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I sat in my daughter's driveway in Mesa last April watching my 6 year old granddaughter cannonball into a swimming pool through the windshield of my car. She was wearing a Little Mermaid swimsuit with a ruffle around the waist. Her name is Posey. She has my husband's red hair and my daughter's freckles and a laugh you can hear from the cul de sac. She came up out of the water and looked toward the kitchen window and waved. She thought I was inside helping her mama with the potato salad. I wasn't inside. I was sitting in my Camry with the engine running and the AC on full blast and a Tupperware of deviled eggs melting on the passenger seat. I'd been in the driveway for 22 minutes. I had my swimsuit in a Target bag on the floorboard. The new one. The one my daughter had picked out for me at Dillard's because the old one had gotten too tight around the middle. Black with a little gathering at the waist. A tankini. Modest enough for a grandmother. Pretty enough that I'd cried in the dressing room when I'd first tried it on. I'd promised Posey I'd swim with her. She'd been talking about it for 2 weeks. Grandma Suze in the pool. Grandma Suze on the floatie. Grandma Suze diving for the pennies her daddy was going to throw in the deep end. I sat there in that driveway and I could not make myself open the car door. I'm 53 years old. My name is Suzanne. Everybody calls me Suze. I've lived in Mesa, Arizona for 27 years. Before that I grew up in a little town in west Texas called Stamford that nobody's ever heard of unless they're from there. I have one daughter. Lacey. She's 31. She married a good man named Brent who does something in commercial real estate that I've had explained to me 8 times and I still don't entirely understand. They live in a cul de sac in Gilbert with a pool and a Bernese mountain dog named Biscuit. Posey is their only child. So far. My husband is named Roy. We've been married 34 years. He's a roofer. Has been since he was 19 years old. He owns a small company with two trucks and four crew. He leaves the house at 5:15 every morning and he gets home at 6:45 every evening covered in tar and white dust and the smell of hot asphalt. I am a school administrator. Have been for 21 years. I work in the front office at an elementary school in Mesa called Salk. I run the carpool line. I bandage knees. I call mothers when their kids have a fever. I know every kindergartner's allergy and every fifth grader's home address. I am, in my regular life, a competent woman. I am not a woman who sits in driveways and watches her granddaughter through a windshield. But that's what I'd become last April, and I have to tell you how I got there before I can tell you how I got back. It started in 2022, the fall after Posey turned 3. I'd noticed I was tired all the time. Not normal tired. The kind of tired where you'd be sitting at your desk at 2:14 in the afternoon and you'd start to nod off while a 7 year old was telling you about a loose tooth. I figured it was the school year. I figured it was Roy's roofing schedule. I figured it was the heat. We had a brutal summer that year. 117 in July. Phoenix made the news for it. I went to my doctor in October of 2022. Dr. Khoury. She's been my doctor for 11 years. Lebanese woman. Sharp. Honest with me in a way most doctors aren't. She ran the labs. She called me 4 days later. "Suzanne. Your A1C came back at 6.4. You're on the line. Pre diabetic. Your fasting glucose was 118." I sat at my desk in the front office at Salk Elementary holding the phone and watching a third grader walk past my window holding his backpack by one strap. I said "what does that mean." She said "it means we need to talk. Can you come in this week?" I went in on a Thursday. She told me what I'd been hearing about for years from my mother, who'd been a type 2 diabetic since she was 51. My mother who lost her eyesight at 67. My mother who'd had a stent put in at 71. My mother who passed last year, the day after Thanksgiving, in a hospital bed in Lubbock. Dr. Khoury said "you have a strong family history. We caught this early. We have a chance to turn it around. Diet, exercise, weight loss. If we get aggressive now we can pull you back before this becomes diabetes." I said "okay." She said "I want to see you in 6 months. A1C, weight, blood pressure. We'll see where we are." I left her office that day with a piece of paper that listed everything I needed to do. I tried. I really did