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I came to on the floor of a HyVee in Topeka, Kansas with a 19 year old stock boy holding my head off the linoleum like it was an egg. His name tag said Dawson. He had a piece of gum in his mouth and he was trying not to cry. I could see the gum because his mouth was hanging open in the kind of frozen panic only a teenage boy in his first real job can wear. He kept saying "ma'am, ma'am, ma'am" the way you say a word when it's the only word left in your head. I'd been standing in the cereal aisle 14 seconds before. Reaching for a box of Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds. The store brand was cheaper but I was on my lunch break and I was tired and I wanted the name brand. That's the last thing I remember. Then I was on my back looking up at Dawson and the fluorescent ceiling and the box of cereal had fallen open and there were little flakes scattered across my chest like brown snow. My name is Renee. I'm 53 years old. I've taught preschool at a Lutheran church on the west side of Topeka for 16 years. I have a husband named Greg who works for Westar Energy reading meters. We have a son, Caleb, who is 24 and getting his teaching certificate at Emporia State. We live in a little 1972 ranch with vinyl siding and a chain link fence and a Labrador named Pepper who has eaten 3 of my shoes since 2021. I am not the kind of woman who collapses in a grocery store. I have to put that on the table right now. I am the woman who runs the entire 4 year old room by myself, who lets the parents call me Miss Renee even though most of them are older than me, who teaches 14 children how to write their names and tie their shoes and not throw sand at each other. I do not collapse. I had collapsed. The ambulance came. Two paramedics, one of them a guy named Bryce I recognized from church. He kept it professional but his eyes were doing that thing where someone you've known casually for 4 years suddenly has to be touching your wrist for medical reasons and you can both feel how weird it is. They took me to Stormont Vail. My blood pressure was 96 over 58. My blood sugar was 89. My oxygen was 99%. EKG was clean. The ER doctor was named Dr. Patel. She was probably 34 years old. She came in with a clipboard and a polite smile and she said "Mrs. Hutchins, your bloodwork looks normal for your age. Your vitals are fine. You probably just got dehydrated. It's warm in the store. Maybe you skipped breakfast. We see this a lot." That phrase. Normal for your age. I want you to hold onto that phrase because it's the phrase that this whole story turns on. Normal. For. Your. Age. I went home that afternoon with a discharge paper that said "syncope, etiology unclear" and a recommendation to "stay hydrated and follow up with your primary." Greg drove me home in his truck. He didn't say much. He kept reaching over and putting his hand on my knee at red lights. Pepper greeted us at the back door like nothing had happened and I sat on the kitchen floor with her for a long time with my back against the dishwasher and I let her lick the side of my face until my hair was matted. That night I lay in bed and I started doing math. The math you don't want to do. I had been tired for about 3 years. Not the kind of tired you fix with a nap. The kind of tired you wake up with. The kind of tired you carry into the shower and the shower doesn't wash off. I thought it was the kids. The 4 year olds. They take it out of you, all those little bodies and all those little needs. I'd been telling myself for 3 years that this was just what teaching preschool at 53 was supposed to feel like. But there was more than the tired. There was the brain fog. I'd be in the middle of reading a book to the kids and I'd lose the word for something on the page. Not a fancy word. The word for "ladder." The word for "rooster." Just gone. I'd cover it with a smile and ask the kids what they thought it was called and they'd shout out "ladder" and I'd say "yes, ladder, that's right" and we'd move on. I was 51 the first time it happened. I was 53 now and it was happening 3 or 4 times a week. There was the weight. I'd put on 18 pounds in 2 years that I could not get rid of no matter what I did. I'd done the Mediterranean diet. I'd done the 16:8. I'd cut sugar for 6 weeks straight. The weight would move 3 pounds and come right back the second I had a single slice of birthday cake at a 4 year old's party. There was the sleep that didn't fix anything. I'd go to bed at 9:30 and sleep until 6:15 and wake up like I'd been running through a forest all night. Greg said I never tossed. I just lay there and woke up exhausted. There was the gray. Not in my hair. In my face. I'd look in the bathroom mirror and the woman looking back at me had a flatness to her skin that hadn't been there in 2019. Like somebody had turned the saturation down on a photograph. I had been telling myself for 3 years that this was just 50. This was just the age. This was just what happens to a body that has carried a baby and worked on its feet for 16 years and watched its own mother fade out in a hospital bed in 2018. This was normal for my age. The morning after the HyVee, I called out of work. First sick day I'd taken in 4 years. I told the