Serene Herbs ad: I’ve Never Felt This Young

I nanny for a family on Martha’s Vineyard every summer. The stuff rich people spend money on would shock you. But there’s one thing I actually copied for my own use. I’ve been with this family for three summers. The mom is a retired general counsel at a bank you’ve definitely heard of. The dad runs a private equity fund out of Midtown, flies into Hyannis on NetJets every Thursday and back out Monday. Two kids and a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Winston. And a shingled summer house on Highland Avenue overlooking the Inkwell that looks like it belongs in Architectural Digest. Their kitchen has a soapstone island bigger than my entire apartment. A La Cornue range in blue enamel that cost her more than my car and I have never once seen anyone cook on it, because they have a chef who comes Wednesday through Sunday. A living room with two Minotti sofas nobody sits on because they are “the formal ones.” A sunroom with a canvas sectional where the kids eat Popsicles and watch cartoons. Original Jacob Lawrence hanging over the baby grand. A Lorna Simpson photograph down the hallway. A Howard pennant from 1962 that belonged to her mother, framed by a conservator from the Studio Museum. Fresh flowers in every room. Delivered twice a week from a florist in Vineyard Haven. Peonies, dahlias, white hydrangea. I learned the names because she corrects you if you call them “the pink ones.” I watched her spend fourteen hundred dollars on flowers that died in six days. The housekeeper threw them out on a Tuesday and new ones showed up Wednesday like nothing happened. They fly private from Teterboro on NetJets. There is a Range Rover in the gravel drive she never drives because she prefers the Escalade that the service sends from Edgartown. Their kids’ playroom has an antique Moroccan rug that gets juice spilled on it daily and nobody blinks. The closet in the main bedroom is bigger than my first apartment in Dorchester. Oscar de la Renta. The Row. Hermes scarves folded by color. There is a Birkin on the top shelf that costs more than my mother paid for her house in 1988. I know because I googled it one night when the kids were asleep. The bathroom has Aesop soap. Augustinus Bader cream. A Diptyque candle that costs ninety-eight dollars and smells like a courtyard in Marrakesh. The shampoo in the guest shower is Oribe. The cotton balls are in a cut-crystal jar from Baccarat. And most of it, I don’t get it. I really don’t. It feels like spending for the sake of spending. Like money is just background noise and they stopped hearing it years ago. Like they’ve run out of normal things to buy so they just keep going deeper into a world where a candle costs a hundred dollars and nobody thinks that is insane. But there’s one thing in that house that actually made sense to me. Her body. I know how that sounds. Out of the Birkin and the NetJets and the La Cornue and the Diptyque, the thing that got me was her body. But let me explain. Because once you understand this, you can’t un-understand it. My first week on the job, I came up on the Sunday ferry and started Monday at seven in the morning. The mom, let’s call her Yvonne, was on the porch having coffee with the kids. No makeup. Hair wrapped in a silk scarf. Wearing a white linen caftan and bare feet on the painted boards. And the second I looked at her, something felt wrong. Not wrong like bad. Wrong like I had never seen a sixty-two-year-old Black woman carry a body like that in person before. She was lean. Not thin. Lean, like a woman who has been running the same body for forty years and nothing has moved on it. Her waist was defined. Her stomach was flat under the linen. No bloating. No puffiness in her face. Her skin, with no makeup, looked lit from inside, even at seven in the morning. The skin on her neck looked twenty years younger than her face said she was. And this is a Black woman who has summered in the Vineyard sun since the sixties. I stood there on her porch holding my bag thinking, what is happening with this woman. I’m forty-one. I’m twenty-one years younger than her. And standing next to Yvonne on that porch, in the morning light off Nantucket Sound, I looked older than her. I assumed it was a trainer. A chef on a strict rotation. Ozempic, probably. That is what rich women her age do, right. I figured she was spending twenty thousand a year with a nutritionist on Park Avenue and a shot in her stomach every Sunday night. But then I noticed something. She ate. She actually ate. Butter on her toast. Cheese. The chef made oxtail stew on Fridays and she had seconds. She had wine with dinner on Saturdays. She never counted anything out loud. She never canceled plans because she was “being good.” She never had the puffiness or the drawn-out face you see on the Ozempic women at the club. Her body just looked like that. Every day. At seven in the morning before coffee. At nine at night after a long day with the kids. In the Vineyard sun. In the harbor light. Through a whole summer of lobster and corn and the wine her husband brought up from the cellar. The worst part was the mirror by the mud room. It hangs right where you come in from the beach. Every morning went the same way. First I’d see Yvonne out on the porch, flat belly under her linen at sixty-two. Then I’d walk inside and the mirror showed