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My doctor told me I was the healthiest sixty-one-year-old she'd seen all week. I drove home and cried in the driveway.

I don't quite know how to start this except to tell you the truth, which is that nothing was wrong with me.

I don't mean that the way people say it when they're being modest. I mean it the literal way. The bloodwork was good.

The blood pressure was good. The weight was where it had been since my forties. The mammogram was clean, the colonoscopy was clean, the bone density was where they wanted it to be, the thyroid panel was where it had been for years on the small dose I take for it.

My doctor — a woman I've trusted for nine years, who has never once oversold me on anything — looked at me across her desk that afternoon, set down her tablet, and said, Carol, you are doing everything right.

I wish more of my patients looked like your charts.

And I sat in my car in her parking lot for about twenty minutes afterward and cried, with the keys in my hand and the engine off, because I had not felt right in close to two years and I did not know how to explain that to a single person, including myself.

You can probably guess the rest of this letter from there, or you can't, and which one you are tells you whether to keep reading.

The thing I'm describing is the gap between the chart says you're fine and the body you have to live inside doesn't feel fine.

It is a peculiarly lonely place to live.

You can't really complain about it because, technically, you don't have anything to complain about.

People ask how you are at church and at the grocery store and at the school where I substitute-teach two days a week, and you say good, good, because what are you supposed to say — my labs are perfect and I feel like someone unplugged me from the wall? They'd think you were being dramatic. Most days I thought I was being dramatic.

Let me try to tell you what off actually felt like, because I think specifics matter when you're trying to figure out whether someone is describing your life or someone else's, and most letters like this one are too vague to help with that decision.

It felt like waking up at six-thirty after eight hours of sleep and lying there for another twenty minutes trying to convince my legs the day was worth getting up for. Not depression — I'll come back to that — just a flat resistance to standing up.

It felt like reading the same paragraph of a novel four times and giving up on the book and not picking up another one for nine months. I am a person who reads.

I have been a person who reads since I was eight years old. I had a stack of novels on the nightstand that I'd bought with intention and stopped opening, and every night I'd look at the stack and feel a small private grief about it, and turn off the light.

It felt like standing in the produce aisle staring at the bell peppers and forgetting why I'd come to the store at all — and not in the cute what did I come in here for way that everyone laughs about, but in a quieter way where I'd stand there for a full minute, hand on the cart, mind blank, until something snapped back into place.

It felt like my husband — his name is Tom, he is sixty-three, he is a retired surveyor who reads three newspapers a day and still thinks the world is mostly interesting — saying something funny at dinner and me laughing a beat too late because I'd been somewhere else inside my head. He never pointed it out.

He's not that kind of man. But I noticed myself doing it and I felt myself becoming a person I didn't recognize across the table from him.

And it felt like a two p.m. crash, every afternoon, like clockwork — except it wasn't a crash, exactly, so much as a slow leak. By two I was running on fumes. By four I was done. By eight I was in bed reading the same page four times.

I lost most of my evenings for almost two years. We used to play cards after dinner. Gin rummy, mostly, sometimes cribbage. We stopped without ever saying we were stopping. The cards just stayed in the drawer.

I want to be clear about something now, so we can move past it. None of this was depression. I went and asked, because I am not the kind of woman who refuses to talk to somebody when something is wrong.

I sat with a therapist for three sessions. She was a kind woman in her fifties with a small office and a fern on her desk, and she was thorough, and at the end of the third session she put her pen down and said, Carol, I don't think this is what you think it is.

I don't think it's depression. I think your body is telling you something your mind is trying to translate, and I think that's the conversation you actually need to be having. I have turned that sentence over in my hands many times since. I will come back to it at the end of this letter.

So back to the parking lot, and the crying, and the long drive home that afternoon.

Tom listened to me try to explain all this that night at the kitchen table, and he didn't try to solve it, which is one of the reasons I married him forty-one years ago.

He just said, what do you want to do? And I said, I don't know. I want to feel the way I used to feel. I don't know how to get there from here. And he said, Okay, then we figure that out. That was the whole of his contribution and it was exactly the right amount.

What happened next was so small I almost didn't want to write it down because it sounds invented. But I'm telling you what actually happened, because if I dress it up you won't trust me and you shouldn't.

About a week later I was at the farmer's market on a Saturday morning — I go most Saturdays, it's one of the things still on the short list of things I look forward to, even in the bad stretch I'm describing it stayed on the list — and I got to talking with the woman who runs the root vegetable stand.

Her name is Lorraine and I have known her in the way you know market people for the better part of six years. She is in her late sixties and she has the strong hands of a woman who has been pulling things out of the dirt for most of her life.

I had a bag of beets in my hand because Tom likes them roasted with goat cheese and walnuts, and Lorraine looked at the bag and said something offhand about beets being one of those things people were paying attention to again.

