Health Revolution

‘It’s great, you don’t even feel how hungry you are,’ she said.

But Jane had also suffered from food issues, which she had solved with exercise. She wrote:

‘Go for the burn! Sweat! . . . No distractions. Centre yourself. This is your time! . . . Your goal should be to take your body and make it as healthy, strong, flexible and well-proportioned as you can!’

These felt like powerful mantras for a woman who had just been dumped, a chance to find my way back through hard work.

I lay on the rug on the floor of my studio apartment and tried to imitate the pictures in the book. I had to move the little coffee table in front of my love seat in order to have enough room to do all these new exercises. I had the gas turned on in the oven as usual and the oven door wide open to warm up the apartment. It was noisy in the apartment upstairs as people came and went and the German shepherd barked.

It was hard to lift my butt 250 times, as Jane recommended, but the harder it was, the stronger was my feeling of rebirth. I would move through this pain, to something new and better. I wanted to be like Jane Fonda on the book’s cover.

At around the same time, a good friend of mine was also dumped by her boyfriend. The two of us formed a self-help group for dumped women and spent several weeks dissecting our breakups and who had actually said what to whom. But our conversations always came to the same conclusion, a unanimous condemnation of two completely oblivious young men in Stockholm. Our judgment was broad, covering personality, morals and looks.

After a while, my wise friend thought we should get off the couch, widen our repertoire and maybe get a little exercise. And as I mentioned, by that time Jane Fonda had arrived in Sweden. It was a big event in what was then a calmer and more peaceful Sweden than the Sweden of today. The newspapers Expressen and Aftonbladet reported on the worldwide fad that had landed in Stockholm, via a woman named Yvonne Lin.

Yvonne Lin was then world master in the martial art of Wushu, which I had never heard of. She had gone to Hollywood to learn from Jane Fonda and to absorb her training methods. In an underground training centre on Markvardsgatan, a little side street off Sveavägen, Yvonne Lin started Sweden’s first workout centre.

Now we were going to try Jane Fonda for real.

We stepped into the studio as if into a temple, reverent and quiet – and immediately felt bewildered. A group of grown men were running around in the space, directed by someone who looked a lot like Bruce Lee, the martial arts master from Hong Kong. Instead of legwarmers, they had wooden pistols and were pretending to shoot at each other. One of them was yelling ‘bang!’ as he hit a brick with a series of karate chops. I recognised two very well-known men who were often featured in gossip magazines. But where was Jane?

It turned out that the space was also used by Yvonne Lin’s husband, who was a martial arts master, and that this was some kind of self-defence training.

We cautiously entered the training studio. When Yvonne Lin stepped in, wearing a tight outfit with perfectly rolled legwarmers, and put on Human League singing ‘Don’t You Want Me’ with the bass pumped up, I was swept away.

This was completely new.

The workouts had the rhythms and choreographic awareness of dance routines. They focused on exactly those body parts that I wanted to reshape; they had glamour, elegance and humour and alternated between precision and free expression. There was an upbeat feeling to the workouts, and they boosted our self-confidence, since we all worked in front of a large mirror, looking at ourselves for forty-five minutes. It was like being on Broadway, or participating in a lineup of dancers in Fame, where we would collectively dance our way to success and the perfect body.

Now, more than thirty years later, I can see the narcissism in this. The fixation on the body, disguised as neo-feminism, partnered with a business mindset masquerading as health movement. I also remember Jane Fonda’s almost desperately clenched jaw when I got to interview her on TV a few years later. She was a slim woman who seemed slightly fearful to me then – a far cry from the liberated workout rebel we had all believed in.

But she was a child of her time. The United States and Europe had left the hippies, unisex styles and political demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s behind, in favour of white wine and prawns, Wall Street, padded shoulders, yuppies and a new interpretation of what it meant to be a man or a woman. And yes, it was largely about the body and material things. Or as Melanie Griffith famously told Harrison Ford in the movie Working Girl: ‘I have a head for business and a body for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?’

The ideal probably lay somewhere in between. But we should look at our past with compassion and realise that maybe we needed a daily dose of Jane Fonda in order to grow up and become ‘whole’ human beings. In any case, our little self-help group, ‘The Exes’, needed a daily fix. And little by little, the feeling of being dumped faded away.

Gradually, the swinging food pendulum calmed down as well. I had a breakthrough one morning. I was sitting at the dining table at home in my apartment. The table faced out over a courtyard where two little children were playing. The night before, I had eaten sandwiches, ice cream and sweets. I felt anxious and guilty and was now considering whether I had the right to eat breakfast.

