The Blood Sugar Journal Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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I almost didn't tell anyone about this. Not because I'm ashamed. But because I know how it sounds. A 57-year-old woman sitting in her bus on the side of a county road, hands on the wheel, shaking like she'd grabbed an electric fence, talking herself through a prayer she hadn't said since her mother's funeral. That's not the kind of thing you lead with at Sunday dinner. But I keep thinking about the other drivers. The ones still doing what I was doing, which was nothing. Just watching the numbers creep and telling themselves it wasn't that bad yet. So I'm going to tell it the way it happened. My name is Patricia. Patricia Gwen Hollis, although nobody's called me Gwen since my daddy passed. I'm 57 years old and I live in Gadsden, Alabama, same town I was born in, same general neighborhood I grew up in, about 4 miles from the school where I have driven a route for going on 19 years. Bus number 14. The morning elementary run and the afternoon middle school run. I know every dip in the road between here and Pittman Middle School. I know which kids get on at which stop and what time their porch lights come on in winter. I know the smell of the bus in August, and the way the windows fog over in January before the heat kicks on, and the particular sound a diesel engine makes when it's been sitting in cold weather and you first turn the key. I know my bus. And that morning, I knew something was wrong with me. It had been building for a while. That's the honest part of the story. The part where I have to admit I saw it coming and kept looking away. My numbers had been inching up for 3 years. Not all the way up. Just... drifting. My doctor called it a trend. She said we'd watch it. She said to cut back on the white rice, which I did, and to walk more, which I tried, and to come back in 6 months, which I did, and the number would be a little higher and she'd say we'd keep watching. For 3 years, we watched. I never let myself say the word out loud. I knew what word it was. Half my family has it. My mother had it. Her sister has it. My uncle Darryl has been on insulin since he was 52. I watched all of them manage it and I told myself I was going to be different. I was going to catch it early. I was going to do the right things and it wasn't going to get me the way it got them. But the right things weren't holding the line. And I knew it. Deep down, under all the watching and the waiting, I knew the line was moving. The shaking started a few months before that morning on the road. Not all the time. Just sometimes. Mid-morning, usually, or right around 3 o'clock, which is when I'm doing the afternoon pickup. A little wobble in my hands. A flush of something hot behind my eyes. That underwater feeling where sound gets faraway and your own heartbeat gets loud. I would pull into a stop, let the kids file on, breathe through my nose, and by the time I was rolling again it would be mostly gone. I told myself it was caffeine. Then I told myself it was the new medication my doctor put me on for something else. Then I just stopped telling myself anything about it because I didn't have room for what the honest answer was going to be. On a Tuesday in October, I was coming up the stretch of 431 between the Walmart and the first light, 11 kids on the bus behind me, and my hands started doing the thing. Except this time they didn't stop. I pulled off. Right there on 431, hazard lights on, eleven 6 and 7 and 8 year olds sitting in their seats looking at me in the big mirror. I gripped the wheel. I breathed. I said the first few lines of the prayer from my mother's funeral, which is the thing I say when I genuinely don't know what else to do. It passed. I drove the rest of the route. I parked the bus. I went home and I sat at my kitchen table and I didn't move for about 45 minutes. Then I called my daughter Keisha. Keisha is 31. She's a home health aide. Has been for going on 6 years now, works primarily with elderly patients, a lot of them managing exactly what I was trying not to manage. She's heard every version of this story. She knows the territory. I told her what happened on the road. All of it. The shaking, the prayer, the hazard lights, the kids in the mirror. She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Mama. How long has this been happening?" I told her the truth, which was a while. She drove over that evening. We sat in my kitchen and she made tea, which is what she does when she's thinking, and she asked me to walk her through my meals from the day before. What I ate and when. She knows how to take a history. She's done it a hundred times. We went through it. Breakfast had been light that morning. Later than usual, closer to 8, and I'd had my route at 7:15, so I'd been running on fumes. She pulled up something on her phone. Started asking me questions I didn't fully understand about what happens between meals, about how the body handles glucose when you haven't eaten, about what that does to a person whose system has been under strain for a few years. She set the phone down. "The food isn't the whole problem," she said. "The way your