I asked her what she meant. She said her son-in-law had been reading about beetroot — about cardiovascular wellness, about cellular energy, that sort of thing — and had started taking it in capsule form on top of eating the actual root, and he was a man who didn't believe in much of anything, and she shrugged in the way that meant but here we are, and he says it makes a difference.

She said it casually. She wasn't trying to sell me anything. She was a woman with dirt under her fingernails making conversation while she weighed beets.

I went home and looked it up.

I did not look it up the way I look most things up, which is to say I did not skim. I read for two weeks. I read about the deep crimson pigment in beetroot — it's called betalain, that color that stains your cutting board for three days and your fingers for two.

I read about the nitrates that are naturally present in the root. I read about the long, patient relationship the research community has had with this vegetable for decades, in the context of cardiovascular wellness and cellular energy.

None of what I read was a fireworks story. It was the opposite of a fireworks story.

It was a vegetable that has been quietly studied for a long time by careful people who are not making outlandish promises.

I am sixty-one and I have lived through enough wellness fads to have grown a sturdy skepticism about anything that promises me my old self back in thirty days.

I once paid two hundred dollars for a powder that was supposed to "reset" my mitochondria — a powder that tasted, very specifically, like pond water — and it did nothing.

I once tried a thing where you put drops under your tongue for adrenal fatigue. I once tried a tea cleanse. I do not tell those stories with shame. I tell them the way you tell I used to smoke. It was a different time, and I knew less, and I'm older now.

So I was not in a hurry. I read, and I thought about it, and I read some more, and eventually I picked one to try. I picked Rosabella Beetroot, and I picked it for a reason worth telling you about.

The reason is that betalain — the pigment, the part the research community keeps circling back to — is heat-sensitive. That's the chemistry of the molecule. If you process beetroot with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat.

The people at Rosabella decided to cold-press the beetroot at low temperatures because they wanted as much of the compound as possible to make it from the field into the capsule.

That is a slower way to make a supplement, and it tells you something about who is running the operation. The other thing I liked was that it was one bottle.

Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water, and you're done for the day. No afternoon dose, no powder to blend, no schedule to memorize. I did not want a stack of seven things and a protocol. I am sixty-one and I have earned a simple morning.

Before I started it, I called my doctor's office. Not for an appointment — just a question through the nurse line. I explained what I was thinking about adding, and asked whether I should worry about it given the small dose of thyroid medication I take.

The nurse said she'd check with my doctor and call me back, and she called me back the same afternoon and said no concerns, go ahead, keep doing the walking and the water and the rest of it.

I was adding it to what I was already doing. I was not stopping anything, I was not swapping anything out, I was not adjusting any of my prescriptions. I want to make sure I say that part as clearly as I can, because I would feel terrible if anybody read this letter and got the wrong idea about what I did. Whatever your doctor has you on, stay on.

Just call them or your pharmacist and ask before you add. That's the whole rule.

Two capsules. Morning. Glass of water. That was it. I started on a Tuesday because I had nothing better to anchor it to.

The first two weeks, I felt nothing in particular, and I want to tell you that honestly because the temptation in a letter like this one is to compress the timeline and pretend something dramatic happened on day three. Nothing dramatic happened on day three.

I had read enough to know that bodies are different.

Some people notice something within the first week or two. Some people take much longer than that. Some people don't notice much at all. I was prepared to land in any of those camps and I was trying to keep my expectations honest.

What I noticed, I noticed slowly, in pieces I did not connect at the time.

The first thing I noticed was that I finished a book. A whole novel, a five-hundred-page novel, in about ten days, the way I used to. I had not finished a book in nine months.

I put it down on the side table next to the stack I had been ignoring, and I went to pick up the next one, and I felt this small flutter of something I recognized — the feeling of I want to know what happens next.

I had missed that feeling and I had not known I was missing it until it came back. I sat with the second book for a minute before I opened it because I didn't want to scare it away.

The second thing I noticed was that the two p.m. leak had moved. It wasn't gone.

I'm not going to tell you it was gone, because that would be a lie and you would smell it. But it was happening at three-thirty instead of two, and on some days it didn't really start until after dinner.

That was a piece of afternoon I had been giving away for almost two years, and I had it back, and I started using it.

I started a small herb garden on the back porch. Nothing ambitious — basil, thyme, two pots of mint that immediately tried to take over. But it was something I was doing in the afternoon instead of being done with the afternoon.

The third thing I noticed was a Tuesday in week six or seven, when Tom and I were doing the dishes after dinner — he washes, I dry, that's been the arrangement for forty-one years — and he said, without looking at me, you seem more here lately.

He said it the way he says most things, which is quietly and without making a production of it. I did not say anything back for a minute, because I was figuring out whether he was right. Then I said, I know. I am. And we finished the dishes.

The fourth thing I noticed — and I am putting this one in because I think it might be the one that actually means something — is that we started playing gin rummy again. Not because I made a decision to.

The deck just came out of the drawer one Sunday evening and we played three hands and I won two of them and Tom said welcome back. I almost cried at the kitchen table. I didn't, but it was a near thing.