try. I cut soda. I cut the McDonald's drive thru. I started walking around the block in the morning before work. I tried that Whole30 thing for 11 days before I gave up because the breakfast was beating me. I tried keto. I tried intermittent fasting. I tried the Mediterranean diet from a book my sister sent me from Austin. I lost 6 pounds. I gained 4 back. I lost 3. Gained 7. By the time I went back to Dr. Khoury in April of 2023, my A1C had gone up. 6.4 to 6.6. She didn't lecture me. She's not that kind of doctor. She just said "let's give it another 6 months. Keep trying." I went home and I cried at the kitchen table for an hour and a half. That fall I tried again. Different diet. Different walking schedule. I joined the YMCA on Higley Road and I went 3 times a week for 5 weeks before I started skipping because the women in the water aerobics class were all 20 years older than me and somehow in better shape and I couldn't take it. October 2023, A1C at 6.8. That's when Dr. Khoury said "Suzanne. I think we need to start metformin. Just a low dose. To buy you some time while you keep working on the lifestyle stuff." I started metformin. It made me feel awful. Stomach issues, gas, the kind of digestive things you don't talk about at dinner parties. I lost 4 pounds in 2 weeks because I couldn't eat without consequence. Then I stabilized and gained it back. By April 2024 my A1C was at 6.9. Half a point from type 2. The metformin wasn't doing anything for the number. It was just making me miserable. That's when I noticed the changes that aren't on any chart. My belly had gotten soft in a way it had never been. I'd had Lacey at 22 and lost the weight by the time she was 6 months old. After that I'd carried 138 pounds on a 5 foot 4 frame for 28 straight years. Then between October 2022 and April 2024, I'd put on 19 pounds. Most of it in my middle. My pants didn't fit. My bras didn't fit. My swimsuit didn't fit. My energy was gone. I'd come home from work and lie on the couch and watch Lacey's old episodes of Gilmore Girls and not move until Roy came home. He'd kiss the top of my head and say "you okay babe" and I'd say "just tired" and he'd nod and go shower the tar off himself. My skin had gotten dull. Like a layer of grey under the surface. The kind of grey you see on women in nursing homes. I was 51 years old and my skin looked like my mother's had looked at 64. I stopped looking in the mirror. I stopped wearing the clothes I liked. I started wearing oversized t shirts to work, the kind with school spirit logos on them, because they hid the belly. And I stopped getting in pools. That's the part Lacey didn't know. Posey had been begging me to swim with her since she was old enough to swim, which was the summer she turned 4. Lacey had a pool put in that summer. A nice one. With a tanning ledge and a built in spa. Every time Lacey hosted something, every Easter and Memorial Day and Fourth of July and birthday, I came over and I sat by the pool in long pants and a cardigan and I drank iced tea and I told Posey "next time grandma. Grandma's not feeling great today. Next time." For 2 years I told her next time. She'd nodded each time. She's a sweet girl. She didn't push. But she'd stopped asking by the spring of 2024. She'd stopped expecting me to come in. And the Easter that just passed, last April, that was the day she'd told her mama at breakfast that grandma was finally going to swim. She'd told the lady at her dance class. She'd told her teacher. She'd told the lady at the H E B who knew her by name. Grandma's coming to Easter and we're going swimming. Lacey had called me 3 days before to tell me. She said "mom. Don't disappoint her this time. Please." I said "I won't." I went to Dillard's. I bought the tankini. I cried in the dressing room. I drove to her house on Easter Sunday with the swimsuit in a Target bag and the deviled eggs in a Tupperware on the passenger seat and the cardigan I usually wore folded in the back seat as a backup. And I parked in the driveway and I sat there for 22 minutes. I watched Posey cannonball off the side. I watched Brent throw pennies in the deep end for her to dive after. I watched Lacey come out with a tray of lemonade and look at the driveway and see my car and frown. I watched her come walking down the driveway in her sundress. She knocked on my window. I rolled it down. She said "mom what are you doing." I said "I'm coming Lacey just give me a minute." She looked at the Target bag on the floorboard. She