For months I kept explaining away little things. My nails were splitting. My skin looked tired even when I wasn’t. I wasn’t sleeping deep. I chalked it up to stress, age, whatever. Then I watched a Dr. Berg video that connected all of it back to one thing I’d never really thought about: glycine, the amino acid that makes up a third of your body’s collagen. Once I started paying attention, I realized my body had been dropping hints for a while. Here are the four signs I completely missed.
1. My Nails Kept Splitting and Peeling
I used to think this was just “weak nails,” genetics, whatever. Turns out collagen is literally structural — it’s your connective tissue, and glycine is a third of that structure. If your body doesn’t have enough raw material, it shows up in the places that regenerate fastest: nails, hair, skin. Mine were splitting at the tips no matter how much biotin or nail hardener I used, because I was treating the surface instead of the supply.
2. My Skin Looked Dull and Inflamed, Not Just “Tired”
I kept blaming late nights, but here’s what I learned: glycine is required to make glutathione, your body’s main antioxidant, and without it your body can’t detox properly. That backup shows up as inflammation — puffiness, breakouts, that dull, stressed-out look no serum can fully fix.and that really stressed me out I was doing all the topical stuff and ignoring what was actually happening underneath. I used collagen rich serums but they didn’t gave me that result I wanted.
3. I Wasn’t Getting Deep Sleep, Even When I Was in Bed for 8 Hours
This one surprised me the most. I’d sleep a full night and still wake up groggy. Adequate glycine is tied to reaching deep, restorative delta-wave sleep — the kind where you actually feel repaired in the morning. I wasn’t short on hours, I was short on quality, and I never connected that to something as simple as an amino acid deficiency.
4. I Was “Eating Enough Protein” but Still Felt Off
This was the one that clicked everything into place. I eat chicken breast, eggs, salmon — I genuinely thought I had protein covered. But regular muscle meat is actually low in glycine. The parts that are rich in it — skin, cartilage, bones, tendons — are exactly the parts most of us throw away or never order and that’s where we go wrong. So I was hitting my protein goals on paper while quietly running low on one of the most important amino acids in that protein family.
Putting It Together
None of these signs screamed “collagen deficiency” on their own. But once I saw them lined up together, it was obvious my body had been asking for this for a while. So I started being intentional about it, and within a few weeks I noticed calmer skin, nails that stopped splitting, and mornings where I actually felt rested.
What I Started Eating
I didn’t overhaul my diet — I just started adding these in:
- Bone broth, regularly, not just when I was sick
- Whole roasted or slow-cooked chicken, skin and all, then turning the leftover carcass into soup
- Oxtail and short ribs, which are naturally loaded with connective tissue
- Fish with the skin on, or small whole fish like sardines
- Gelatin, warmed into drinks or made into simple gel snacks with a little stevia with some pomegranate juice and grape fruit juice.
The Products That Made It Easier
On the days I didn’t have homemade broth on hand, these are the ones I reached for:
- Great Lakes Wellness — the classic, comes in both gelatin and a cold-dissolving collagen hydrolysate
- Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides — flavorless, dissolves in coffee or water without a trace
- Bulletproof Collagen Protein — grass-fed, a favorite in keto and low-carb circles
- Ancient Nutrition Multi Collagen Protein — a blend of bovine, chicken, fish, and eggshell membrane collagen
- Sports Research Collagen Peptides — affordable, grass-fed, easy to find
If you’d rather skip the powder altogether, a straight glycine supplement is also an option — most people do somewhere around 4–10 grams a day, taken with food.
My Honest Take
I wasn’t expecting much when I started this. But four small, unrelated annoyances turned out to be connected, and fixing the root cause instead of patching each symptom individually made a real difference. Give it a few weeks before you judge it — this isn’t an overnight fix, it’s a slow rebuild it not only improved my hair and skin health but also my joints are feeling much more relaxed.
This post reflects my personal experience and information shared by Dr. Eric Berg, DC. It’s not medical advice — check with your doctor before adding new supplements, especially if you’re on medication or managing a health condition.