director, a sweet woman named Patty, that I had a stomach bug. She told me to stay home as long as I needed. I sat at my kitchen table in my robe with a cup of coffee getting cold next to me and I opened my laptop. I want to tell you that I knew what I was looking for. I didn't. I typed in the search bar: why am i so tired in my 50s Then I deleted that and I typed: woman fainting in grocery store Then I deleted that and I typed something I hadn't ever typed before. I typed: what causes fatigue brain fog weight gain even when bloodwork is normal That was the question. That was the question I'd been carrying around in my mouth for 3 years without knowing how to say it. I clicked on 11 different links. Most of them were garbage. Magazine listicles. "10 reasons you might be tired" with reasons like "are you stressed?" and "are you eating enough greens?" But on the 7th link, a long blog post written by a woman who said she was a nurse practitioner in Portland, Oregon, I read a sentence that stopped me cold. She said "if your bloodwork is normal but your energy isn't, the problem isn't usually in your blood. It's usually in your mitochondria." I had not thought about mitochondria since 8th grade biology class. The powerhouse of the cell. I sat at my kitchen table and I let that phrase sit there. The powerhouse of the cell. I remembered Mrs. Erskine, my 8th grade science teacher, drawing a little bean shape on the chalkboard at Robinson Middle School in 1985. I remembered her saying that every cell in your body has these little engines inside it that make the energy your body uses to do everything. To pump your heart. To fire your nerves. To form a thought. To carry a 4 year old. To stand in front of a cereal display and reach for a box. I remembered Mrs. Erskine pointing at the chalkboard and saying "girls, this is where life happens." I had not thought about that drawing in 38 years. I sat at my kitchen table with cold coffee and Pepper snoring under the table and I went down a rabbit hole that lasted 5 hours. I want to tell you what I learned that morning because nobody had ever explained any of this to me. Not Dr. Patel. Not my primary. Not the 3 different OBGYNs I'd seen over the years. Not the bottles of multivitamins in my pantry. Not the magazines at the dentist office. Here is what I learned. Every cell in your body needs energy to do its job. That energy is made inside the cell by your mitochondria. They are real. They are not metaphor. They are little engines inside every cell of you, right now, working. When they work well, your cells get the energy they need. Your body does what bodies are supposed to do. You wake up rested. You think clearly. Your weight responds to what you eat. Your skin holds light. Your nerves fire on time. When they start to wear down, every system in your body starts to feel it. Not at once. Not loud. Slow. The way a house cools down when the furnace is dying. You don't notice the first 2 degrees. You notice when you're putting on a sweater inside your own kitchen in October. Mitochondria wear down for a lot of reasons. Aging is one. Stress is another. Years of poor sleep is another. Years of processed food is another. Environmental load is another. Inflammation is another. Most of modern American life is, in fact, a slow grinding away of mitochondrial function in women who are supposed to be in the prime of their lives. The fatigue that sleep doesn't fix. The brain fog. The weight that won't move. The skin losing its light. Those are not separate symptoms. They are the same symptom. They are your cells telling you they're running on fumes. I read that sentence on a website written by a doctor named someone I don't remember and I sat there at my kitchen table and I started to cry. Not because it was scary. Because for the first time in 3 years, somebody was explaining to me what was happening to me in a way that wasn't "normal for your age." It was normal. But it wasn't permanent. And it wasn't my fault. It was a system that had been quietly running down underneath me while I'd been carrying 4 year olds and reading books and skipping breakfast and watching my mother die. I kept reading. I read about something called AMPK. Imagine it as the master switch on the wall of a factory. When AMPK is on, your mitochondria get the signal to fire up, get to work, make energy efficiently. When AMPK is sluggish, the factory floor goes dim. The crew clocks in but they're half asleep at the conveyor belt. Researchers had been studying things that help activate AMPK. That's when I read about amla. Amla is a fruit. Indian gooseberry. Phyllanthus emblica is its real name. I had never heard of it. I went to my kitchen pantry and looked at every bottle I'd ever taken in the last 5 years. Multivitamins. Vitamin D. Magnesium. A B complex I bought at Sam's Club. Not one of them mentioned amla. Not one of them mentioned mitochondria. Not one of them mentioned AMPK. I went back to my laptop. In Ayurvedic medicine in India, they have used amla for thousands of years and they call it "the nurse." The nurse. The one who quietly takes care of the rest of the body so the other systems can do their work. Researchers had found that amla appears to help activate AMPK. When AMPK is more active, mitochondria