looked at me. She didn't say anything for a second. Then she said "are you not coming in." I started crying right there in the driveway. The kind of cry where you can't get a breath. The kind of cry I hadn't done since my mother died. Lacey opened the car door and got into the passenger seat. She moved the Tupperware to the floor and she sat down and she didn't say anything for a long time. When I could talk I said "I can't do it. I can't get in the pool in front of her. I can't have her see me like this." Lacey said "mom." I said "I look like grandma. I look like grandma right before she lost her eyesight. The grey skin. The belly. I tried Lacey. I tried so hard. The diet, the walking, the metformin. None of it has worked. I'm getting worse. And Posey is going to remember her grandma as the woman who sat in cardigans by the pool." Lacey took my hand. She said "mom you can't sit out here." I said "I know." She said "give me 20 minutes. Pull yourself together. Come inside. Wear the cardigan if you have to. But come inside. Posey needs to see you." She kissed my cheek and she got out of the car and she walked back up the driveway with the deviled eggs. I sat there. I wiped my face with a Wendy's napkin from the glove box. I reapplied my lipstick using the visor mirror. I went inside. I wore the cardigan over the swimsuit. I sat by the pool. I watched Posey swim with her daddy. She came over to me at one point dripping wet, with her wet hair sticking to her face, and she put her cold little hand on my knee and she said "grandma are you not gonna swim." I said "next time baby. Grandma's not feeling great today." She looked at me for a second longer than a 6 year old should be able to look at a person. Then she went back to the pool. That night I drove home with Roy in the passenger seat asleep with his mouth open and I knew something had to change. Not the diet. Not the walking. Not the metformin. Something underneath all of it. Two days after Easter I was in the carpool line at Salk Elementary. I was holding a stop sign in the morning drop off lane. Cars were rolling through. I was waving. I was nodding. I was bandaging the day before it had even started. A black SUV pulled up. Driver rolled the window down. It was a woman I hadn't seen in 9 years. Lana Yazzie. She used to work in the front office with me from 2013 to 2016 before she moved up to a district position. Tall woman. Navajo. Late 40s. Used to wear her hair in a long single braid down her back and had a laugh like a bell. She'd left Salk weighing maybe 200 pounds. She'd had her own diabetes diagnosis the last year we'd worked together. She'd been on metformin and another medication. The woman in the SUV looked like a different person. She'd lost weight. Not in a sick way. In the way a person looks when their whole body has come back online. Her skin was glowing. Her braid was longer. Her eyes were bright. She said "Suze, oh my god, look at you." I said "Lana, look at you." She laughed. She said "honey I'm picking up my niece. She's in third grade now. Can you believe it. Can I park and come hug you? Are you on a break?" I said "yeah I get a 15 minute break at 8:30." We sat at the picnic table out by the staff parking lot at 8:35 that morning. Two cups of coffee. The Mesa sun already hot at 8:35 in April. I told her everything. I had not told another human being everything. I'd told Roy pieces. I'd told Lacey the Easter version. I'd told Dr. Khoury the medical version. But I told Lana the whole thing. The driveway. The cardigan. The 19 pounds. The grey skin. The metformin that wasn't doing anything. The 6.9 A1C creeping up to 7. The fact that I hadn't gotten in a pool in 3 years. Lana listened. She didn't interrupt. When I was done she said "Suze I have to tell you something." She said "I was where you are 18 months ago. A1C climbing. On metformin. Couldn't lose the weight. Felt 20 years older than I was. My niece kept asking me to go hike Camelback with her and I kept saying next time. I knew exactly what was going to happen. My grandma was diabetic. My mom is diabetic. My oldest sister is diabetic. I was just the next one in line." She said "my sister, the one out on the rez, sent me something in the mail. A bottle. I almost threw it away. I thought it was one of her wellness things. She'd been into a lot of stuff over the years." She said "I opened the box. There was a note. The bottle was a pomegranate extract. Specifically a brand called Alevia. My sister had been on it for 