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I tried to button my dad's funeral suit on a Tuesday afternoon in February and the button popped off in my hand. Not the bottom one. The middle one. The one that holds everything together. It hit the hardwood floor of our bedroom and rolled under the dresser and I just stood there in my undershirt with my belt undone and the suit jacket hanging open like a curtain that wouldn't close. My daughter's wedding was 9 days away. The suit was my father's. Charcoal grey. He bought it in 1998 from a place called Halloran's downtown that doesn't exist anymore. He wore it twice. Once to my sister's wedding. Once in his casket. My mother had it dry cleaned after the funeral and hung it in the back of her closet in a plastic garment bag and told me when she gave it to me at Christmas last year that she wanted me to wear it to walk Lauren down the aisle. She said "your father would have loved to see this." I told her I'd wear it. I meant it. I just hadn't tried it on until that Tuesday in February. My name is Russell. I'm 52 years old. I live in Akron, Ohio in the same split level my wife Diane and I bought 23 years ago when Lauren was 4 and Tyler was 2. I sell commercial flooring. Carpet tile mostly, some LVT, some sheet vinyl. I drive a Silverado with 178,000 miles on it and I've been calling on the same hospital systems and school districts in Summit County for almost two decades. I'm telling you this so you know what kind of man I am. I'm not the kind of man who looks in mirrors. I shave in one for 2 minutes every morning and that's about all the time I want to spend looking at myself. I don't own a scale. Diane has one and I know where she keeps it but I haven't stood on it since I went to my brother in law's 40th birthday party in 2017 and the doctor at his roast joked about needing to weigh us by the truckload. I knew I'd put on weight. Everybody puts on weight. I figured I was carrying maybe 20 extra pounds. Maybe 25. When the button hit the floor that Tuesday I walked over to Diane's side of the bathroom and stepped on the scale. I was carrying 47. 47 pounds my dad wasn't carrying when he wore that suit. I stood there in the bathroom for a long time. The fan was running because Diane had been in the shower an hour earlier. The mirror was still a little foggy in the corners. I could see myself in the parts that had cleared and I didn't recognize the shape my body had become. But it wasn't the weight that made me sit down on the edge of the tub. It was that I was looking at my dad. Not metaphorically. Not "I look like my old man now, isn't that funny." I mean the exact shape of his chest in that suit at my cousin's confirmation in 2003. The exact way his shoulders rolled forward. The exact softness around his jaw. The exact tired look in his eyes when he came home from the warehouse on Friday nights and sat in the brown chair and didn't get up again until my mother put dinner in front of him. My dad died of a heart attack at 58. He had 6 years on me. And I was already wearing his shape. I sat on the edge of that tub and did math I didn't want to do. My dad was on a statin for the last 9 years of his life. His cholesterol was 247 the year he died. The doctor said his numbers were "trending in the right direction." His LDL was 142. He had what my mother called his "spells" where he'd sit at the kitchen table after dinner with his hand on his chest and tell my mom he was just tired. He was tired for years before he died. My own bloodwork from October was on the kitchen counter under a stack of mail. My doctor had called and left a voicemail I hadn't returned. My LDL was 168. Total was 261. The doctor wanted to start me on a statin. I told her I'd think about it. I'd been thinking about it for 4 months. I didn't tell Diane about the button. I picked it up off the floor and put it in my sock drawer and hung the suit back up in the closet and went down to the basement and got on the elliptical for the first time since Tyler had moved out for college. 11 minutes. I couldn't do 15. That night I lay awake at 2:43 AM and looked at the ceiling and thought about my dad. Not the shape of him. The man. I thought about the way he used to whistle when he was making coffee on Saturday mornings. The way he held a pencil when he was figuring out a tip at a restaurant. The way he carried me on his shoulders out to the truck after I fell asleep in the back of the church on Christmas Eve when I was 6 years old. I thought about how he was supposed to walk my sister down the aisle but the heart attack was 3 months before her wedding and my uncle did it instead and my mother cried through the whole ceremony because the wrong man was at the end of that aisle. I thought about Lauren. About how she'd asked me 3 separate times if I was sure I wanted to wear Grandpa's suit. How I told her every time that yes, I was sure. How she'd hugged me last Thanksgiving and said "Dad, I'm so glad you're gonna be there." I lay in the dark and I made myself a promise. I was not going to be the wrong man at the end of that aisle. The next morning was Wednesday. I dropped my truck at Diane's brother Mike's house at 7:30 AM because the brakes were soft and he runs a shop out on Manchester Road. I figured I'd kill an hour. I walked across the street to a Dunkin' and got a coffee and sat at one of those high tables by the window and pulled out my phone. I don't know what I typed exactly. Something about cholesterol. Something about my dad. Something about being 52 with my father's bloodwork in my body and his suit in my closet. I went down a rabbit hole that lasted the rest of the morning. Mike texted me at 9:15 that the truck was done. I texted him back that I needed another hour. He said "you good?" I said "yeah just working." I wasn't