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I sat in the bowling alley parking lot last Tuesday night for 38 minutes before I could make myself go inside. The Mississippi Queen Lanes off Brady Street in Davenport. Same place I've been bowling on Tuesday nights for 22 years. Same parking spot, third row from the door, under the busted light that nobody ever fixes. But I wasn't there to bowl. I was there to drop off the team shirt. The one with my name stitched on the back in red thread. Dale. The one I haven't put on since the third week of October. My teammates didn't know I was coming. I was going to walk in, drop the shirt on the bar, slide the team captain my key to the locker we share, and leave before anyone tried to talk to me about it. That was the plan. I sat there with the engine running and the heater going and the shirt folded on the passenger seat next to a half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew that I shouldn't have been drinking. I'm 56 years old. I've lived in Davenport, Iowa my whole life. Worked at the John Deere parts distribution center on River Drive for 31 years. Married to Brenda for 28 of those. Two grown kids, Dylan and Macie, both out of the house. One grandson, Cooper, who's 4 and who I see every other Sunday at my daughter's place over in Bettendorf. And until October, I bowled Tuesday nights with the same five guys I'd been bowling with since 2003. We called ourselves the Strike Force. Dumb name. We were 8 years old when we picked it. Not really, but we acted like it. Carl, who's a retired union electrician out of Local 145. Big guy, white mustache, always wore a Hawkeyes cap even though he went to school in Cedar Falls. Marv, who runs a body shop in Moline across the bridge. Quiet guy. Best release I've ever seen on a human being. Tony, who used to teach shop at Davenport West before he retired. Vinny, who's actually from Chicago but moved here in 1988 for a woman who left him 6 months later and he never went back. And me. For 22 years, every Tuesday at 6:45 PM, the five of us walked through the doors at Mississippi Queen and rolled three games. League ended at 9:30. We'd grab a beer at the bar after. Talk about our wives. Our kids. Our backs. The Bears or the Vikings or whatever was on the TV behind the bar. Then we'd drive home. That was my Tuesday for 22 years. I held the league high average for 11 of those years. 214. I had a 298 in 2011 that the alley still has the score printout pinned up behind the counter. I never let them take it down. I'm telling you all this because I need you to understand who I was before this started. Before I quit on my team mid-season. Before I let my best friends call me for two weeks straight while I sat on the couch and watched the phone light up and didn't answer. Carl called me 11 times. Marv called me 4 times, which is a lot for Marv. Tony left a voicemail I never listened to. Vinny drove over to my house twice, knocked on the door, and left when I didn't answer because I was sitting on the toilet with the bathroom door locked and the fan on so I couldn't hear him. I'm not a guy who hides from his friends. I'm not a guy who quits things. I'm not the guy who can't release the ball at the top of his backswing because his hand is shaking too hard. But that's who I became this fall, and I didn't know how to tell them. It started over the summer. I was tired. That was the first thing. Bone tired. The kind of tired where you wake up at 6:30 in the morning after 8 hours of sleep and feel like you got hit by a truck. I figured it was the heat. We had that brutal stretch in July where it was 96 every day for two weeks straight. I figured it was work. We were short two guys in the warehouse and I was pulling 10 hour shifts. I figured it was age. Brenda kept saying "you're 56 honey, you're not 36, this is what it looks like." But then the shaking started. Just my hands at first. I'd be sitting at the kitchen table with my coffee and I'd notice my mug rattling against the wood when I went to pick it up. Not a tremor exactly. More like a low hum running through my fingers. I'd flex my hand. Make a fist. Open it. Close it. The shaking would calm down for a minute and then it would come right back. I didn't tell Brenda. Then I started falling asleep in my recliner. Used to be I'd watch the Iowa basketball game until the end. Now I'd be out cold by halftime. Brenda would come in from the kitchen at 9 and find me snoring with the remote on my chest. She'd cover me with the blanket from the couch and go to bed by herself. I'd wake up at 2 AM, stiff as a board, with my mouth dry as paper, and drag myself to bed. Brenda would roll over without opening her eyes. I'd lie there in the dark and feel my heart beating too hard in my ears. Then would come the bathroom trips. 