8 months. She'd dropped her own A1C from 7.2 to 5.8 in that time. She'd written me a note that said Lana, I know you won't try this if I tell you in person. Try it. If it doesn't work, send the bottle back and they'll refund you. It's 90 days to find out." I said "Lana." She said "Suze I took it for 5 months. I lost 23 pounds. My A1C dropped to 5.4. Dr. Khoury, our same Dr. Khoury by the way, took me off metformin in November. I haven't been on it since. I sleep through the night. I have energy I haven't had since I was 28 years old. I hiked Camelback with my niece on her birthday in February." I sat there at that picnic table. I said "but why didn't Dr. Khoury tell me about this." Lana laughed. She said "honey. Dr. Khoury and I had this conversation. She said she didn't know what to do with it. She'd never been trained on it. She said her job is to manage the disease, not to know about everything that might support a body upstream of the disease. She told me whatever I was doing was working and to keep doing it." She said "the way it was explained to me, by my sister, by the literature she sent, is that pre diabetes and even type 2 isn't a pancreas problem the way we think about it. It's a pathway problem. There's a system in your body that controls how fast the food you eat turns into sugar in your bloodstream. That pathway gets worn down. Slowly. Decades worth of slow. By stress, by processed food, by oxidative stress that builds up in your body like rust forming inside a pipe." She said "every year that pathway gets worn down a little more. The metformin doesn't do anything for that pathway. It just forces the number to come down. The pathway keeps wearing down underneath. That's why people end up on more and more medication. Because the underneath keeps getting worse." She said "pomegranate has these compounds called punicalagins. They're some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in nature. The way they work, they can help neutralize the oxidative stress that's been wearing the pathway down in the first place. When the rust eases off, the pathway can start working more like it used to. Sugar can enter your blood more gradually. The way it did when you were 22. Same meals, same food, different response." She said "it's not magic, Suze. It's not even fast. It took me 6 weeks before I felt anything. It took me 4 months before the weight really started coming off. But it does what nothing else I tried did. It works on the underneath." I sat there. I said "Lana, I have a granddaughter. She's 6." Lana said "I know honey. You told me. That's why I'm telling you." She pulled out her phone. She typed something. My phone buzzed in my pocket. She'd sent me a link. She said "this is where I order from. Alevia.com slash pom slash 5. They have a 90 day guarantee. You take it for 90 days. If you don't feel anything different, you ship the bottle back, you get every penny back. If your body responds the way mine did, you keep going. There's no risk to trying." I sat there with the link on my screen. She said "your granddaughter is 6. She'll be 7 in 8 months. You can be in the pool by July." I ordered it that night. It came on a Friday in a brown box. I took the first one Saturday morning, April 27th, with my coffee. I didn't feel anything for the first 9 days. But on day 10, a Tuesday, I came home from work and instead of going straight to the couch I went into the bedroom and I put on actual jeans and an actual blouse and I came back out and Roy said "you going somewhere" and I said "no I just felt like getting dressed for dinner." Day 14, I slept through the night for the first time since 2022. Day 21, I noticed my pants were looser around the middle. Not a lot. Just a little. The waistband had been digging into me for over a year and the digging had stopped. Week 6, my fasting glucose readings, which I'd been doing every other morning with the kit from Walgreens, started showing up in the 90s instead of the 110s and 120s. Week 8, I had my checkup with Dr. Khoury. My A1C had dropped from 6.9 to 6.3. Dr. Khoury looked at the chart. She looked at me. She said "Suzanne. What are you doing." I told her. She said "Lana sent me your way?" I said "no, I sent me your way. Lana told me what she was taking." Dr. Khoury wrote it down. She said "I'm seeing more of this. I want you to keep doing it. We can talk about reducing the metformin next visit if your numbers keep moving." Week 12, I weighed 144 pounds for the first time in 21 