can start producing cellular energy more efficiently. The way they did when you were 31. When mitochondria are better supported, the cells they power can finally start doing their jobs the way they were designed to. The skin cell that maintains your skin's vitality can finally get the fuel to do it. The neuron that holds the word "ladder" in your forebrain can finally fire the way it used to. The muscle cell that's been hoarding fat because the engine inside it was too tired to burn anything can finally start running clean. The cell in your brainstem that keeps your blood pressure steady when you bend down to reach a box of cereal can finally do its job without sending you to the floor of a HyVee. That's the part that made me lean forward at my kitchen table. I had not collapsed because I was dehydrated. I had collapsed because something in me had been running on empty for 3 years and on a Tuesday in March in the cereal aisle, the empty had finally caught up to me. And the fix wasn't more sleep. Or more vegetables. Or more water. I'd been doing all of that for 3 years. The fix was further upstream. The fix was the power plant. I want to tell you that I also read about the amla's antioxidant profile. It has one of the highest antioxidant profiles ever measured in any food. That matters because while it's helping turn the master switch back on, it's also helping protect your mitochondria from the oxidative stress that was wearing them down in the first place. It was like reading about a maintenance crew that also brings their own tools. I ordered a bottle that afternoon from a company called Alevia. I picked them because their bottle was a standardized extract, not just powdered fruit. Their label talked about the specific compounds the research was focused on. 30 servings per bottle. 2 capsules a day. Shipped from the US. They had a 90 day money back guarantee, which I noticed but didn't think much about because at that point I would have paid 5 times the price. It came on a Friday. I started taking 2 capsules with my morning coffee on a Saturday. I drew a little star on my kitchen calendar the way my mother used to draw stars on the days she planted bulbs. Here is what happened over the next 9 weeks. I am telling you what happened to me. I am not telling you what will happen to anybody else. Every body is different. But this is mine. The first 10 days I didn't feel anything I could put my finger on. I took the capsules. I drank water. I went to work. I watched the kids. I came home. I slept. Day 12 I noticed something in the morning shower. I was washing my hair and I realized I'd been standing in the water for 4 or 5 minutes before I started washing my hair. I'd just been standing there. Letting the water hit me. Not because I was tired. Because it felt good. I hadn't stood in the shower because it felt good in I don't know how long. I'd been showering on autopilot because I was trying to get through it. Day 14 I made it through reading Where the Wild Things Are to the 4 year olds without losing a single word. Day 17 I came home from work and I didn't sit down on the couch the second I walked in the door. I stood at the kitchen counter and made dinner. Actual dinner. Not a thing I heated up. I made chicken with lemon and rosemary and roasted potatoes. Greg came in from the garage and stopped in the doorway and said "what's the occasion." I said "no occasion." He said "you're standing up cooking." I said "I know." He didn't say anything else but I saw his face shift. Not a big shift. Just a small one. Like a man who didn't know he'd been holding his breath. Day 24 was the first morning I woke up before the alarm. 5:51 AM. The room was dark and Pepper was breathing slow next to my feet and I lay there for a minute and I realized something I hadn't realized in 3 years. I felt rested. Not "less tired." Not "okay." Rested. The way a body is supposed to feel when it's slept for 8 hours. I started crying in the dark and Greg woke up and said "Renee, what's wrong" and I said "nothing's wrong, Greg, nothing's wrong, go back to sleep." But I lay there until 6:30 with tears running into my pillow because I hadn't known I'd missed it that much. Week 5 I bent down in the produce section at HyVee to grab a bag of carrots and I stood back up and I didn't get dizzy. I had not realized I'd been getting dizzy every time I bent down for 2 years. Your body adjusts to its own decline. That's the part nobody tells you. You don't notice the lights getting dimmer. You just walk into the room differently after a while. You start avoiding the bending and the reaching and the standing and the quick turning. You start picking up things with two hands. You start scooting around your own life to avoid the parts where your body might tell you something you don't want to know. When the lights come back up, you don't realize it right away. You just realize, one day in the carrot section at HyVee, that you bent down and stood up and the world stayed where it was supposed to be. Week 6 the brain fog was gone. Not less. Gone. I taught a whole unit on weather to the 4 year olds without losing a single word. Stratus. Cirrus. Cumulonimbus. Patty, the director, sat in on the last 20 minutes of my Friday lesson and afterward