The Gym Membership Card That Expired Two Years Ago, He Fished It Out of His Wallet

On a weekend afternoon, while tidying his wallet, A-Cheng came across a gym membership card that had expired two years ago. He stared at it for a few seconds, and instead of throwing it away, he set it on the edge of the desk. After his fortieth birthday, he had started running—at first just to feel a bit more energetic. But after his first three-kilometer run, he woke up the next day with knees so sore they felt like someone else's. He told his wife that back in college he could run five thousand meters without a problem, and now even crossing the street made his legs feel heavy. She didn't respond, just swapped his breakfast milk tea for soy milk.

He decided to start with the simplest thing: keeping records. For two weeks straight, he wrote down in a notebook what time he went to bed, what time he woke up, how long he ran, and what he ate. The first week, he assumed the problem was that he wasn't running enough, so he increased his mileage—and the second week he felt even more exhausted. The second week, he guessed it was too much coffee, so he cut down to one cup a day, but his energy didn't change noticeably. The clues in his notebook contradicted each other, and he began to wonder if he was missing something.

One Wednesday night, he flipped to a page that read: "Dinner was just salad, woke up in the middle of the night too hungry to sleep." Next to that line was a crooked smiley face. It suddenly hit him that for months, in an effort to control his weight, he had often eaten too little at dinner and relied on coffee to get through the day. His declining fitness might not have a single cause—it could be several small habits stacking up. He shared this thought with his wife, and she said, "You finally got around to talking about food."

The next day, he saw a discussion on social media titled "Zinc Supplement Recommendations." In the comments, some people said taking it improved their energy, while others said they felt nothing at all. He didn't order anything right away. Instead, he screenshotted the comments and saved them, planning to look into it later. He noticed that these discussions often lumped "food" and "medicine" together—some people were sharing about multivitamins, others were talking about things that require a prescription, yet they described them all in the same tone. He decided to first figure out what he was actually looking for.

He started using a clumsy method: photographing the packaging of every product that caught his interest, then comparing the ingredient labels when he got home. Some labels were clear; others just said "patented extract" without listing the amount. He also added a new column in his notebook: "Why do I want to buy this?" The first entry read "to get my energy back," the second read "to sleep better," and for the third he paused for a long time before finally writing "not sure." That uncertainty made him alert—half of his motivation was just anxiety.

That weekend, he went with his wife to a big-box store. In the supplement aisle, he ran into an employee who was restocking shelves. He didn't ask "which one works?" Instead, he asked, "On these labels, what information is the government required to include?" The employee pointed to several items, including the product name, ingredients, warnings, and suggested dosage. A-Cheng copied these into a note on his phone, and when he got home he looked up public information from the Food and Drug Administration, confirming that the labeling rules for foods and drugs are different. He didn't get any answers about efficacy, but for the first time he felt like he was standing on firmer ground.

A few weeks later, in a long article discussing men's vitality health, he saw someone compare sleep habits, exercise, diet, and supplements in a single table. He didn't take it all at face value. Instead, he broke down each item mentioned in the article and checked it against his notebook. He discovered that what he was truly lacking wasn't a particular capsule—it was consistent sleep and enough protein. He readjusted his dinners, switched to running every other day, and turned off his phone an hour before bed. Two weeks later, he didn't feel like he was "back to twenty," but at least he was no longer waking up hungry in the middle of the night.

That expired gym membership card ended up in a drawer—he didn't renew it. He told his wife he was still observing, and he had made an appointment with a family medicine clinic, planning to bring his notebook and a list of the supplements he was currently taking so a professional could review everything. His wife asked him, "What about all those recommendations online?" He said, "Let them sit for now. Once I figure out what my problem actually is, I'll decide whether to buy anything." He opened his notebook and wrote on the last page: Sleep well first, then talk about the rest.

Later, he placed that notebook on the shoe cabinet by the entryway and would flip through it before heading out for a run. There was no magic formula in it—just a few crooked lines: what time he went to bed, how many kilometers he ran, what he had for dinner. Occasionally he still clicked on those supplement discussions, but he no longer rushed to place an order. He learned to look at "other people's experiences" and "his own records" separately, and he learned to ask himself that question before making an impulse purchase: What am I actually looking for? There's no standard answer to that question, but at least it kept him from pinning all his hopes on a bottle of capsules.