months. Down 13 pounds from where I'd peaked. Week 14, I bought a new bra. Week 16, in early August, Lacey called me on a Wednesday afternoon. She said "mom. Posey wants to know if you can come over for swimming Saturday. Brent's grilling. It's just family." I said "what time." She paused. She said "you said what time." I said "yeah Lacey. What time." She said "be here at 4." I drove to Gilbert that Saturday with a Tupperware of potato salad and the new tankini in a Target bag and the cardigan, just in case, folded on the back seat. I sat in the driveway for 11 minutes. This time I wasn't paralyzed. This time I was crying a little, but it was a different kind of cry. I was thinking about my mother. I was thinking about Easter. I was thinking about the way Posey had put her cold hand on my knee. I got out of the car. I left the cardigan on the back seat. I walked into Lacey's kitchen wearing a sundress with the tankini under it. Posey was at the kitchen counter eating a popsicle. She had a wet braid down her back. She looked up and she saw me and she said "grandma." I said "hi baby." She put her popsicle in the sink and she came over to me and she said "are you swimming." I said "yeah honey. Grandma's swimming today." She looked at me for a second. Then she ran out the back door yelling for her daddy. I got in the pool that day. I sat on the tanning ledge first. Posey came and sat next to me. Then she pulled me into the deeper part with both hands. We floated on a noodle together for 20 minutes. Brent threw pennies in the deep end and I dove for them. I came up out of the water laughing with my hair plastered to my face and I caught Lacey watching me from the patio with her hand over her mouth and tears running down her cheeks. I'm telling you this story because there's a woman reading this who's sitting in a driveway. There's a woman who hasn't gotten in a pool in 3 years. There's a woman who's tried every diet there is and watched her A1C creep up anyway and decided the problem must be her, must be her willpower, must be her aging body, must be just what happens. It's not you. It's not your willpower. The pathway underneath has been wearing down for a long time and the body that's been showing up in the mirror is the body responding to that wearing down. The weight in the middle. The grey skin. The fatigue. The numbers that keep climbing no matter what diet you try. Those aren't your fault. Those are signals. The system is asking for support. Alevia Pomegranate is the brand Lana told me about. The brand her sister told her about. Standardized to the punicalagins, which is the part of the fruit that actually does the work in the body. Most brands skip that part. Lana's sister checked. Lana checked. I checked. You can order it at alevia.com/pom/5. They have a 90 day money back guarantee. You take it for up to 90 days. If your body responds the way mine did, you keep going. If you take it and you feel nothing, you ship the bottle back in the box and they refund every penny. That's the deal. That's the only kind of deal worth taking on something like this. P.S. Roy started taking it in June. He didn't have anything wrong with him either. He just watched what it did for me and he said "I want what you're having." His knees, which have been bad for 15 years from climbing roofs, are better. He doesn't groan when he gets out of his truck anymore. That's the part I noticed. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is the real thing. I called and asked before I bought my second bottle because I'm the kind of woman who calls and asks. You take it for up to 90 days, and if it's not for you, you put the bottle back in the box and ship it back. They refund you. No argument. That's the only reason I tried it. Lana said "what do you have to lose." She was right. P.P.P.S. Posey starts swim team next month. She made the cut at the city pool. Lacey called me to tell me and I told her I'd be at every meet. Every single one. I'm going to sit in the bleachers in the Arizona sun in shorts and a t shirt and I'm going to watch my granddaughter swim. And after the meet, I'm going to get in the pool with her, and we're going to do our handstand contest, and I'm going to win because grandma used to be on her high school swim team in Stamford Texas and she's coming back for that record. That's what this stuff is. It's not a number on a chart. It's the things you get back. The handstands. The grandchildren. The pool you can finally get in. 👉 alevia.com/pom/5