jitters, which at that point I did not believe was possible. It's a cutting mix. And that was it. That was the plan. Not a diet, not a program, nothing to weigh or track. A pink drink in the afternoon. I said Jen, I'm 52, my husband is with a 29 year old, and your answer is a strawberry refresher. She said drink it and stop talking. The annoying thing is it's actually nice. I kept waiting for the chalky supplement aftertaste and it just never turned up. I made pasta that night. Ate half and pushed the plate away. I sat there staring at it because my hand had just stopped and I hadn't told it to. I didn't eat standing up in the kitchen that night for the first time in three years. Day three, 9pm came and went and I was on the couch with the kitchen light off. I just wasn't thinking about food. Day five my rings were spinning on my finger and I wasn't waking up puffy. Week two my belt went in a notch and the bloat that had lived in my stomach for three years was gone. My daughter called that week and said mom, you sound different. Week three my jaw came back (I can't explain that any better, it just came back) and my skin cleared up and I slept through the whole night for the first time since I was 47. Week four I was down 14 pounds and waking up before my alarm, which I had honestly forgotten was something that happened to people. Week five I found a green dress in the back of my closet that I bought four years ago and never wore, and it fit, and I sat down on the closet floor and cried for about ten minutes. My poor sister thought something terrible had happened. Week six my friend Denise bullied me into a date. My daughter set up the app. I matched with a man named Daniel, a lawyer, divorced, very kind. I put the green dress on and Jen was standing at the bottom of the stairs and just said, there she is. I got to the restaurant early and sat by the window and Daniel was running late, and the next part of this story sounds fake. I can’t even believe it myself. My ex-husband walked in with her. He was wearing the watch I bought him for his 50th. They sat four tables away and he never saw me. Daniel showed up and he was lovely and funny and about halfway through dinner I felt someone looking at me. I looked over and there he was, staring at me with his mouth slightly open. I went to the bathroom to collect myself and there was a woman at the sink next to me, mid fifties, beautiful but absolutely exhausted looking, and she said I'm sorry, I have to ask, you look incredible, what do you do. So I stood there at the sink and told her all of it. She ordered it on her phone before I'd even left the bathroom. There he was. My ex husband waiting in the hallway when I came out. He said Christine, you look, and then stopped, and then said you look incredible, what did you do. I walked past him without saying a word. I've replayed that moment probably two hundred times. My daughter came over a few weeks later, saw it on my counter, and said mom why do you look like that, I'm 26 and I'm hungry every hour of the day. She's on it now too. She sent me a selfie last month and said I look like you. Here's what I actually want to say, to whoever's still reading this far down. I spent three years believing he left because I got old, and that this was just what 52 was like, and I should make peace with it. I was wrong. And I still can't get over how stupid it sounds when I say it out loud. Three years of crying in parking garages, avoiding every mirror in my house, sitting out of photos at my own niece's wedding. And what fixed it is a little packet in the bottom of my handbag that I tip into a water bottle around 11 because I want something nice to drink in the afternoon. If you're 45 or 50 and you've done the counting and the walking and the gummies, if you've got berberine capsules sitting in your cabinet doing absolutely nothing, if a doctor gave you two minutes and told you it's just your age. It isn't. You don't need to inject anything into your stomach once a week and you don't need to eat less than you're already eating. Jen says it sells out constantly because they make it in small batches. I checked yesterday and they were nearly out again. It's about a dollar a day, 30 in a box, and it tastes like a strawberry refresher which still feels like cheating. There's a 30 day money back guarantee if it does nothing for you. Link's at the bottom. PS. For the four of you who asked in my DMs, no, it is not the same as the capsules you already have in your cabinet. I asked that too. That was my exact question. It's the drink form or it doesn't absorb properly, and I'm not the person to explain the science, my sister is. PPS. Yes there's caffeine in it from the yerba mate, it's gentle but I drink mine in the morning and not at 6pm. And take it with something in your stomach, not on an empty one, I learned that the hard way on day two. I saw the woman my husband left me for. She was 29 and I almost cried right in front of her. The only reason I'm not still broken over it is what my sister got on a plane to bring me. PPPS. He texted me last week. I didn't answer.