I drew a diagram, looked at it, and tried to think about what my relationship to food looked like and what feelings it triggered. Out of these thoughts an image emerged, a circle or spiral where crash dieting was followed by hunger, which was followed by overeating, which in turn was followed by feeling bad, which in turn made me feel that I had to start dieting again. It kept turning, around and around and around. Dieting – hunger – overeating – bad feelings – dieting – hunger . . .

I couldn’t control the hunger that appeared when I had been eating only little broccoli florets and some cottage cheese for several days in a row. It was also impossible for me to control the overeating once it started. Nor could I control the anguish that overeating brought with it. But between the anguish and the decision to start dieting there was actually a little window – a window of willpower.

There and then, at the dining table, the thought struck me. I could feel anguish – but still decide that I was allowed to have breakfast.

A new spiral was born. It was a better spiral, where I always allowed myself to eat, even if I had overeaten the night before. Since I didn’t diet as strictly anymore, I was less hungry and my indulgences became more modest, eventually tapering off. Jane Fonda gave me this victory. But it was a brittle harmony. I had to exercise in order for the balance to work.

Yvonne Lin decided to train workout instructors. We were a large group of hopeful young women who came to the audition that preceded the training itself. I was now a completely different person than I had been just a few months before. My relationship with food was more balanced; I was stronger and had higher and more consistent energy levels. And I was dependent on exercising, which had saved me.

When the audition came, it felt like a matter of life and death. I stood in a row with the other women and did aerobics like crazy. Even though I had never been much of an athlete, I hoped to be able to become an instructor, to be able to get into the training.

And I was chosen. When we gathered for the first time and introduced ourselves, all of Sweden was there. We were a cross-section of the country, cutting across educational levels and family backgrounds. We waited tables, we fixed teeth and we worked in shops. We were students. We danced or taught. We were ordinary girls but also girls with mysterious occupations who seemed to glide around in Stockholm’s underground/fashion/artistic/glamour world. We formed a true sisterhood in our way-too-cramped dressing rooms.

When one of the sisterhood had just had a baby, her boyfriend cheated on her with a TV celebrity. After our training buddy found someone else’s black lace undies in bed when she came home with her newborn – and when the TV celebrity also gave an interview in a tabloid where she talked about how she seduced men in carpenter trousers – there was no end to the sisterhood and the primal power that came roaring out of our group. Wasn’t the TV celebrity a snake and the boyfriend a swine? We watched over the abandoned mother like lionesses. No one would be able to hurt her.

We exercised for hours at a time, day after day.

And now I began to see the structure behind the training. How you started with a warmup, and then worked the shoulders, back, abs and waist, legs, butt and finally abs again. There was a system. I also understood which types of exercises were good for each body part. And how to find your place in the music and count the eights correctly, with the beginning impetus of an exercise on beats one, three, five and so on.

We learned how to stand, move and speak in front of a large group of people and get everyone to move in the same direction – literally. How to get the energy and joy going and build up the participants’ motivation. It was extremely useful.

We also learned to do things many times. Since we didn’t use any weights, we added extra resistance to the movements and did endless repetitions – for example, lifting your leg 155 times at a certain angle. It required toughness, but we learned to be tough. That too was extremely useful.

I had studied physics and maths in Stockholm, then biology. Biology was exciting and I wanted to continue, so when there weren’t any courses in human biology in Stockholm that spring, I went to Lund. It was March when I came down from Stockholm by train, and the Lund night was damp, raw and cold. There were no rolling suitcases back then, so I was carrying two heavy suitcases from the Central Station to the apartment that a friend had let me borrow. The apartment was supposed to be furnished. That was debatable, as it turned out.

There was a kitchen table, a built-in bed, a stuffed eagle and a saltwater aquarium with fish from a Norwegian fjord that the owner had caught during a course in marine biology.

At first I felt lonely in a city full of young people who all seemed to know each other. My genetics course had few students and didn’t really provide a context where I could meet other people. And there wasn’t anything like Jane Fonda’s workouts or Yvonne Lin.

A thought struck me, and I called my self-help friend.

‘We should open up something here,’ I said.

‘Do you really think people are ready for it?’ she asked.

I went looking for exercise spaces at a time when working out and gyms barely existed in Skåne, and I had to try to explain the concept when I met with landlords. We finally found a ballet studio near the All Saints Church. We would open our place there, a simple business with a big idea: to become the first Jane Fonda studio in Skåne.

I had another hidden motive as well. If only I could work out, I would be able to keep my eating in check.

