Ad copy

Pat Greene was supposed to direct the choir at our church's hundredth anniversary celebration in October. She had been preparing the program for two years. Twelve special selections. A full orchestra brought in from Clark Atlanta. Three guest soloists, including the granddaughter of our founding pastor flown in from Houston. Eight hundred people in the sanctuary. The Bishop of the Sixth Episcopal District. Two news crews from Channel 11 and Channel 5. Pat sat in the back pew of the church she has served for twenty-two years, behind the third pillar on the left side where she could not be seen from the pulpit, and listened to her twenty-eight-year-old assistant Roxanne Holcomb conduct her choir. Pat had quit her Mounjaro® in February. I'm going to say something most of us on these GLP-1 medications do not want to hear, and I'm not going to soften it because Pat did not get a soft version of this either. Another bottle of fiber is not going to save your shots. Not Miralax. Not Metamucil. Not the ninety-four-dollar prescription bulk-former your gastroenterologist called in last Thursday. Not the magnesium your daughter ordered for you off Amazon for forty-six dollars. Not the prune juice your mama swore by. Not the Smooth Move tea from the health food store in East Point. NONE OF IT IS GOING TO WORK. I know because I tried all of it for eleven months. And nine weeks ago I had a discontinuation appointment on the calendar for a Friday afternoon at one because I was done — done planning every Sunday morning around whether I could make it through service without leaving the sanctuary, done burping behind my hand at the Mothers Board meeting, done watching my own grandbabies and falling asleep on the couch while they watched cartoons at three in the afternoon. I was going to walk into my prescriber's office at one o'clock, quit my Ozempic, and accept that I would be back to two hundred and thirty-four pounds within nine months. Maybe sooner. I had done it once before, after Marcus. I almost let it happen. I was still listening to the same garbage that took my best friend's place at the piano. Read every word of this. The answer is in here and it is not what your doctor told you. My name is Gloria Mason. I'm 67. I live in Stone Mountain, Georgia — twenty minutes east of Atlanta — in the brick ranch house Marcus and I bought in 1989 with the down payment we saved for six years. Marcus passed eighteen months ago — September of '24, sudden heart attack at seventy-one, the morning after our forty-fifth anniversary dinner. He was retired from Aflac, he was a deacon at our church, and he was the only man I ever loved. I have two grown daughters — Kendra in Tucker, Tracey in Decatur — and three grandchildren who keep me alive. I retired from Atlanta Public Schools in 2022 after thirty-two years as a guidance counselor, the last seventeen at Frederick Douglass High. I am active at Greater Mt. Zion AME Church, where Marcus and I were members for thirty-six years, and where I sit on the Mothers Board with eleven other women who have known me longer than my own daughters have. In the nine months after Marcus passed, I ate. Not from hunger. From wanting something to do with my hands at seven in the morning when the house was too quiet. I gained fifty-six pounds. By June of last year I weighed two hundred and thirty-four — the most I had ever weighed in my life. My doctor told me my blood pressure was a hundred and sixty over a hundred and that we had two paths in front of us. I chose Ozempic®. I started in July. By December I was down to one eighty-six. My pressure was normal. I had started walking on the trail at Stone Mountain Park three mornings a week. I had bought a dress at Phipps Plaza I had not had the courage to try on in twelve years. I should have been thanking the Lord. The woman in the photograph on my dresser and the woman in my mirror were starting to match again. Instead, I was sixty-seven years old, sitting in the back pew at Sunday morning service holding a folded handkerchief over my mouth because I had not gone normally in nine days and I could feel a sulphur burp coming up. The constipation started in week four. By month three I was going every six or seven days, and only after a long fight. By month six the fight had stopped working. The sulphur burps started in April. The kind that come up without warning. The kind that came up standing next to Pastor Womack on the receiving line after the eleven o'clock service. The kind I had never had in sixty-seven years of life. I started carrying breath mints in my pocketbook in a way I had not since I quit smoking in 1989. The fatigue is what would have taken me. I am a sixty-seven-year-old woman with three grandbabies between two daughters who both work outside the home. I am the standing Tuesday and Thursday daycare. By July of last year I was driving to Kendra's house at two in the afternoon and falling asleep on the family-room couch while my eight-year-old grandson Caleb built Legos beside me on the floor. He told his mother. Kendra called me that night. She did not say it, but she was afraid. And the brain fog. I lost the name of my own granddaughter Aniyah at the Mothers Board meeting in August. Just