I like to think I’m smart. That I’m an educated consumer who knows a magic pill when she sees one. I’m not. I’m as gullible as the next person, and it kills me to admit this to you.
I’ve been watching my weight since I was 11. I could blame my mother, who enrolled me in a behavioral modification program for chubby pre-teens run by UConn graduate students working toward their PhDs. But why go there. She just wanted to spare me the struggle she’d had, and the fucked-up relationship with food she was hoping I wouldn’t inherit.
So yes, I dabbled with eating disorders early on. (Would not recommend.) I tried the fen-phen that was going around in the ’90s, to ill effect. Diet teas, herbal remedies, you name it, I played with it, all to keep an extra 10 or so pounds off my 5’2″ frame.
For the last 25 years or so, I’ve more or less made peace with my body. I know how to eat. I consider myself an athlete. I know roughly how far I need to run or hike to stay where I want to be. And…
Something happened around 53. I was doing calisthenics in my living room in Ireland, moving into a straight-armed plank, and suddenly I was upside down, staring at the skin on my thighs. It was hanging off me in folds. I made Walt look too. (He was diplomatic.) A month or two later, I noticed the skin under my arms. Crepey. Dimpled. The look you see on old people.
It was as if the train had flown off the tracks.
Maybe I needed lotion. I’ve always been lackadaisical about that stuff. Maybe I needed to lift heavier. Lord knows I’ve never been a fan. But this didn’t feel like a muscle problem. And every year, my “flappy skin condition” got worse.
Then, 10 years later, there I was, scrolling reels on my living room couch in New Hampshire. All comfortable like.
An absolutely stunning woman was sharing her transformation. She was 55, she said, and people mistook her for 30. She zoomed in on her legs. The “before” photos looked exactly like mine: crepey, saggy, sad. The “after” photos showed legs that were cut and shapely, with skin that would have put a teenager to shame. Oh, how I marveled.
Then she walked us through how she did it, in seven steps. A clean diet. Leg workouts. A pristine hydration practice. Ten thousand steps a day. And item five of seven, nestled between cutting sugar and parking in the B-lot at the mall, was a supplement I’d never heard of. NAD+, in one specific brand, available on Amazon.
Here’s what got me. I was already doing most of the other six. Which meant the supplement was the only thing I hadn’t tried. The missing ingredient. The thing standing between me and the legs I’d had… well, never.
Hello!
I bought the pills. I took them religiously. And, that’s right, they changed jack shit. No surprise there.
Then the posts started showing up. Women who’d fallen for the same reel, or one just like it. One of them did some digging and discovered that our beautiful 55-year-old didn’t exist. She was AI. There were several versions of her, ranging in age from 50 to 70, each one having conquered aging with a pill you could buy on Amazon. The exact brand was clearly visible in every storyboard.
Hundreds of smart women weighed in. We’d all been had by someone who wasn’t real. Talk about embarrassing.
Here’s the part that stings. She wasn’t real, and she still told a better story than most of the experts I work with. Before. After. Seven credible steps. One shiny thing tucked in at number five.
Most experts write their books backward. They lead with the six honest steps, the methodology and the research and the framework they’ve spent 20 years refining. The transformation shows up somewhere around chapter nine, if at all. That outcome the reader is after, that feeling.
Your reader is me on that couch. They don’t want your framework. They want the after. They want to believe there’s one thing they haven’t tried yet.
You know there’s no pill. Your job is to make them feel the after so badly that they’ll do the six hard things to get there.
I’m still running up mountains on my crepey legs, by the way. The pills are in a drawer somewhere.