3 AM, 4:30, 5:15. Standing in the bathroom in the dark, watching myself in the mirror, wondering when I started looking like my father did the year before he died. I went to my doctor in August. Dr. Mehta. Indian guy. Younger than me. Kind. He's been my doctor for 9 years. He listened to me list out everything. The tiredness. The shaking. The night sweats I forgot to mention to Brenda. The way my vision would go blurry for a second when I stood up too fast. He ran the blood work. He called me back 3 days later. "Dale, your fasting glucose came back at 187. Your A1C is 7.4. You're a type 2 diabetic." I sat there at my kitchen table holding the phone and watched a squirrel run along the fence in the back yard. "Dale? Are you there?" "Yeah. I'm here." "I want to start you on metformin. 500 milligrams, twice a day with meals. And I want you to see the diabetes educator. And I want you to cut sugar. No more soda, no more sweet tea, no more dessert. We need to get your numbers down." "Okay." "This is manageable. People live with this for decades. But we have to start now." "Okay." I hung up the phone. I sat there for an hour without moving. I'd done everything wrong for years and I knew it. I drank 4 Mountain Dews a day. I ate at Whitey's. I had a Maid-Rite for lunch most days. I had ice cream every night while I watched whatever Brenda put on the TV. My father had been a type 2 diabetic. He lost two toes before he died. The last 18 months of his life he couldn't drive because his feet were too numb to feel the pedals. I sat there and I thought about my father's feet. I took the metformin. I cut the Mountain Dew. I went to see the diabetes lady at Genesis Medical. Nice woman named Patricia. She gave me a meal plan and a glucose monitor and a little book to write my numbers in. I tried. I really tried. But the tired didn't go away. The shaking got worse. My morning numbers kept reading 160, 170, 180. Patricia adjusted the metformin. Dr. Mehta added another medication. The numbers came down a little. The tired stayed. And then it was the last week of September and I was at the alley on Tuesday night, second game, frame 7, and I went to release the 6 pin spare and my hand was shaking so bad the ball came off my fingers two seconds before it should have. It bounced once on the lane and went straight into the right gutter at about 11 miles an hour. The whole row went quiet. Carl said "you alright there Dale?" I said "yeah, just a bad release." Marv looked at me funny. Marv doesn't look at anyone funny. Marv looks at the lane. I bowled a 142 that night. My worst game in probably 8 years. I told the guys I was fighting something off. They said okay. Vinny offered to drive me home. I said I was fine. The next Tuesday I bowled a 156. The Tuesday after that, a 138. The Tuesday after that, I called Carl an hour before league and told him I had a stomach bug. The Tuesday after that, I didn't call anyone. I just didn't show up. That's when the phone calls started. 11 calls from Carl over the next 2 weeks. 4 from Marv. The voicemail from Tony. Vinny knocking on my door. I sat in my recliner and let them all roll to voicemail. I told Brenda I was just taking a break. She knew I was lying. She didn't push. I gained 9 pounds in 6 weeks. My pants stopped fitting. My morning numbers crept back up to the 170s even though I was taking everything Dr. Mehta gave me. I had become a man I didn't recognize. A man who slept 11 hours and woke up exhausted. A man whose hands shook too hard to button his own work shirt some mornings. A man who couldn't sit through a Hawkeyes game without nodding off. A man who'd quit on his best friends because he didn't know how to tell them what was happening to him. Brenda found me crying in the garage the day after Thanksgiving. I was sitting on the workbench staring at the bowling bag I hadn't touched in a month. She came out to get the broom and saw me and stopped. She didn't say anything. She just sat down next to me on the bench and held my hand. We sat there for probably 20 minutes. When we went back inside she made me tomato soup with grilled cheese, except she used the low carb bread that tastes like cardboard, and I ate it anyway, and that's when she said "Dale, you need to talk to somebody." I said "I'm talking to you." She said "no, you need to talk to your friends." I didn't, though. I just kept being miserable. Until the second Saturday in December, when Vinny knocked on my door at 10:30 in the morning, and I made the mistake of