The One Change That Gave Me My Energy Back

I want to tell you about the day I stood in my kitchen and lined up a small pile of pills on the bench.

A little yellow one. Four creamy-coloured capsules with transparent outers. All natural. No prescription. Nothing dramatic about the moment at all, just me, a glass of water, and a quiet scepticism I was doing my best to ignore.

I swallowed them all in one go, the way my grandmother taught me without ever meaning to. Watching her as a kid, swallowing what seemed like an enormous pile of medication, I'd spent years practising until it just became second nature.

That was it. I went about my day.

Nothing changed.

Day two — nothing changed. Day three — nothing changed.

Or at least, that's what it felt like. Then my wife said something that stopped me mid-sentence.

"Don't you feel tired?"

I didn't. Not even slightly.

The Exhaustion I Had Forgotten Was Abnormal

To understand why that question mattered, you need to understand what my baseline had been for most of my life.

Exhaustion wasn't an event for me. It was a condition. A constant, low-grade companion that I'd had for so long I'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing the hum of a refrigerator. It was just there, always.

From the afternoons at around 2pm onwards I would need constant food just to keep moving. My brain would go foggy. I'd sit in meetings and drift. I'd slump in my chair at the dinner table, not just when I was alone, but even with guests, even when I was trying. Sitting upright was genuinely too much effort some days.

Projects didn't get done, or took far longer than they should have. Not because I was lazy... I had a physical job, I was getting my 10,000 steps in every day, I was by most measures an active person. But by the time I got home there was simply nothing left. My kids would pull on my arms and beg me to come outside, and I would look at their faces and have nothing left to give them.

I'd had this since childhood. Ross River Fever as a young man had knocked me sideways. I fell asleep in university lectures, nearly lost a job as a mechanic when I kept dozing off in running cars. But even before that, exhaustion was just the rhythm of my life. Sleep, work, collapse. Repeat.

The way I coped was by learning to push through it. I lived by the idea David Goggins talks about, that when you think you're done you're only at about 40% of your actual capacity. So I just kept going. I toured Tasmania by bicycle. I rode from Rockhampton to Brisbane via the inland route. I won a state championship in mountain biking. I commuted an hour each way through city traffic on a bike.

None of that fixed the exhaustion. It just meant I got better at ignoring it.

Why I Almost Didn't Try It

40 years later and a friend mentioned that her husband had been using a product that had made a real difference for him. She thought it might help me too.

I want to be honest with you about my reaction, because I think it matters: I didn't believe her.

I had tried supplements before. I'd even tried products from network marketing companies. Some of them worked for a few weeks and then stopped, and I'd be right back where I started. The pattern was so familiar that I'd stopped expecting anything different. My blood tests always came back clean. Doctors told me I was healthier than average. There was no diagnosis, no explanation, no fix.

So I said yes mostly to be polite, and because I genuinely had nothing left to lose.

The product is called Protandim, made by a company called LifeVantage. It's not a stimulant. It doesn't give you a caffeine hit or a sugar rush. What it's designed to do is activate something called Nrf2, a protein that essentially switches on your body's own antioxidant production. Rather than flooding your system with antioxidants from outside, it signals your body to produce more of its own. The researchers who developed it spent years on this. It's been studied in peer-reviewed journals. That's about as deep as I'll go here, because the science deserves its own post and I'd rather get it right than rush it.

What I can tell you is what happened to me.

Day Three

My wife's question on day three was the crack in my scepticism.

I kept watching. Kept taking the pills. Kept looking for other explanations... maybe I'd had less hard work that week, maybe I'd eaten differently, maybe it was a coincidence.

Nothing else had changed.

By the end of the first week, projects were getting done. I was staying up later. Not because I was forcing myself to, but because I still had energy and things to do. I was spending time with my kids in the evenings instead of lying on the couch. My mind was moving again.

The thing I remember most clearly is that I was so used to pushing against exhaustion that when the resistance disappeared, I kept pushing anyway. Old habits. I started staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning just because I could, then waking early because I wanted to. That lasted about a week before my body reminded me, firmly, that I'm in my fifties and sleep still matters. I crashed hard.