she stopped me in the hall and she said "Renee, you have so much energy today." I said "Patty, I have so much energy every day now." She gave me a long look. She said "what changed?" I told her. Week 7 I went for my annual physical. Different doctor than Dr. Patel. My primary. A woman named Dr. Hatch who I've seen for 9 years. She looked at my vitals and she looked at me and she said "what are you doing different?" I said "I started a supplement called amla. Indian gooseberry. From a company called Alevia." She wrote it down. She said "I've heard of that." She didn't say more. But she wrote it down. Week 9 was last weekend. Greg and I drove down to Emporia to see Caleb. He met us at a little diner near campus called the Sweet Granada and we sat in a booth for 2 hours and we just talked. About his student teaching. About the apartment he and his girlfriend Hannah were thinking about. About whether he wanted to come home for Easter or stay down there with her family. At one point Caleb stopped in the middle of telling a story about a kid in his second grade classroom and he looked at me and he said "Mom. You look good." I said "thank you, baby." He said "no. I mean you look like you. You look like you in 2017." I sat in that booth and I held my coffee cup with both hands and I didn't say anything for a while. I had not looked like me in 2017 for a long time. My son had noticed. I had not realized he had been noticing. I had not realized he had been quietly watching his mother fade for 3 years and not saying anything because what does a 24 year old kid say to his mother about something like that. He had been carrying it. The way Greg had been carrying it. The way I had been carrying it. We all just been carrying it because we didn't have a name for it. The name we'd been given was "normal for your age." It wasn't normal. It was a power plant that needed support. If you're reading this, and you've been doing the math I was doing, and you've been calling it 50, and you've been blaming the kids or the job or the years, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm not your doctor. I'm a preschool teacher in Topeka, Kansas. I'm telling you what I did. Alevia's Amla is a standardized extract of Indian gooseberry. 2 capsules a day. 30 servings per bottle. Made in the US. The guarantee is 90 days. You take it for 3 full months, and if your body doesn't respond, you mail it back and they refund the order. No phone calls. No customer service obstacle course. No begging. 3 months is longer than my church's free trial of the new contemporary worship service. P.S. The cereal aisle. I went back to the HyVee on Wanamaker last Tuesday. Same store. Same aisle. Same shelf. I stood there and I reached for the same box of Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds and I picked it up and I put it in my cart and nothing happened. I cried a little in the dairy section but I wasn't sad. I was the opposite of sad. I was looking around at the lights and the displays and the other women my age pushing their carts and I thought about how many of us are walking through grocery stores in our 50s thinking the way we feel is just what it is, and I wanted to grab every single one of them by the elbow and tell them what I learned. P.P.S. If your wife or your mother or your sister has been "fine" for the last few years in that way where she's not actually fine but she keeps saying she's fine, she might not have the words for what's happening to her. We don't always have the words. The doctors keep handing us "normal for your age" and we keep taking it because what else are we supposed to take. Don't accept "normal for your age" for somebody you love. Sit at the kitchen table with her. Ask her how she feels when she wakes up. Ask her if she remembers the word for ladder. Ask her if she's been bending down differently at the grocery store. She'll know what you mean. She just might need somebody else to say it first. P.P.P.S. Alevia's Amla has a 90 day money back guarantee. 3 full months. The vitamin D I'd been taking for 4 years didn't come with that. The magnesium I'd been taking didn't come with that. The bottle of energy gummies I'd bought from a kiosk at the mall in 2022 didn't come with that. Alevia stands behind their product for 90 days. Think about who's confident in their bottle and who's just hoping you autoship and forget you're subscribed. P.P.P.P.S. Dawson, the stock boy. He still works at that HyVee. I saw him last Tuesday while I was in the cereal aisle. He was stocking peanut butter. He looked at me and he looked at me again and he said "ma'am. Are you the lady from March." I said "Dawson, I am." He said "ma'am, are you okay." I said "Dawson, I am better than I have been in 3 years." He stood there in his green apron with a jar of Jif in his hand and he didn't know what to do with himself. I told him thank you. For holding my head. He said "ma'am, you scared me bad." I said "I scared me too." Then I bought him a king size Snickers at the checkout and asked the cashier to put it in his locker. Don't wait to be on the floor of a grocery store with a teenage stock boy holding your head before you start asking what's actually going on inside you. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33