opening it because I thought it was the UPS guy. Vinny is 6 foot 4. Italian. Massive guy. He has hands like baseball mitts. He used to run a tile business before his back gave out and he started doing fleet maintenance for the city. He walked past me into my living room without being invited. He sat down on my couch. He said "Sit down Dale." I sat down. He said "I've known you for 22 years. You're going to tell me what's going on right now, or I'm sitting on this couch until Brenda gets home and I'm asking her, and we both know she'll tell me." So I told him. I told him about the diagnosis. About the medication. About the shaking and the fatigue and the night sweats. About my father's toes. About the fact that I'd put on 9 pounds and my numbers were still climbing and Dr. Mehta had said the next step was insulin and I wasn't ready to be a guy who gave himself shots in the stomach every morning at 6 AM. I told him I was scared. I cried for the second time in 3 weeks. Vinny didn't say anything for a while. He just sat there with his big hands on his knees, looking at the carpet. Then he said "my pop had type 2." I knew his pop. Sicilian guy named Sal. Died in 2009. Vinny said "he was on insulin for the last 7 years. Pretty rough. They took his right leg below the knee in 2007. Last 2 years he was in a wheelchair." I said "I know Vinny. I went to the funeral." He said "yeah you did. You drove me down to Chicago. I never thanked you for that." We sat there for a minute. Then he said "after pop died, my brother Carmine, the one in Naperville, he got the diagnosis. 2011. Type 2. Just like pop. Carmine's a stubborn son of a bitch. Refused the metformin. Refused insulin. Said he was going to figure it out himself." I said "how'd that go." Vinny said "he figured it out himself." I looked at him. He said "Carmine started doing his own research. He's an electrical engineer. He treats his body like a circuit board. Anyway. He came across all this research on a certain extract. From a fruit. Sounds dumb when I say it out loud. But he showed me the studies. There's a lot of them. Like a lot a lot. And the way it works, it's not what I thought." He said "Carmine's been taking it for 9 years now. His last A1C was 5.6. He's been off metformin since 2017. His doctor calls him a unicorn." I said "what's the fruit?" He said "pomegranate." I almost laughed. I almost said Vinny, come on, pomegranate? The thing they put in salads at Olive Garden? But he was looking at me with the same face he had when he was talking about Sal, and I knew Vinny well enough to know he didn't drive over to my house on a Saturday morning to tell me about a fruit. He said "let me show you something." He pulled out his phone. He showed me a research summary Carmine had sent him 5 years ago and that Vinny had saved in his email, like a guy who saves things in his email because he knows he might need them again someday. What he showed me changed how I thought about my body. I'd been thinking about my blood sugar the way Dr. Mehta talked about it. Numbers on a piece of paper. Glucose levels. Medications to bring them down. Cut the soda, cut the bread, take the pills, hope the numbers come down. That's the whole conversation. Vinny's brother was thinking about it completely differently. He was thinking about the system underneath the numbers. The pathway that's supposed to control how fast the food you eat turns into sugar in the first place. The thing that's supposed to make sugar trickle into your blood slowly, the way it did when you were 22 and could eat a stack of pancakes and not feel a thing. That pathway, Vinny's brother explained in his email, can wear down over time. Stress wears it down. Processed food wears it down. Decades of soda and Whitey's and Maid-Rites and Mountain Dew wear it down. The years themselves wear it down. And the more it wears down, the faster food turns into sugar, and the bigger the spikes get, and the harder it is for your body to keep up. The food isn't the only problem. The food has been the same kind of food for a long time. What changed is the pathway underneath. That's the part that gets worn down. And the thing that wears it down, more than anything else, is oxidative stress. Vinny's brother called it rust. Like rust forming inside you, slowly, year after year, until the machinery doesn't work the way it used to. Pomegranate, the email said, has been studied for the compounds it contains called punicalagins. Some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in nature. And those compounds have been looked at for their role in supporting the very pathway that's been wearing down. When that pathway gets better support, sugar can enter your blood more gradually. The way it did when you were younger. The spikes can ease. The crashes can soften. Same meals. Same food. Different response. Vinny said "Carmine sent me this 5 years ago. I never paid attention because I didn't think I needed it. Then 6 months ago I got my own A1C back. 5.9. Pre diabetic. Just on the line. I called Carmine. He told me to start taking it. I've been taking it ever since. Got my A1C rechecked in October. 