A few years later, I had finished my education as a science journalist and had a child. Lund had not only offered opportunities to study and work out – I also met an incredibly wonderful man, and we fell in love and got married.

Soon I was expecting my second child. I was now working on the editorial team of an independent TV channel in Stockholm, a workplace with a fast tempo and lots of creative tension around a brilliant but tough boss.

Some women just develop an adorable little baby bump when they are pregnant. I’ve never looked like that. My belly was big, my legs were heavy, and there were still four months left until the birth.

Then I woke up one morning unable to walk. My lower back was incredibly painful and my legs wouldn’t carry me. My husband drove us to the maternity centre and had to support me as I walked in.

‘You have a loosening of the pelvic ligaments,’ the midwife told me.

She gave me a pair of crutches. They helped a bit, and I shuffled out of there.

I felt like I was seventy-five years old as I limped into work with my crutches, next to my young and childless co-workers. I had to swing one leg in front of the other in order to get over the threshold and down the stairs. Our tough but brilliant boss had a reputation for bullying people, and one of his former colleagues had advised me to always stand when I talked to him so as not to give him the upper hand. So when I spoke with him I would stand up and lean on my crutches, but I didn’t feel particularly tough in all the struggles we had over how to do things.

My midwife associated the pelvic loosening with the physical and psychological struggle of communicating with my boss. It was caused by stress as much as by my body.

Things got complicated in the supermarket, as I juggled shopping bags and crutches, and was barely able to lift my hungry two-year-old.

One of my workout friends, who also was a naprapath, came to my home and looked at my back. She gave me some exercises that helped.

‘Your ligaments are worn out,’ she said.

‘What can I do about it?’ I asked.

‘You have to make sure you keep your muscles strong, to compensate. Never stop working out.’

My eating habits were more balanced by this time. It was the early 1990s, and we ate a lot of pasta and bread, as people did in those days.

I gave birth to four children within five years and also had a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy that led to major surgery. After that, my lower back was worn out. The large central abdominal muscle, or rectus abdominus, had been torn in the middle, and I had scars from various complications. My female body had been subjected to the rigours of birthing and ground down by everyday life, but it had also been loved and nursed babies and was beginning to understand how wonderful life was. I was no longer a carefree young woman whose thoughts centred on men and studies. I was a mother with great challenges on the job and in the family.

It wore on my body. But I still felt strong.

Along with the children came an interest in food. In the past, I had struggled to normalise and find some kind of balance, but having to take care of the children transformed me.

In the early 2000s, my husband’s workplace moved to Great Britain and our whole family followed. I began working from there, also in a new role, and became aware of organic food. It was a different country, where eating habits were completely different from the meatballs, quick-cooking macaroni and fish sticks that had been our everyday fare in Sweden.

The supermarkets were bulging with processed junk food, and the results were visible everywhere. In the children’s new schools, we saw a lot of overweight students, who stood around eating sweets after school or sat in the schoolyard with a bag of crisps. At the same time, there was a selection of organic fruits and vegetables that I had never seen in Sweden, where organic products in the early 2000s consisted mainly of small, wilted carrots.

Here the organic produce was greener and fresher. It was exciting. A new friend inspired me to begin making more food from scratch. She taught me how to make casseroles and showed me the Jewish chicken soup that she had learned from her mother-in-law that was better than penicillin. It clicked. Something in all of this reminded me of my mother’s food. It was real food, the kind I had grown up with, the kind of homemade food that I used to eat, before single life, fast food and stress messed everything up.

I found an article about the powerful effects of omega-3 oil and experimented with myself and my family. The oil seemed to make everything better: PMS, stress, anxiety, concentration problems . . . What kind of miracle oil was this? How did it work?

In an American magazine article, I found an interview with an American dermatologist with perfectly smooth skin, Dr Nicholas Perricone. He talked about salmon as a miracle food that helped counteract wrinkles, stress and anxiety. He also talked about something that he called ‘low-grade inflammation’, as well as about food and disease prevention. I put the information into my fleeting internal memory.

Gradually, our family’s eating habits began to change. We ate more homemade and organic food. We ate lots of vegetables, good fish and poultry. Our butcher was situated in the English countryside, in an old shop from the nineteenth century on a winding country road, and also sold homemade applesauce and little jars of pickles that were lined up above the chicken breasts and roasts.

They also proudly displayed sausages that had won both gold and silver in the British sausage contests, hitherto completely unknown to me. These gold and silver sausages were made of real meat, from locally raised animals, and contained mixtures of lamb and mint or pork and leek. They were a taste sensation and became a staple food in our home.