for fifteen seconds. I covered it. The two women across the table who noticed pretended they did not. I went out to my car in the church parking lot afterward and cried for ten minutes before I could drive home. I told my prescriber. "It happens with these medications, Mrs. Mason. Drink water. Try Miralax. Give it more time." I tried what he said. I tried what Sister Carolyn from the Mothers Board suggested. I tried what my daughter Tracey saw on TikTok. By August I had been to the bathroom five times in three weeks. I am a retired guidance counselor. I track things. Between February and August I spent five hundred and twenty dollars on supplements and laxatives. Miralax morning and night. Citrucel at lunch. Metamucil at dinner. A magnesium from the GNC at Camp Creek. A probiotic my daughter Tracey ordered from Amazon for forty-eight dollars. A prescription bulk-former my gastroenterologist wrote at ninety-four dollars out of pocket. Prune juice. Senna tea. A bottle of Smooth Move from a health-food store in East Point. I had a basket of all of it in my pantry. Tracey saw it when she came over to drop off the grandbabies on a Sunday afternoon. She asked me what was happening. I told her I was fine. I still had not gone normally in eight weeks. The sulphur burps were keeping me from communion on First Sundays. And meanwhile, my best friend Patricia was disappearing from the only thing she had ever loved more than us. Patricia Anne Greene and I have been friends since 1968. We were both twelve years old, both in Sister Mae Hudson's youth choir at Greater Mt. Zion, both not very good singers if I am being honest with you. Pat had a voice like clear water by the time she was sixteen. I had a voice that does not need to be discussed further. Pat went on to study music education at Spelman College from '76 to '80, came back to our church in 1985, and was made music minister in 2003. She has been the music minister at Greater Mt. Zion for twenty-two years. Our congregation does not have a Sunday service without Pat at that piano. Pat has not had a Sunday morning without our congregation since 1985. Marcus called her the heartbeat of our church right up until the day he passed. She started Mounjaro® a year before I started Ozempic — same kind of grief story, different husband, hers passed in 2021. She lost fifty-one pounds. By December of '24 she was running again — she had been a sprinter at Spelman, I do not know if I told you that — and she was three months into rehearsals for the church's hundredth anniversary celebration scheduled for October. The committee had been planning it for two years. Pat was going to direct twelve special selections, a full orchestra brought in from Clark Atlanta, three guest soloists, and a praise dance from the youth ministry. Bishop Brown was coming from Washington. Two news crews. In February she had a constipation streak that went fourteen days. She did not tell me. She did not tell her son Marcus Junior up in Athens. She filled out her own discontinuation paperwork on a Saturday night when she was alone in her kitchen. She quit her shots that week. By May she had gained back twenty-three pounds. By July she had stopped coming to choir rehearsal — sent Roxanne in her place. By September she was up forty-six pounds. The depression came in heavy by the third week of September. She missed three Sundays in a row. People were calling me asking if Pat was all right. I did not know what to say. The hundredth anniversary celebration was Sunday morning, October the twenty-first. The sanctuary was full. The Bishop preached for fifty-two minutes. Roxanne stood at Pat's piano and conducted Pat's program. Roxanne is twenty-eight years old. She is a very gifted young woman, the granddaughter of one of Pat's choir mothers from the eighties. She did her best. Pat sat in the back pew on the left side, behind the third pillar where she could not be seen from the pulpit, and listened to twenty-two years of her work being conducted by a young woman who had not yet been born when Pat first sat down at that piano. After the service I went looking for her. Her car was already gone. The next morning the church board met. By Wednesday word had spread that they were discussing transitioning Pat to "Music Minister Emeritus" — a respectful title for a forced retirement none of us thought we would see. Roxanne would take over permanently in January. I drove home from running errands on Tuesday afternoon and sat in my car in my own driveway for thirty-five minutes before I could go inside. I called my prescriber's office and scheduled the discontinuation appointment for Friday at one. I did not tell my daughters. I did not tell anyone. The next Wednesday was my regular Bible study night at the church. Wednesday evening women's Bible study, six-thirty to eight, the same group of women I have been studying scripture with for sixteen years. I had not been the last four Wednesdays. I had been telling myself I would skip another one and stay home in front of the television. I do not skip Bible study. I made myself go. After the lesson ended at eight, the women's group cleaned up together — folding chairs, clearing coffee cups from the church's silver urns, wiping