Jenny Howe

this helped me A LOT 😮

I ran a 60-day experiment on myself with berberine to see if it could take off the 40 pounds I'd gained in perimenopause without the shot all the celebrities are on. Here are the actual numbers. I've been a practicing family physician for 25 years, and perimenopausal weight gain is the most common thing women bring me in my career. And I've sat across the desk from thousands of patients and explained the same things over and over again. Hungry again an hour after eating. Shaky and irritable if they go too long without food. Thinking about food when they aren’t even hungry. I've watched patients have breakdowns in my exam room because the weight won't stop climbing no matter what they do. Around 3 years ago, it happened to me. I'm 56. My weight started climbing out of nowhere. First it was 142, then 160, then 182. All those years of 14-hour clinic days, vending machine lunches, sleeping 4 hours between on-call nights. It finally caught up with me. At first it was one bad number at my own physical. I figured the scale was off. Then I started checking it at home and the numbers were 178 in the morning. 180 after dinner. I couldn't get them under 175 no matter what I did. Then came the food noise. Constant, mostly after dinner, the kind that follows you from room to room until you give in. I'd step on the scale first thing and the number would set the mood for my whole day. If it was 176, I was anxious. If it was 181, I was defeated. The same scale dread I tell my patients to stop obsessing over, I now had myself. I started weighing myself 5, sometimes 7 times a day. The irony wasn't lost on me. Now I was the patient. Every single one of them was right. My doctor wanted to start me on the shot. I told her I'd think about it. But I knew I wasn't going to take it. I refer women for that shot, and every other single prescription I can barely keep track of, every single day. I also see what they do to people. The months of nausea that make some of my patients dread eating at all. The cost every single month that turns a medical decision into a financial burden by the second refill. The weight that comes flooding back the moment they stop, sometimes faster than it left. And the worst part? It's not a fix. It's a permanent prescription. And half my patients are STILL gaining weight on top of it. My own mother spent the last twenty years of her life on and off diets, counting and restricting and starting over every January. She never got free of it. I'm a doctor and not even I could help her. I wasn't doing that to myself. So I did what I told every patient to do first. I counted calories at 1,400 a day for eight months, walked 10,000 steps every morning, and did Pilates four times a week plus cardio. I tried berberine too. The literature on berberine and blood sugar is solid, I've recommended it to patients for years. I bought berberine capsules from Amazon, the one with all the 5-star reviews. Took it every morning for 2 months. Numbers didn't move. I tried a different berberine brand I found in the store. Same result. I figured my own physiology must just be too far gone for any of this to make a difference. Then about 2 months ago, one of my regular patients came in for her follow-up. Sweet woman, her name is Dana, 49 years old, and has been gaining weight steadily since perimenopause started. She'd been white-knuckling it for years and her weight was still creeping up. We were talking about referring her for the shot. We couldn't keep asking her body to do something it clearly wasn't doing on its own. But this time her chart looked different. Her weight was down 23 pounds from her last visit. I almost asked if we'd pulled the wrong file. I asked her what she was doing differently. She got a little sheepish and said "Dr. Reeves, I added something on my own. I didn't want to bother you about it." I told her she could bother me about it. She pulled a box of drink mix packets out of her purse and said this was the only thing that had moved her weight. Then she said, "I tried to tell my friend Laura about it but the capsules don't work, you have to get the drink." I'll be honest, I was very skeptical. Patients bring me supplements every week and 99% of them are nonsense. But her chart was right there in front of me, and I knew her well enough to know she wasn't faking it. That night my scale read 178.4. I stood in my bathroom feeling defeated. So I got out my laptop and went deeper into the literature than I had in years. Here's what I found, and I'll keep it simple. The real problem is the fullness signal. Your body quit sending it a few years ago, and you've been at war with it ever since without knowing. You can diet for the rest of your life and you'll never win this, because you're not fighting food. You're fighting your body, when you should be working with it. When that fullness signal is restored, your body can start telling you it's had enough on its own. You eat less without thinking about it, the cravings quiet down, and the weight drops. As a doctor I'll tell you this is the same signal the shot works on. Then I went and looked at the berberine capsules I'd been swallowing for two months. Plain berberine in a gelatin shell, barely absorbing. The label tells you what's in the capsule, not what actually gets into you. The capsules I'd tried? A single ingredient in a form my body could barely use. The research pointed to something far more complete. No wonder no one was seeing results. I kept reading. The bigger problem isn't even the form, it's what's missing. Berberine on its own is one of FOUR things that break at once in perimenopause, and a capsule gives you that one and none of the rest. Here's what I mean. Berberine activates GLP-1, the fullness signal. But 5-HTP restores the serotonin your estrogen stopped making, which is why you're standing in the kitchen at 9 PM. Chromium stops the blood sugar crash an hour