I enjoyed baking, using good ingredients. Chocolate cake on Sunday with extra butter, berries and cream. I no longer dieted. We got a dog, and walking the dog became my new workout, aside from some sporadic visits to a nearby gym. These were sunny years. Good years, shimmering years with a wonderful flock of growing children. Nothing could hurt us.

At least that’s how it felt then.

Life’s blows come in different shapes.

Some people go through devastating divorces. Others have children with serious illnesses. People are injured in car accidents or become ill with incurable cancer. You lose your job, go bankrupt or experience other tragedies. You can feel as if your life has ended. For my part, the tsunami washed over me in October 2006 – at least it felt like a tsunami at the time.

I was asked to go into politics. Not that I was a typical ‘partisan’; I had never really understood how you could see people as enemies just because their opinions were different from yours. It felt more like a kind of visionary military duty, to work on a number of issues that I felt were important, like research and entrepreneurship.

I was an outsider who made my way into a system that was hard to understand, and both the preliminary party election and the parliamentary election went unexpectedly well. Just in time for the 2006 election, I moved home from Great Britain with three of the children, while my husband remained with one son for a transitional period. I was elected to parliament and also quite unexpectedly became trade minister. The whole thing was unthinkably strange. But I had a dull feeling in my stomach.

After only a few days, a storm arose when I said that my family had paid a nanny under the table in the 1990s, long before my political involvement and before Sweden implemented the ‘RUT’ tax deductions for household help. With four small children and my own business, as well as two ailing parents, I couldn’t have made my life work any other way. Of course it was completely wrong – I realised that. But it was hard to explain myself once the machinery was set in motion. What I said in explanation sounded crazy or confused when it was printed. As an outsider in the political system, I felt completely helpless. I didn’t have good political networks; I had no one to talk to and little support.

At home, the Swedish Security Service, or Säpo, explained that my family had received death threats and that they couldn’t protect us since we didn’t have a fence around our house. My children cried. We couldn’t go out and walk the dog because there were so many journalists standing in the garden. We were on the front page of every newspaper.

Finally, I couldn’t handle it any longer. I asked the prime minister to be excused from my post because I felt that I would never be able to perform any meaningful work at all. We were in total crisis, near a breakdown.

This is not the book in which I’m going to describe this in detail – the enormous lessons that I learned from being a non-politician in the political power centre, about the powers and counterforces that arise, about the tough political game. And about myself and my weaknesses, but also my unexpected fighting spirit and my great toughness. Perhaps I’ll write about this some day.

In any case, the dramatic journey came to affect my inner life and my body – big time, as the Americans say.

We moved back to Great Britain, to my husband and the son who had stayed. I couldn’t sleep for weeks, in spite of strong sleeping pills; I woke up every night in a sea of sweat and pinched myself in the arm.

Is it true that all this happened to me?

I was confused and shocked. Family members went into depression. I felt a deep sense of guilt for everything I had exposed them to but had a hard time providing the support that I wanted to since I barely had enough energy for myself.

Then I found Emelie. This ethereal woman was a personal trainer at a gym in the area, and she carefully trained me twice a week. When she massaged my back at the end of one session, my tears began to flow.

‘Why are you crying?’ she asked.

‘Something terrible happened,’ I explained. ‘In another country.’

She looked at me with her kind eyes.

‘That doesn’t mean anything right now.’

But of course it did. The questions gnawed at me. Would anyone ever want to have anything to do with me again? My husband, who had never even felt I should become a politician, was fantastic in supporting all of us and bringing us back together. But I needed to find my inner strength again.

With her exercise sessions, Emelie helped me do it. My self-confidence began in my body, like a steady flow from her wonderful sessions. I strained and worked with my body and began to realise that I had been barely breathing for the last two months, just panting like a panic-stricken dog.

I also began having new thoughts that I had never had in my life. I had experienced difficult times before, but they had always been about someone other than me. Now I saw things with new eyes. I thought about women’s vulnerability, life’s fragility. How could I use what I had learned in order to help others?

I looked up a well-known business leader in London who was on the board of a growing microfinance organisation with extensive activity in India. At the end of the meeting he asked me if I would like to go there and see how I could contribute, and within two weeks I was on a plane to Chennai.

I ended up among some of the world’s poorest women and children. The children crept up in my lap and gave me eager hugs. The women lent me their children across borders of skin colour, language, religion, culture – and I was incredibly thankful for that. My heart couldn’t defend itself. They just crept right in, and I decided that I would process what I had experienced and turn it into light, for other people. It could begin here, with these people.