down the folding tables in the fellowship hall. There were six of us at the start of the cleanup. Most of the others had already gone home by the time I was folding the last three chairs. Doreen Williams came back from the kitchen with a trash bag in her hand. Doreen is seventy-two. She is one of the matriarchs of our church and a fellow Mothers Board member. She was the lead pharmacist at the Greene Brothers Pharmacy on Cascade Road in southwest Atlanta from 1981 until they closed in 2019 — thirty-eight years filling prescriptions for half the Black families on the southside of this city. She was Marcus's friend before she was mine. She and her husband John were at his funeral. She set the trash bag down. She looked at me across the folding table. "Gloria. Sister. You sit down. We need to talk before you drive yourself home." I sat down. I told her everything in about twelve minutes. The constipation. The burps in the receiving line. Pat. The discontinuation appointment Friday at one. I cried in the fellowship hall of the church Marcus and I had served for thirty-six years for the first time since the morning he passed. Doreen handed me a clean napkin with the church's name printed at the corner from the stack on the table. Then she sat down across from me and folded her hands the way she used to do when she was about to explain to me what a new prescription would do to my husband's pressure. "Sister Gloria. Can I tell you what I learned in thirty-eight years filling prescriptions at Greene Brothers?" "Please." "These medications — Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro — slow your gastric emptying by fifty percent or more. That is how they make you feel full. That is how you got down to one eighty-six." "I know that part." "But here is what your prescriber did not tell you. When your stomach empties at half-speed, two things happen they do not put on the patient handout. First, food sits in your stomach long enough to ferment. Bacteria break down food that should have moved on six hours ago. That is where the sulphur burps come from. Second, the slowdown runs all the way through your gut. Stool sits longer. Dries. Compacts. By the time it reaches your colon, the muscle contractions your body normally uses to push it out are not strong enough to compensate." "That is the constipation." "That is the constipation. Now let me tell you what the supplement industry has been doing to women like us for the last two years." "Tell me." "Fiber works by adding bulk that needs gut motility — muscle contractions — to push it through. But your medication is intentionally suppressing those contractions. When you add fiber on a GLP-1, you are adding bulk that has nowhere to go. You are not relieving constipation. You are making the bloating worse." I thought about every morning of forced Citrucel water I drank at the kitchen sink before I drove to Tuesday daycare at Kendra's. "Stimulant laxatives — Dulcolax, Senna, Smooth Move — they force the intestinal muscles to contract. But your medication is suppressing those exact contractions. The two drugs fight each other inside your gut. The GLP-1 wins almost every time. That is why you have been cramping at three in the morning and still not going." I thought about the night in August when I had taken three Senna tablets and missed the next morning's Mothers Board breakfast for the first time in nine years. "What works?" "You need an osmotic mechanism. Magnesium pulls water into your colon without requiring muscle contractions. That is the correct approach for a slowed system. But the dose has to be right, and most of what is on the shelf at the GNC or on Amazon is not the dose on the label." "What else?" "You need a prokinetic — something that speeds your gastric emptying enough to stop the fermentation, but does not fight the medication. There is exactly one botanical that does this reliably. Ginger root extract, at a specific dose and gingerol standardization. The supplement industry has been selling unstandardized ginger powder under premium labels for years. Most of it has no measurable active compound at all." "How do you know?" "My daughter Renee works at a contract testing lab in Norcross. She runs assays on commercial supplements when one company is suing another for label fraud. Last year she ran a panel on twelve GLP-1-positioned supplements being sold to women like you and me. Nine were underdosed on magnesium. Five had no measurable gingerols. Two contained heavy metals above CFR-111 limits. One was three percent of the magnesium it claimed on the label." "How many passed?" "One. Just one." She wrote a name on the back of the Bible study handout, where the verse memorization section had been left blank. "GLP-1 SOS™. Started by a woman who was on Wegovy and went through what you are going through. She found a real formulator and got it right. I have told every Mother on this board who is on these medications. I have told the deaconess at Big Bethel. I have no business relationship with the company. I just do not want any more Pats." I looked at the handout. GLP-1 SOS™ written in Doreen's careful pharmacist's print. Then I looked at her. "Will this work for Pat?" "It will work for Pat if she will take