working. I was reading about something my father never had a chance to read about. Here's what I learned that morning sitting at that high table in a Dunkin' on Manchester Road in Akron, Ohio. Cholesterol isn't the villain everybody told me it was. Not exactly. Your body needs cholesterol. It uses it to build cell membranes, make hormones, keep you alive. The number on the lab sheet isn't the whole story. The real problem is what happens to cholesterol on its way through your bloodstream. When cholesterol gets oxidized, it changes. It goes from being something your body uses to something your body has to defend itself against. Oxidized cholesterol is what actually sticks to artery walls. It's what builds up. It's what hardens. It's what eventually closes off the pipe. And here's the part that hit me like the button hitting the floor. When your body is under oxidative stress, it makes more cholesterol. Not less. More. It's trying to defend itself. It's patching damaged cells. The stress causes the production. The production causes more cholesterol available to be oxidized. The oxidized cholesterol causes more damage. The damage causes more stress. It's a loop. A loop that gets tighter every year. A statin doesn't break the loop. A statin turns down the volume on the production. It tells your liver to stop making so much. But it doesn't touch the oxidative stress that started the loop in the first place. That's why my dad's numbers kept "trending in the right direction" for 9 years while his body kept getting more tired and his chest kept getting heavier and the brown chair kept holding him longer and longer until one Friday in March it held him for the last time. The statin was managing the number. It wasn't doing anything about why the number existed. I sat in that Dunkin' and felt something I hadn't felt in 4 months. Not since the voicemail. Maybe not since my dad died. It wasn't hope. It was sharper than hope. It was the feeling of finally seeing the shape of the actual problem. That was Wednesday morning. By Wednesday night I'd read about something called amla. Amla is a fruit. Indian gooseberry. They've been using it in Ayurvedic medicine for I don't even know how long. Thousands of years. It has one of the highest natural antioxidant profiles ever measured in a food. It contains compounds called emblicanins, which I'd never heard of, which apparently help protect cholesterol from getting oxidized in the first place. When less of your cholesterol is getting oxidized, less of it ends up in the form that sticks to your artery walls. When less is sticking, your body isn't constantly trying to patch damage. When the damage stops happening, your body stops cranking out replacement cholesterol like a defense mechanism. The loop loosens. Not because something is blocking it. Because the reason for it eased. I read about it for 2 more hours. I read meta-analyses I didn't fully understand. I read about randomized controlled trials. I read about a 12-week study that looked at people with high cholesterol who took standardized amla extract twice a day and what happened to their numbers. The results were the kind of thing my dad would have read aloud to my mother at the kitchen table while she made coffee in the percolator. I read about a study on the atherogenic index, which is basically a measure of how dangerous your specific cholesterol mix is. People taking the extract saw that index move in a meaningful direction. I'm not telling you any of these numbers because I'm not a doctor and I'm not selling you a study. I'm telling you that I sat in a Dunkin' on a Wednesday morning and read enough to know that this wasn't some Facebook trend. This was something with a paper trail going back further than the company selling it. 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. The website talked about emblicanins specifically. They had a 90-day money back guarantee, which I didn't need but liked the idea of. The product shipped from the US. I didn't tell Diane. I didn't tell anybody. It came on Friday. I took 2 capsules with my morning coffee on Saturday and started a calendar count down to the wedding. 8 days. I'm going to be honest with you about what I expected. I didn't expect anything. I'd already accepted I was going to walk Lauren down the aisle in a suit that didn't fit, with a middle button replaced by a tailor who would charge me $30 not to ask questions, and I was going to look in the wedding photos for the rest of my life and see my dad's body in my dad's suit and know that I almost let it happen to me too. The amla wasn't going to fix that. I knew it. This was a longer play. But something started happening that I didn't expect. Day 3 I noticed I wasn't reaching for the leftover pizza at 9 PM. I'm not saying I had iron willpower. I'm saying I didn't think about it. I made dinner, ate dinner, and at 9 PM I was reading a book on the couch instead of standing in the kitchen with my hand on the fridge door. Day 5 I went up the basement stairs carrying a load of laundry and got to the top without taking the breath I'd been taking on that landing for the last 18 months. Day 6 was when Diane noticed. She was making toast in the kitchen and she stopped and looked at me and said "Russ, what are you doing different?" I said "what do you mean?" She said "I don't know. Your face." I went into the bathroom and looked. I didn't know what she was seeing. I looked the same to me. But the puffiness around my eyes that I'd stopped noticing because it had been there for years had thinned out a little. Just a little. Day 8 was the rehearsal dinner. I tried the suit on at 4:15 PM with the new button the tailor had matched. The jacket closed. Not loose. Not a different man. But closed. And I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with