me mine. The soft layer around my middle that no amount of walking took off. The bloating that showed up by three in the afternoon no matter what I ate for lunch. The puffiness in my face that got worse every year. Some mornings I stopped looking. I’d walk past that mirror with my eyes on the floor like it owed me money. Then I’d go home to my rented room in Vineyard Haven and do the whole thing again in a worse mirror. The bathroom light showed everything, and under it sat the shelf of things that promised me a body back and never delivered one. The greens powder that tasted like pond water. The sixty-dollar probiotic that did nothing. The berberine the woman at Whole Foods told me would change my life. The apple cider vinegar I choked down for three months. The collagen I added to my coffee. And I kept buying. That is the part that gets me now. Every morning I stirred something into my water or swallowed something with my breakfast because I didn’t know what else to do. And every afternoon my stomach bloated out like I had swallowed a balloon. But this woman who has two decades on me walks around every day looking like that. So one afternoon Yvonne was at the kitchen island answering emails. The kids were down for their nap. And I just asked. Casual, like it was nothing. “Hey Yvonne, what do you take?” She looked up from her laptop. Smiled. Like she had been waiting for someone to ask. “One thing.” “One thing?” “One thing. Every morning. Before anything else touches my mouth.” I stared at her. “What do you mean one thing? What about all the stuff in your bathroom?” She laughed. “Most of that is gifts. PR packages. Things people send before the season starts. I haven’t touched any of it in years.” “So what do you take?” “Soursop Bitters. Two tablespoons on an empty stomach.” I must have looked at her like she was crazy, because she smiled and kept going. “My doctor in Montego Bay put me on it twenty years ago. He was a Jamaican man my mother used to see when we summered down there. He told me what most of these American doctors still won’t tell their patients. If you are over forty and you can’t lose the weight no matter what you do, it isn’t your metabolism. It isn’t your hormones. It isn’t your age. It’s parasites.” “Parasites?” She nodded. “Everybody has them. Especially after forty. They live in your gut, they feed on your food before your body does, they produce waste that keeps your belly bloated out, and they build a slimy wall around themselves so no pill, no probiotic, no powder can ever reach them. That’s why nothing you’ve tried has worked. Nothing could get through the wall.” I stared at her. “So what does the bitters do?” She half-closed her laptop. “The bitterness. That is the whole mechanism. The second it hits your tongue, your liver dumps bile, and bile is the one thing that dissolves that wall. Once the wall is gone, the sixteen African and Caribbean herbs in the bottle finally reach the parasites, clear them, and sweep them out of your colon.” “Everyone always asks me what I did,” she said. “The women at the club especially. They investigate. One of them held my wrist at a dinner so she could feel how thin it was. She was checking whether the rest of me matched the waist.” “They think I had a tummy tuck. They think it is the shot. They never believe me when I say it is a bitter liquid I pour from a bottle every morning.” She closed her laptop the rest of the way and said, “The brand I use now is Serene Herbs. You get it off the website. There is a discount if you catch them in stock, they sell out most months.” Like it was nothing. Like she was telling me where she buys butter. “But I’ll tell you the one thing nobody told me,” she added. “The first week is bathroom. You will see things leave your body that will scare you. Don’t panic. That is years of waste finally moving. By week two, your stomach is going down. By week six, you have a waist again. Don’t quit at week one. Most women do, and they go right back to the powders.” “Does everyone know about it?” I asked. She smiled over the top of her laptop and said, “Well, a certain kind of woman does, I guess.” I went home that night and sat on my bed staring at my phone. The website was open. And I almost didn’t order. Because who am I to use what she uses. Me, a nanny from Boston with a used Civic and a rented room and a shelf of failed supplements. That is who I am. That is who I have always been. I thought about the Birkin on the top shelf of her closet. The private jet. The fourteen-hundred-dollar peonies. The Baccarat cotton ball jar. All the things I will never afford. But then I thought about her waist. At sixty-two. Flat under the linen. The way she said one thing, two tablespoons, that’s it. The way she had thrown out everything else because nothing else mattered once she found this. And I thought, she is twenty-one years older than me. If a bottle of bitter liquid can keep a sixty-two-year-old looking like that, what could it do for me at forty-one. I ordered it. There was a discount through their page. One bottle came with a full-size bottle of their Soursop Daily Gut Drops for free. I put it on my debit card and immediately felt guilty. Then I felt stupid for feeling guilty. Then I felt angry that I had been swallowing greens powder and berberine capsules for twelve years and calling it normal, while a woman two