5.4." I said "5.4 Vinny." He said "5.4 Dale." I sat there on my couch. I thought about a lot of things at once. I thought about my father's missing toes. I thought about Sal in the wheelchair. I thought about my morning glucose readings and the way my hand had shaken on lane 7 in front of Carl and Marv and Tony. I thought about Cooper, my grandson, who's 4, and what I'd look like to him at 66, at 71, at 76, if this kept going the direction it was going. I thought about the fact that I'd been taking metformin for 4 months and the numbers were going up, not down. And Dr. Mehta was talking about insulin. And insulin was the thing my father couldn't get off of. The metformin was working on the number. It wasn't doing anything for the pathway. Vinny said "I brought you a bottle." He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small dark bottle. The label said Alevia. It said Pomegranate. He said "Carmine's the one who told me about this brand. He'd tried 3 or 4 others before this one. Said this one was the only one standardized to the punicalagins, which is the part that actually does the work. The other brands he tried were just standardized to ellagic acid, which he said was basically the marketing version. Cheaper. Doesn't do much. You want the punicalagins." He said "take it for a couple months. See what happens. If nothing happens, you didn't lose anything. If something happens, you'll know." He set the bottle on my coffee table. He stood up. He said "I'll see you Tuesday. 6:45. You're going to be there. I'll come pick you up if I have to." I didn't show up that Tuesday. But I did start taking it. I took the first one on a Sunday morning, December 16th, with my coffee. I didn't feel anything that first day. Or the second. Or the third. I figured that was about right. Brenda asked me what was in the new bottle and I told her, and she gave me one of her looks, and then she ordered her own from the same place a week later because Brenda is a woman who reads the box on everything. About 10 days in, I noticed I wasn't reaching for the second cup of coffee at 10 AM. I'd been on 4 cups a day for years. The second cup was usually my survival cup, the one I needed to get through the morning meeting. I just didn't need it. That was the first thing. Then around 2 weeks in, I came home from work on a Wednesday and instead of falling into the recliner I walked into the kitchen and started chopping onions for the dinner Brenda was making. I hadn't helped her cook in months. She didn't say anything but I caught her smiling at the stove. 3 weeks in, my morning fasting numbers started showing up in the 130s and the 140s instead of the 170s and 180s. I thought my meter was broken. I tested it twice in a row with the same finger. Same reading. 4 weeks in, I slept through the night for the first time since August. No 3 AM bathroom trip. No 4:30 standup. I woke up at 6:15 when my alarm went off. Brenda was already up making coffee. She turned around when I walked into the kitchen and she said "you look different." I said "I feel different." She said "your eyes look different." I didn't know what to say to that. I called Vinny on a Sunday in late January. I said "Vinny it's working." He said "I know it's working. I saw you laughing at something Carl said in the parking lot on Tuesday." Because by then I'd been back to bowling for 3 weeks. The first night back was a Tuesday in early January. I drove over to Mississippi Queen at 6:30. I sat in the parking lot. I had the team shirt folded on the passenger seat. I was going to drop it off and leave. Instead I picked it up and I put it on over my t shirt. I walked through the doors. Carl saw me first. He was sitting at the table on lane 4 with his cap on backwards, which is what Carl does when he's nervous. He stood up. He looked at me. He didn't say anything for a second. Then he just opened his arms. I walked over and let Carl hug me in front of God and Tony and Marv and Vinny and 30 other people in the bowling alley. Carl smelled like Old Spice and Camels and bowling alley. Marv said "took you long enough." Tony said "you owe us 14 weeks of beer money." Vinny just nodded at me. I