after dinner that sends you back to the pantry. And yerba mate gives you steady energy without jitters so you're not reaching for sugar by 2 PM. I'd been recommending berberine for cravings for years and I'd never actually considered that a single ingredient in capsule form couldn't touch a problem that had four moving parts. None of them were getting close to what the research actually supported. None of us were. I started looking for anything that addressed all four at once, and it came down to three things. It was the third one that almost no brand will actually do. - It has to be a drink, not a capsule (so the compounds actually absorb) - It has to be the full combination, not berberine alone (so you're addressing all four pathways at once) - It should be formulated by a clinician (so the doses and ingredients reflect actual research, not marketing) I kept seeing the same brand mentioned over and over in the reviews. Ovia Essentials. The same one in my patient's purse. I ordered it. It was more intentional than the raw capsules and the off-the-shelf berberine I'd tried. At that point I didn't care. Ovia Essentials was a daily drink mix formulated by Dr. Sarah Chen, with berberine, 5-HTP, chromium, yerba mate, plus magnesium, ginger, and cinnamon. No fillers. Single-serve packets stirred into cold water, which I appreciated since I knew how bitter raw berberine can be. One packet stirred into cold water that Monday morning. It tasted like a strawberry açaí refresher, which I found faintly ridiculous for something I was treating as a clinical experiment. That first night I made pasta, ate half, and pushed the plate away. My hand stopped without being told to. It wasn't willpower. It was something I hadn't felt in years. It was day 3 that made me stop doubting. By day 3, 9 PM came and went with the kitchen light off. By day 5, my rings were spinning on my fingers and the morning puffiness was gone. My energy was steady all day. By week 2, my belt was in a notch and the bloat was gone. By week 3, my jawline was back, my skin was clear, and I slept through the night without waking up once. By week 4, I was down 14 pounds. I was waking before the alarm feeling like a different person. At week 5, I pulled a green dress out of the back of my closet and it fit. At day 60, I stepped on the scale three times in a row to make sure: 156. For the first time in 3 years, the weight was coming off without medication, without starvation, without fighting my own body. I sat on the edge of my bed and cried. I'm a family physician. I treat perimenopausal weight gain every day. And nothing I'd done for 3 years had moved my own numbers like this. That food noise that used to follow me from room to room after dinner? Gone. The scale dread that had me weighing myself 7 times a day? Mostly gone. I check once in the morning and once before dinner now and that's it. I sleep through the night without waking up thinking about what I'm going to eat tomorrow. When I went back to my doctor at the 3-month mark, she pulled up the chart, looked at me, and said we don't need to talk about the shot anymore. She actually asked what I was taking so she could mention it to a few of her own patients. I've quietly mentioned Ovia Essentials to 12 of my own patients with perimenopausal weight gain since then. The ones who've followed through have all come back with better numbers. One woman who'd been white-knuckling 1,200 calories a day for over a year dropped 19 pounds in two months without counting a single thing. She told me she hasn't thought about food between meals in 6 months. Look, for almost 3 years I thought I had two options. Take the shot I refer women for every day and deal with the side effects, or watch my weight slowly creep up until I turned into my mother, dieting forever and never getting free. As a family physician, I knew exactly where the second road ended. I was wrong about the first option being my only alternative. And here's something I wish I'd understood sooner. Not all berberine is the same. Remember what my patient said in my office, that the capsules don't work? This is what she meant, and I didn't understand it until I read the research myself. I wasted 2 months on berberine capsules that could never touch my real problem, and if I'd grabbed the first cheap berberine off Amazon it would have been the same story. Ovia Essentials' full-spectrum drink mix is the only form that actually moved my numbers. They offer a 90-day money-back guarantee. If your weight doesn't move, you get a full refund. No questions asked. In 25 years of writing prescriptions, I have never seen a pharmaceutical company offer to give your money back if their drug doesn't work. Think about that for a second. And here's the thing. If my patient hadn't pulled that box out of her purse, I'd still be stepping on the scale 7 times a day, dreading the food noise I knew was coming, putting off the shot conversation with my doctor. I'm sharing this because I hope it helps someone else. After 25 years as a family physician, I thought I knew every option for perimenopausal weight gain. Turns out, my patient knew something I didn't. Here's where I got mine: https://www.oviaessentials.com/products/cutting-drink-mix P.S. Ovia Essentials is a small company. They produce in small batches to keep the quality intact, which means they sell out regularly. If you have a doctor's appointment coming up in the next 30 to 60 days and you want to give your body the support it needs before that visit, check availability now. Don't wait. Every day the cravings keep running is another day closer to the prescription your doctor is already planning to write. P.P.S. The 90-day guarantee is the part I keep coming back to. I have written thousands of prescriptions in my career. None of them came with "if this doesn't work we'll give you your money back." Not one. Whatever you decide, that detail is worth thinking about.