I still show up.

Five days a week, sometimes six. Pilates. Weights. The occasional 6am run I swore I'd never do again. I watch what I eat. I sleep seven hours. I do all the things people tell you to do.

So why, sometime around 43, did I start feeling like I was running on a half-charged battery?

Not exhausted. Not sick. Just... less. Like someone had quietly turned a dial down on everything I used to count on. My workouts felt harder at the same intensity. My recovery took a day longer than it should. By 3pm I was going through the motions, not powering through them.

I kept waiting for it to pass. Thought maybe I needed more iron. Different sleep. Less stress.

I wasn't wrong to try all of that. I was just missing the bigger picture.

Here's what nobody tells you when you're in your 40s and still showing up for your health every single day.

Your body isn't breaking down. Your cells are burning fuel differently.

There's a molecule inside every cell in your body called NAD+. It's the fuel source behind almost every process that makes you feel energized, sharp, and physically capable. Your muscles run on it. Your brain runs on it. Your ability to recover from a hard workout runs on it.

In your 20s, you had plenty. You didn't notice it because you didn't need to.

By your 40s, research suggests NAD+ levels have dropped by roughly half compared to where they were two decades earlier. By your 50s, that gap widens further.

This isn't a theory. It's been measured. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine, the University of Colorado, and institutions like the Sinclair Lab at Harvard have spent the better part of the last decade documenting what happens to NAD+ as we age. And the picture is consistent.

It doesn't mean you're falling apart. It means the system that powers your cells is working with less fuel than it used to.

That's a very different problem. And it has a very different solution.

I'm not someone who buys into trends. I spent a long time on the skeptical side of the supplement world, mostly because I'd tried enough products that promised a lot and delivered nothing. The bar for me had gotten high.

What shifted my thinking wasn't a testimonial. It was the underlying biology.

NMN, short for Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, is a precursor to NAD+. Your body converts it directly. That's not marketing language, that's the metabolic pathway. And unlike a lot of supplement claims that rest on one small study and a lot of hope, NMN has been through multiple human trials now, not just animal models.

A 2022 clinical trial published in the journal npj Aging, involving healthy adults, showed measurable increases in NAD+ levels in the blood following NMN supplementation. A separate trial out of Washington University documented improved muscle function and insulin sensitivity in postmenopausal women specifically. These are peer-reviewed outcomes in humans, in the relevant age group.

That last part matters. Because a lot of longevity research is done on 25-year-olds or on mice. Research in women over 40 is rarer, and that's exactly the demographic where the NAD+ gap starts to really show up.

What I noticed when I started taking NMN wasn't dramatic. It wasn't a lightning bolt moment.

It was more like the afternoon arrived and I hadn't started fading yet. My post-workout soreness, which had been lasting 48 hours or more, settled back down to something manageable. I stopped dreading the second half of my day. Focus held longer. I wasn't reaching for caffeine at 2pm just to get through a call.

Months in, a few things I hadn't expected: my sleep felt deeper, not longer, just more restorative. My skin, which I'd been quietly writing off as a consequence of my 40s, had more bounce to it. I'm not claiming NMN is a skincare product. But it makes sense. If your cells are better resourced, that shows up everywhere.

The hard part of this conversation is that the supplement industry has badly polluted the NMN category. There are products on shelves with no third-party testing, no transparent sourcing, no evidence their NMN is even bioavailable by the time it reaches your bloodstream. Some studies on NMN absorption have shown that capsule formulation matters significantly. Purity matters. Dosing matters.

I take Omre NMN + Resveratrol. The reason isn't loyalty, it's specifics.

Every batch is third-party tested and the certificates of analysis are published, not buried in a footnote. The dosing is based on the human clinical trial range, not a number someone picked because it sounds impressive. It's manufactured in a GMP-certified facility in the US. They're not the cheapest option and they know it. They're not trying to compete on price. They're competing on the thing that actually matters: whether it works.

If you've been doing everything right and still feel like something is slightly off, the problem probably isn't your discipline. It isn't your willpower. It isn't that you're just getting older and this is how it goes now.

It might be your cells running on less than they should be.

That's a solvable problem.

If you're 40 or older and you train regularly, take care of yourself, and still can't shake the feeling that something is running at 70 percent when it used to run at 100, this is worth looking at seriously.

Start with the research. Read the Washington University trial. Look at the ingredient label and the COA before you buy anything. And if you want to know where I landed after doing exactly that, Omre is the link below.

Not because you need to be convinced. Because you've already done the hard part. You just need the right fuel.