rolled a 198 that first night back. My hand was steady. The release came off clean. I missed two spares in the second game that I should've made, but I made them in the third. I'm not telling you I bowled a 298 again. I'm not 36. I'm 56. My body's been through some things. But last Tuesday I bowled a 221. My team captain wrote it on the chalkboard behind the bar with my name next to it and Carl bought me a beer. I drove home at 9:45 PM with the radio on and the heat up and Brenda was waiting up for me on the couch like she used to. I sat down next to her. She said "good night?" I said "real good night." She put her hand on my knee and I noticed it wasn't shaking. I've been on Alevia Pomegranate for going on 5 months now. My last A1C, the one Dr. Mehta pulled in February, came back at 5.8. From 7.4 in August. Dr. Mehta sat there with the chart in his hand and said he'd never seen anyone drop their A1C that much in 6 months without insulin. I told him about the pomegranate. He nodded politely. He's a kind man. He didn't argue with me. He said "whatever you're doing, keep doing it. We'll talk about reducing your metformin at your next visit." I haven't quit the metformin. That's between me and Dr. Mehta and I'm not in a hurry. But Dr. Mehta and I both know what's been moving the needle and it isn't the metformin. The metformin's been the same dose since August. The pomegranate's been the new thing. My weight's down 11 pounds. My pants fit again. I haven't fallen asleep in the recliner before 9:30 PM in 2 months. Brenda's been on it for 4 months. Her blood pressure was creeping into the 140s over 90s and her last reading at her own doctor was 127 over 81. She doesn't talk about it. She just orders it. Vinny's brother Carmine, the engineer in Naperville, the one who started this whole chain reaction, has been on the same brand for over a year now. He'd been on a different one before and he said Alevia hit different. Something about how it's standardized. Something about the punicalagins being the part of the fruit that actually does the work, and most other brands skip that part because it's expensive to standardize for. I don't know enough about the chemistry to argue. I just know my hands aren't shaking. I just know I'm bowling again. I just know my grandson sat on my lap at Easter and I held him for 20 minutes without my legs going dead. I'm telling you this story because somebody is reading this who's where I was in October. Sitting in the parking lot. Not going inside. Not picking up the phone. Watching their hands shake at the kitchen table and telling themselves it's just stress, just the heat, just age, just whatever they can think of to make it not be the thing it actually is. You don't need a different life. You need the pathway underneath the numbers to start working again. Alevia Pomegranate is what worked for me. Standardized to the punicalagins, the compound that actually does the work, in a small dark bottle from a company out of, I don't even know where, somewhere in the Midwest I think, that Vinny's brother Carmine recommended after he'd tried half a dozen others. If you want to try it, you can find it at alevia.com/pom/5. They have a 90 day money back guarantee. You take it for up to 90 days. If your hand stops shaking, your morning numbers start coming down, you start feeling like the person you used to be, you keep it. If you take it and you feel nothing, you ship the bottle back and they refund every penny. That's the deal. That's the only deal worth taking on something like this. I'm 56. I bowl on Tuesday nights. My team's called the Strike Force. I'm not quitting on them again. P.S. Vinny called me last week from his garage. He'd just gotten his March numbers back. A1C dropped to 5.2. He said "tell your wife, tell your kids, tell anyone you know who's where you were." So I am. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is real. I checked because I'm a guy who checks. You order it, you try it for up to 90 days, and if it's not the right fit for you, you put the bottle back in the box and you ship it back to them and they refund you. No fight. That's the only reason I tried it. Vinny said "what do you have to lose, you ship it back if it doesn't work." He was right. P.P.P.S. Cooper bowled his first frame on Saturday. I took him to the alley on the morning league when nobody's there. He's 4. He rolled it with two hands between his legs. Knocked down 3 pins. Then he looked up at me and he said "Pappy did I do it." And I said "yeah buddy you did it." And then I picked him up and I held him on my hip while the pinsetter came down. And my legs didn't shake. 👉 alevia.com/pom/5