the suit on and I didn't see my dad in the casket. I saw my dad in the kitchen on Saturday mornings. Whistling. The wedding was the next afternoon at a place called Stan Hywet Hall on the west side of town. Old stone walls. A long aisle. Late winter light coming through the leaded glass windows. I walked my daughter down that aisle in my father's suit and the middle button held. When I handed her off and went to sit next to my mother in the front row, my mother put her hand on my knee and didn't take it off until the ceremony was over. At the reception she pulled me aside by the bar and said "you look like him in that suit." And I knew she didn't mean the casket. She meant the kitchen. She meant the percolator. She meant whistling. I cried in the bathroom for about 4 minutes and went back to the dance floor. I've been taking Alevia's Amla every morning since. That was 14 months ago. I got my bloodwork redone in November. I'm not going to give you the numbers because they're mine, and because every body is different, and because the part that matters isn't on the paper anyway. The part that matters is that I went into that appointment and my doctor sat down across from me with a different look on her face than she had the last time. She asked me what I'd been doing. I told her about the suit. I told her about the button. I told her about my dad. She listened all the way through. She didn't put me on a statin. She said "let's keep watching it." I think about my father a lot now in a way I didn't for the 16 years between his funeral and Lauren's wedding. Not the man in the chair. The man before the chair. The man at the breakfast table. The man on Saturday mornings. He was tired for 9 years before he died. I'm not going to be tired for 9 years. I'm going to be at Tyler's wedding whenever that happens. I'm going to be there for the grandkids Lauren and her husband Andrew haven't had yet. I'm going to whistle at the kitchen counter on Saturday mornings while my future grandson sits on the floor playing with Tupperware. I'm going to be the man at the end of the aisle. If you're reading this and your cholesterol number has been climbing every year for a decade, if your doctor has been telling you it's "trending" while you keep getting more tired, if you've got a suit in a closet that used to fit and you've stopped trying it on because you're scared of what the mirror is going to show you, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm telling you what I did. Alevia's Amla is a standardized extract of Indian gooseberry. 2 capsules a day. A 30 day bottle. Made in the US. Their guarantee is 90 days, which means you have 3 months to decide whether your body is responding to it. If it's not, you return the bottle and they refund the order. No phone calls. No conversations. No "are you sure." That's a longer window than a lot of prescriptions give you to know if they're working. I keep two bottles in the cabinet now. One for me, one for Diane. She started taking it in May after her own bloodwork came back higher than she liked. We go for walks together at night now. Around the block twice. The streetlights came on early last week because the days are getting shorter again, and Diane said the same thing she said the night I noticed my face had changed. She said "Russ. You look like yourself." I said "I know." I'm not 22 again. I'm not pretending to be. I'm 52 and I sell carpet tile and I'm carrying maybe 15 of those 47 pounds still, and they'll come off when they come off. But I'm not wearing my dad's shape anymore. And I'm not heading down my dad's road anymore. And every time I open my closet and see that charcoal suit hanging next to my work clothes, I feel something I never expected to feel about a piece of fabric. I feel like my father gave me one more thing. He gave me the warning. If you want to look into it, this is where I got mine. P.S. The middle button is still the one he sewed on, by the way. The tailor matched it, and I told him to leave my dad's original buttons on the sleeves and just replace the one in the middle. So now the suit has 5 of my father's buttons and 1 of mine. I think that's about right. He started it. I just had to keep it from coming apart. P.P.S. If your wife has been quietly watching you slow down for the last few years, if she's been making smaller portions for dinner without saying anything, if she's stopped asking you to help with stuff around the house because she knows you're going to sit down halfway through, she's not nagging. She's grieving the version of you she used to know. Diane was. I didn't know it until I'd been on the amla for a month and she told me one night in bed that she'd been scared. Scared the way she was when her own dad got his diagnosis. Trust what your wife has been seeing. She's looking at the man. The doctor is looking at the chart. P.P.P.S. Alevia's Amla has a 90 day money back guarantee. 3 full months to see what happens. If your numbers don't move, if your energy doesn't change, if your wife doesn't notice your face, you send it back and they refund you. In 9 years of my dad being on his statin, nobody offered my mother her money back when the drug didn't save him. The system doesn't do refunds. Alevia does. Think about who's confident in what they're selling and who's just confident in the prescription pad. P.P.P.P.S. I'm not telling you to stop your medication. I'm not your doctor. I'm a guy who sells carpet tile in Akron, Ohio who didn't want to die in his father's suit. Talk to your doctor. Ask about oxidative stress. Ask about oxidized LDL. Ask why your number keeps going up even though you're "trending." Then make whatever decision you make. But make it before the next button pops off. Don't wait the way I almost did. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33