decades older than me had figured out it was never about any of that. It arrived four days later in a plain brown box. I opened it on my kitchen counter. One dark amber glass bottle. The dropper top. The smell hit me from a foot away. Earthy, bitter, like something a grandmother would brew in a tall pot on a Sunday morning. I poured two tablespoons the next morning and swallowed it on an empty stomach. My face twisted. It was the worst thing I had ever put in my mouth. By that evening I felt a gurgling in my stomach I had not felt in years. The first week I was in the bathroom more than I had been in my entire adult life. By the end of that week I had dropped four pounds and nothing I was wearing had been changed about what I ate. By week three, my jeans buttoned without me sucking in. The afternoon bloat was gone. I was down nine pounds and I had not stepped foot in a gym. By week six, I walked past the mud room mirror on a Monday morning and I stopped. My face was more defined. The puffiness was gone. There was a waist where there used to be a soft layer. I was down fourteen pounds. I had not been under one-fifty since my late twenties. The next Monday I pulled up to the house at seven and Yvonne was on the porch, same white linen, same bare feet, sixty-two and glowing. She looked at me. Tilted her head. Smiled. “You’ve been drinking it.” “How did you know?” “Your face. I can already see it. Your neck too. Give it another month.” I called my sister that night. “I just started something and I think I’m losing my mind.” She called me right back. “What is it?” “It is this bitter liquid from a Jamaican doctor Yvonne has been drinking for twenty years. You pour two tablespoons every morning. It tastes like dirt. I’m down fourteen pounds in six weeks. I haven’t changed a thing I eat.” “That’s not possible.” “I know. It’s not calorie counting. It’s not Ozempic. It is clearing parasites out of your gut. The things you can’t reach with pills. The things that have been bloating you out for years.” Silence. Then, “Send me the link.” She ordered it that night. She didn’t even ask the price. A few weeks later she called me back. “I hate you. I’m down eight pounds. My face is coming back. My husband keeps touching my stomach and saying what have you been doing. What did you do to me.” Her husband texted me the next day. “I don’t know what you sold my wife, but keep selling it.” Within a couple months, my mom had a bottle. She called me after three weeks. She said, “I have been fighting this stomach since 1998. Why did you not tell me about this twenty years ago.” My best friend had a bottle. She said she used to dread looking in the mirror in the morning. Now she stops at every mirror she passes. My own sister’s coworker had a bottle because she noticed my sister’s waist at a work happy hour and would not let it go until she got the name. And every single one of them said the same thing. Why did nobody tell me about this sooner? Here is what I think about now. I spend ten hours a day in a house where everything is designed to feel luxurious. Everything in that house is chosen by a woman who has tried everything and kept only what works. And she kept one thing for her body. A bitter liquid in a dark glass bottle on the kitchen counter. That is her entire protocol. At sixty-two, she has the waist of a woman thirty years younger. Including me, until now. I used to go home and just accept that my body would never look like hers. But it is not about age. It is not about money. It is about finding the thing that actually gets to the root and stopping the endless cycle of swallowing the wrong things on top of each other. I’m not rich. I drive a Civic with the fender duct-taped from the time I backed into a mailbox. I rent a room in Vineyard Haven in the summer and a studio in Dorchester the rest of the year. I shop the sale rack at TJ Maxx. But I wake up every morning now in a body I had given up on. In my tiny bathroom with the flickering light. Two tablespoons of bitter liquid before anything else touches my mouth. That is my entire routine. And for the first time in twelve years, my body feels like it belongs to someone who takes care of herself, because I finally am. Now, I will be honest with you, the way Yvonne was honest with me. It is not overnight. The first week is bathroom. The second week your stomach starts going down. By the third week your clothes fit. By the sixth week you have a waist again. Don’t quit the first week because things look dramatic in the toilet. That is the whole point. Everything that has been sitting in you for years is leaving. It comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can see it for yourself with nothing to lose. Serene Herbs is running a discount right now through their page. Every bottle of Soursop Bitters comes with a full-size bottle of their Soursop Daily Gut Drops included for free. The Drops are the daily step after the Bitters have done their reset. Aloe and marshmallow root rebuild the lining. Lemon balm calms the reactivity. Two droppers under the tongue every morning, tastes like soursop and lime, no bitterness. Bitters for the reset. Drops for the ritual. But after the first few weeks, you will not be sending it back. You will be texting your sister the link. Trust me. I know. Because that is exactly what I did. And she will hate you for it. In the best way