it. Right now, you. Two capsules with dinner. The magnesium pulls water in gently overnight. The ginger speeds your stomach emptying. Regularity inside three or four days. Sulphur burps usually gone within forty-eight hours. Energy back in the second or third week as the B12 builds up." I cancelled the discontinuation appointment from the church parking lot before I drove home. I ordered GLP-1 SOS™ from glp1sos.com that night at the kitchen table where Marcus and I had taken every meal of our marriage. Day one, nothing. Day two, nothing. Day three, I went, in my own bathroom, gently, at six fifty AM. No cramping. No straining. Just normal. I sat on the edge of the tub for a minute afterward and let myself believe it. Forty-eight hours after my first dose, I stood next to Pastor Womack on the receiving line after the eleven o'clock service and shook the hands of about a hundred and forty members of my congregation without covering my mouth with a handkerchief once. Week two, I slept through the night for the first time since March. Week three, I had energy at three in the afternoon for the first time since the spring. Week four, I kept the grandbabies on a Tuesday and a Thursday and on Saturday I drove down to Athens for the afternoon to visit Kendra's mother-in-law at her assisted living facility. I did not fall asleep once. I am still on Ozempic®. Down to one eighty-two. My blood pressure last visit was one twenty-eight over seventy-six. My doctor said it is the best she has seen on me in twenty years. That was eight weeks ago. Haven't been constipated since. Haven't had a sulphur burp since. Every time I see Pat — who is back on Mounjaro now and four weeks into her own bottle of GLP-1 SOS™ — I think about her sitting behind the third pillar. The church board has agreed to delay any Emeritus decision until February. Pat is going to direct the Christmas concert on December the fifteenth. Roxanne will play the offertory. They have already had three rehearsals. I'm writing this because I keep seeing the same posts in the Black women's GLP-1 groups my daughter Tracey added me to. "On Ozempic. Constipated ten days. Tried everything Sister Linda recommended on TikTok. Anyone?" "Sulphur burps so bad I skipped Sunday service last week. Help." "Twelve days. Considering quitting. Anybody got anything?" You are not doing anything wrong. The fiber is not the problem. The brand is not the problem. The mechanism is the problem. Your medication is intentionally slowing your gut. Every fiber supplement, every laxative, every prescription bulk-former in your medicine cabinet was designed for a normal gut. You do not have a normal gut anymore. You have a slowed-on-purpose gut. The two are fighting each other inside you. And it is not just discomfort. Pat quit her shots and almost lost her place at the piano of the church she has served for twenty-two years. I almost lost the version of myself I had finally given back to my husband's memory. All because nobody told us there was a supplement formulated specifically for the way GLP-1 medications change the body. You do not need another brand. You need a different mechanism. You need 250mg of bioavailable magnesium in two forms — osmotic, no contractions required. You need 200mg of ginger root standardized to 5% gingerols — a real prokinetic, not commercial powder. You need 500mcg of methylcobalamin B12 to replenish the energy your reduced eating depleted. That is GLP-1 SOS™. 27,000+ people on Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Mounjaro®, Zepbound®, and Foundayo™ are on it. Made in the USA. FDA-registered facility. Third-party tested. 60-day money-back guarantee — every dollar back if you are not regular within four weeks. You are already paying $149 to $1,200 a month for your shots. $24.99 a month to actually function on them is not the math you should be losing sleep over. Tap below. https://glp1sos.com EDIT: A few of the Sisters at Mothers Board asked me about Amazon listings. Doreen warned me about this. The real GLP-1 SOS™ ships ONLY from glp1sos.com. They do not sell on Amazon. Doreen said most Amazon supplements sit in heat-damaged warehouses for months, which destroys the magnesium bioavailability and the ginger gingerol content. Order direct. P.S. The Amazon magnesium I bought for three months had 19mg per dose, not the 250mg on the label. Renee ran the assay as a favor for her mama. Eight weeks on real GLP-1 SOS™ and I haven't had a single sulphur burp on the receiving line. P.P.S. Pat called me Tuesday night for the first time in seven months. She said she has lost eleven pounds in three weeks and she walked from her house to the Mt. Zion sanctuary on Sunday morning for the first time since the spring — a quarter-mile she had been driving since March. She said one thing to me before she got off the phone: "Three weeks. I should have known last February." Don't let that be you. https://glp1sos.com *These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Ozempic® and Wegovy® are registered trademarks of Novo Nordisk A/S. Mounjaro®, Zepbound®, and Foundayo™ are trademarks of Eli Lilly and Company. GLP-1 SOS™ is not affiliated with Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly. Results may vary.*