body is handling the food. That's what's changing." I want to try to explain what she meant, because it took me a while to understand it myself. Keisha works with a home health company that contracts with a big medical system, and she has continuing education she has to do every year. She'd done a module not long before that on metabolic health. She explained it to me the way she'd explain it to a patient who needed plain language, which I did. She said: your body has a system for controlling how fast food turns into sugar. When you eat something, your digestive system breaks it down and glucose enters your blood. The system's job is to manage the speed of that process. Keep it slow. Keep it steady. When that system is running well, your body keeps up. The sugar comes in gradual and your body handles it. But that system can get worn down. Over years. Processed food stresses it. Aging stresses it. Oxidative damage from just living stresses it. And when it's been under stress long enough, it stops doing its job as precisely as it used to. Now the same meal that used to produce a steady trickle of glucose produces a surge. Your body floods with more sugar than it can keep up with. Then it overcorrects and the sugar crashes. That's the spike and the crash. That's the shaking. That's the underwater feeling at 3 in the afternoon. Not the food itself. The system that's supposed to be controlling the speed of it. "And the tricky part," Keisha said, "is that the number your doctor watches, your fasting glucose, that catches up slowly. You can have the system going sideways for a while before the number tells you. By the time the number is alarming, the system's been struggling for a long time." I thought about 3 years of watching the number drift. I thought about how many times I'd said, well, it's not that bad yet. "So what do I do," I said. "What actually helps the system." Keisha told me she'd been reading some things. Research things, not social media things. She was careful to say that. Her clinical supervisor had mentioned something in a training and she'd gone down a rabbit hole. She said: "There are these compounds. They're in certain plants. Plants that have been studied a lot more than most people realize. And some of them have been looked at specifically for how they interact with the pathway that controls carbohydrate digestion." She pulled up her phone again. She'd been doing this research for a few months and she had notes saved. She read me some of it, slowly, the way you read something you want somebody else to actually understand. She told me about an enzyme called alpha-glucosidase. That enzyme sits in your digestive system and its job is to break carbohydrates down into glucose. When it's working fast, sugar floods in fast. When something slows it down, the glucose comes in more gradually. More the way it's supposed to. Then she told me about pomegranate. Not pomegranate juice. Pomegranate extract. Made from the peel, not the fruit itself. She'd looked into this specifically because the compounds that show up most in the research, the ones called punicalagins, are concentrated in the peel. The part people don't eat. The part most pomegranate juice barely touches. She said the research she'd been reading suggests that punicalagins have been studied for their role in supporting exactly the kind of pathway she'd been describing to me. The one that controls how fast carbohydrates become sugar. There had been a large analysis, dozens of clinical trials pooled together, looking at pomegranate and blood sugar markers across more than a thousand people. The results had been consistent enough to be published in a real journal, the kind with peer review. I said: "Keisha, I'm 57 years old. I've taken a lot of things that were supposed to help and they didn't." She nodded. "I know. That's why I want you to understand the mechanism. Not just that it might help. But why it might work when other things haven't." Most of the things I'd tried over the years had worked downstream. That's the word she used. Downstream. They tried to change what I was eating, or to blunt the effect of the sugar after it was already in my blood. Metformin works downstream. Most of the diet advice works downstream. Change the inputs. Manage the outputs. But the pathway itself. The enzyme that controls the speed of carbohydrate breakdown. That was upstream. That was the part nobody had ever explained to me, and the part most of what I'd tried hadn't really touched. That's what the research on pomegranate peel extract was looking at. Not managing the numbers after the fact. Supporting the part of the system that's supposed to keep things from getting out of hand in the first place. Keisha also said something else that stuck with me. She said: the oxidative stress that wears the system down, year after year, that doesn't just go away on its own. And one of the things that makes pomegranate peel extract interesting is that it's also one of the highest antioxidant sources ever measured. Punicalagins specifically. Which means it's not just working on the enzyme and the carbohydrate pathway. It may be helping protect the system from the kind of damage that wore it down in the first place. I