But the thing is it was a different kind of crash. A normal tired, not the lead-weight collapse I'd known my whole life. I slept, I recovered, and I kept going.

I noticed something else a few months in. I was sitting in a meeting and realised my posture was completely straight. No slumping. No effort required. It was so unusual that it caught my attention in the middle of someone else talking. I'd spent years not even registering that I was hunched because holding myself upright had taken more energy than I had. Now it just happened naturally.

The Things We Didn't Expect

Energy was what I was hoping for. What followed surprised us both.

A few months in, my wife and I noticed something quietly strange: we'd stopped reaching for the ibuprofen and diclofenac. Before Protandim, one or both of us was taking anti-inflammatories at least once a week — muscle tension, aches, the kind of low-grade physical complaints that just seemed like part of being adults with busy lives. We didn't think of it as a problem exactly. It was just what we did.

Then we realised we weren't doing it anymore. The muscle tension that had been a constant background noise had largely gone quiet. I've taken it once since, after hurting my knee, but that's been it. For both of us. That wasn't something we were looking for, and nobody had mentioned it as a reason to try the product. It just happened.

The other thing was immunity. We have two kids, which means a constant pipeline of whatever is going around school coming through the front door. Before, that meant tissues, sick days, and then inevitably the adults catching whatever the kids brought home. It was just our family life cycle.

That cycle has changed noticeably. The whole family takes Protandim now, our kids included, and even when something strong is going around, it either doesn't land at all or arrives reduced so we can keep functioning. We're not immune to everything, and I don't pretend otherwise. But the difference is real enough that we've both commented on it independently. In fact, my daughter recently stopped taking it for her own reasons, and within a week she came down with something.

My best way of making sense of all of this; the energy, the reduced inflammation, the improved immunity, is that Protandim seems to help cells find their strength again and start doing what they were actually designed to do. Heal. Restore. Function properly. When your cells are working well, a lot of downstream problems quietly resolve themselves without you ever targeting them directly. That's not a clinical explanation. The science post on NRF2 has more about that. It's just how I've come to think about it intuitively.

I want to say clearly: I don't know if other people will notice the same things we have. Bodies are different, and I'm one family with one experience. But I'd feel like I was leaving out something important if I only told you about the energy and left out the parts that genuinely surprised us.

Almost Two Years Later

I want to be careful here, because I know how this kind of story sounds. I've read enough of them to be sceptical myself.

So let me say clearly: I am not a doctor. I'm not making any clinical claims. I don't know why this worked for me when other things didn't, and I can't promise it will work the same way for you. Bodies are different. Situations are different.

What I can tell you is that the changes have lasted. That's the part that matters most to me, because I've had short-term improvements before and watched them fade. This hasn't faded. Almost two years on, I still have the same energy. In fact, in October last year I ran out of product and went two days without it. I felt awful. Struggled to get to work, couldn't function properly. I'm not saying that to sell you something. I'm saying it because it's what happened, and this is a blog about what actually happens.

I've kept taking it even during periods of genuine financial stress, because I know too well what's on the other side of stopping.

An Honest Note on How I Share This

LifeVantage sells through a network marketing model, which means if you buy through me, I receive a commission. I want you to know that upfront, because I think transparency matters more than a sale.

I'm not trying to push this at you. I'm not going to follow up with messages or run you through a script. If you're curious, the link is below and you can explore it yourself. If you're not, that's completely fine. Come back next week and I'll be writing about something else entirely.

What I won't do is recommend something I don't use myself and/or believe in. That's the only standard I hold myself to here.

If chronic exhaustion is something you've lived with, the kind that doesn't show up on blood tests, the kind doctors can't explain, the kind you've quietly built your whole life around, then this might be worth looking at. Or it might not be right for you at all. I'd rather you make that decision with honest information than with a polished sales pitch.

That's all I've got.

Next post: I'll be going deeper on the science behind Nrf2 and why your body's own antioxidant system might matter more than anything you're buying at the health food store.