I want to be very careful with what I am telling you here. I am not saying Rosabella did any of that on its own. I was walking three mornings a week.

I was sleeping seven and a half hours most nights. I was eating the way I have been eating for twenty years — fish, vegetables, less sugar than I used to.

I was doing the small things I had been doing for years and that my doctor had been approving of for years. All I am telling you is that I added one thing to the list, kept everything else exactly the same, and the weeks felt less heavy than they had been feeling for a long time. I can't give you a cleaner version of that, and I would not trust anyone who tried to give you one.

The honest version is messy and I am giving you the honest version.

I went back to my doctor at the regular six-month, which fell about four months after I'd started, and I told her what I had added. She nodded the way she nods when she is thinking, which is slowly, with her chin in her hand.

She looked at the bloodwork on the tablet — which was where she wanted it, the same range it had been the visit before — and she said, Carol, whatever combination of things you're doing, keep doing it. I don't see any reason to change a thing. She said no concerns. Come back in six months.

I drove home that day and I did not cry. I made it home, hung up the keys, and went out to the porch to check on the basil.

On Saturday I went to the farmer's market and I bought beets from Lorraine, and I told her, and she said I'm glad, and weighed my beets, and that was that.

That's the whole story. I am sorry if you came here for a more dramatic one. There isn't one.

There is just a quiet one, about a woman who felt unplugged for two years and feels a little more plugged in now, and who wanted to tell you about it in case you are also in the gap.

If you're in the gap — your tests are fine and your body isn't — I want to say a few things to you carefully, because I'm aware this kind of letter can get read in a hurry and I don't want to be misunderstood.

I don't know you. I don't know your bloodwork, or what you are already taking, or what your doctor has said to you in your last appointment. Bodies are different.

Some people notice something within the first week or two of adding something like this. Some people take longer. Some people don't notice much at all. That is the honest version, and anyone offering you a cleaner one is selling you harder than I am.

Here is how I think about Rosabella now, in the words I would actually use. It is something the body uses.

The research community talks about it in the context of supporting healthy circulation, cardiovascular wellness, and the body's own cellular energy, in people whose numbers are already in the range they should be in.

It is not a fix for anything. It is one small thing you add to the long list of things you are already doing for yourself.

Please call your doctor or your pharmacist before you add it. I really mean this — I am not saying it because somebody told me to.

If you are on anything for blood pressure, or anything cardiovascular, or really anything at all, the people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether it makes sense for you.

I am a woman who got curious about a vegetable. I am not the person to ask. They are.

The company has a ninety-day satisfaction guarantee. If you are not satisfied — for any reason at all, including just changing your mind — they refund you. It is not tied to your bloodwork.

It is not tied to anything you have to prove to anybody. If you are not happy, you are not happy. That is all they ask.

The beets are grown on a small operation that harvests on its own schedule, which means there are stretches when they are in stock and stretches when they are not.

I mention that not to push you — please do not let anyone push you into a health decision — but so that if you go to the site and they are out, you know why.

That is all I have. Thank you for reading this far. I hope something here was useful to you.

— Carol

P.S. I wanted to come back to the cold-press for a second, because I rushed past it earlier. The betalain pigment — the deep red, the part the research community keeps circling back to — is heat-sensitive. If you process beetroot the fast way, with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat. Rosabella chose the slow way. Cold-press, low temperatures, more of the compound through to the capsule. That choice costs them money and time and they made it anyway. That was a piece of why I picked them, and it is a small thing but I am at an age where I have learned that the small things tell you who you are dealing with.

P.P.S. Two capsules. In the morning. With a glass of water. That is the entire protocol. No powder to mix, no afternoon dose to remember, no schedule taped to the inside of the cupboard door. I have earned a simple morning at this point in my life, and I appreciated being given one.

P.P.P.S. I am going to say this once more because I actually mean it. Please talk to your doctor or your pharmacist before you add anything new to what you are already taking, especially if there is anything cardiovascular on your chart. They have your whole picture in front of them. I have written you a letter. There is a difference, and the difference matters. The two minutes it takes to ask are worth every second.

P.P.P.P.S. The guarantee, again, in case you skimmed past it. Ninety days. Any reason at all. You do not have to prove a single thing — not to them, not about your numbers, not about how you feel. If you tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied, and they send the money back. That is the whole policy and it is a small-company policy, the kind of thing companies used to do back when companies still answered the phone.

P.P.P.P.P.S. The line the therapist said to me — your body is telling you something your mind is trying to translate — has stayed with me for a long time. I do not know exactly what she meant by it. I took it as permission to listen to the part of myself that knew something was off, even when every test said nothing was. If you are doing the same kind of listening, in your own life, I hope you find your way through the gap. I hope this letter was one small thing in that direction. And I hope, whatever you decide to do or not do after reading this, that the next year of your life feels a little more like the year you wanted than the last one did.

— C.

DISCLAIMER

Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