sat with that for a minute. "So it's not just patching the problem," I said. "That's the idea," she said. "That's what the research is looking at." I want to be honest with you about the next few weeks, because I'm not going to tell you it was dramatic. I found the product Keisha had been looking at. It's called Auniva Pomegranate. It's a peel extract, concentrated, standardized to punicalagins. Made in the USA. Keisha had specifically looked for something that listed the actual active compound, not just "pomegranate extract" on the label. Most of them don't. I started taking it. 2 capsules. Every morning. The first 2 weeks I didn't notice much. Which is what Keisha had told me to expect. She said whatever was going to happen wasn't going to happen overnight. She said give it 6 weeks before you decide anything. Week 3, I noticed I wasn't having the 3 o'clock thing as bad. The flush. The wobble. I drove the afternoon route and I wasn't white-knuckling the wheel at the 3 o'clock stop anymore. I didn't tell myself what that meant yet. I just noted it. Week 5, I had a long Saturday. I was at my church's community breakfast in the morning, which means a lot of coffee and not as much real food as I should have had, and then I spent the afternoon at my sister Renee's house. Usually that kind of day is rough for me. Run down, shaky by 2, eating everything in sight by 4. That day, I felt okay. Not spectacular. Just okay, which for me on that kind of day is better than my normal. Week 8, I went back to my doctor. She looked at my numbers. She looked at me. She said: "What have you been doing differently?" I told her about the pomegranate. I told her what Keisha had explained. She didn't jump up and down. But she didn't dismiss it either. She said to keep doing what I was doing and come back in 3 months. First time in 3 years she hadn't said we'd keep watching. I'm still on bus 14. Still doing the morning elementary run and the afternoon middle school run. Still know every dip in 431 between here and Pittman. I haven't had the shaking since before Thanksgiving. Not the way I was having it. I don't know how to say that without sounding like I'm making a promise on someone else's behalf, because I'm not. I'm just telling you what happened to me. What I can tell you is this: for 3 years I watched a number drift and told myself I was being smart about it by watching. I wasn't being smart. I was just postponing the conversation I didn't want to have. Keisha wasn't going to let me keep postponing it. And she didn't show up with a lecture or a list of things to stop eating. She showed up with an explanation of what was actually happening, and a question: had I ever thought about the pathway itself? Not the numbers downstream. The system upstream. I hadn't. And that turned out to matter. If something about my story sounds familiar, the drifting numbers, the things you've tried that haven't held the line, the way your body seems to handle food differently than it did 10 years ago, I'd encourage you to look into what Keisha pointed me toward. Auniva Pomegranate. The peel extract, not juice. Standardized to punicalagins, which is the part that makes it different from most of what you'll find on a supplement store shelf. They back it with a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you try it and it's not for you, you return the bottle and you get your money back. No fine print about it. For me, the investment was worth it. I stopped watching and started doing something, and something changed. That's all I can tell you. The rest is yours to decide. 👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5 P.S. Something Keisha explained that I want to pass along: most pomegranate supplements you'll find at the pharmacy are standardized to ellagic acid. That's a compound found in a lot of fruits. It's not the same thing. The research that looks most compelling in the blood sugar area is specifically on punicalagins, which are found primarily in the peel of the pomegranate and are actually unique to that fruit. Most juice barely has any peel in it. Most supplements use the wrong marker. That's not me being a salesperson. That's Keisha being very particular about reading the label before she recommended anything, and it's the reason she pointed me to this one specifically. P.P.S. I've told this story to 3 women I know from church, all of them in similar situations with their numbers. Two of them have been taking it for a couple months now. I haven't asked them to compare notes yet, because it's still early. But I noticed one of them at choir practice last week moving like she had her legs under her again. She caught me looking and she just nodded. We didn't have to say anything else. P.P.P.S. If you're reading this from a bus, a break room, a kitchen table at 6 in the morning before the day starts, this is for you. Not for people who have it all figured out. For people who've been watching something and hoping it would stop on its own. It helped me to understand what was actually happening before I had the conversation I needed to have. I hope this helps you have yours.

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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