Health Revolution

After a while I became CEO of the organisation in London. The world was my field of work, and I gained many insights into life and fates far beyond what I could have imagined. It gave me completely new perspectives, a completely new sense of humility.

During this time, I learned a vast amount about our complex world. I was able to do hard things, big things, and work with exceptional people from all backgrounds.

I met poor and vulnerable women in India, South Africa and Kenya and got to see the female power that helped give them the energy to start businesses to earn money for food and clothing . . . similar women, although with different skin colours, all over the world.

One day in Swaziland, the little mountain kingdom that lies in the blue haze of the southeastern corner of South Africa, I stood in front of a self-help women’s group where all – yes, all – of the women showed traces of abuse. It was so common in the village that no one reacted to a black eye, or even a broken arm. The women came with bowed heads to the self-help group that we supported, and they left with backs that were a little straighter than before. I didn’t even have words in my vocabulary to describe the struggle in their lives, the sorrow for those who became infected with HIV when their men had returned from working in the mines of South Africa.

It was huge and mind-opening to see all this. One day I was talking to donors at the world’s largest banks, and the next day I would meet with the world’s most vulnerable people. I got to see everything – all the great and wonderful things, all the fighting spirit but also the vulnerability and awfulness. All in the same week. I learned an incredible amount and gained perspective, and things fell into place.

But it took a hard toll on my body – all these constant long trips that were often taken in the middle of the night, on a plane to or from Asia or Africa, as the only woman and sometimes the only European. I visited airports in cities that I barely knew existed just a few years before.

On a midnight flight between Chennai and Doha, I met Indian guest workers who were on their way to Qatar to build roads and football stadiums. One man told me that they were treated almost like cattle and worked under extremely hard conditions. Several of his comrades had died in workplace accidents. Their eyes were desperate, their bodies sunken. I will never forget that night.

In this context it felt a little shameful to think about my own body, so I stopped thinking about it. I didn’t have time to think about it either, and with irregular meals and sporadic exercise, life began to wear me down. But just like with those oxygen masks – if you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t help anyone else either.

My first back strain came just like that, after three weeks of travel. I couldn’t get out of bed for three days. A few years later, I had constant back pain. I walked around with little pillows to tuck behind my back when I sat and wrote. There were little wedge-shaped pillows in my bag, a manifestation of my new old-lady life. Not that I had anything against old ladies – just the opposite. But I was only fifty-two, after all. What would the rest of my life be like?

And exercise? It had dissipated, turned into an unengaged, unconstructed kind of activity.

‘What was I going to do here?’ I might ask myself when I arrived at the gym and drifted around randomly among the machines. A little cycling here, some weights there. It wasn’t a catastrophe by any means. It just wasn’t me anymore.

It was simply as if a grey fog had draped itself over my life. The children were getting older, and a couple of them had already moved away from home. It was empty. Who was I now, without children at home?

Sometimes the thought came to me that life would never be really sunny again. Was it menopause? Or was it that I couldn’t move the way I used to anymore, now that my back had begun giving me trouble? The kids? I looked for explanations and had a hard time expressing what was missing. I just had a general feeling of malaise and depression.

That’s how my life was starting to go.

And now we’ve arrived at New Year’s, 2013. The moment of truth.

After the long trip home from Kenya, I can barely walk up the steep stairs in our house in London. I hoist the suitcase upstairs by swinging it, and my legs, in front of me step by step. This is the last straw. I lie down on the floor and put my legs up against the wall. Something has to be done. I send an emergency signal up to the higher powers and ask them to show me the way. It doesn’t take long for the answer to come, in my own head.

‘Why don’t you get in touch with that woman named Rita, who trained the blogger Tosca Reno?’

I Google Rita Catolino and find a number of pictures. Rita is, let me just say it, a blonde beauty with wonderful blue eyes, an open smile and an incredibly well-trained body. What strikes me most of all is that she’s glowing with health and strength. She has thousands of followers on social media. I myself have neither Facebook nor Instagram. It feels like a stretch for me to contact her.

A few years earlier, I had heard a good metaphor for inner dialogues – that inside every person is a struggle between two completely different beings. Or more specifically, it is the same being but different parts of the brain that are activated. One is the ape inside us, or the old parts, from an evolutionary standpoint, that lie in the centre of the brain. The ape is governed by basic reflexes. We react to threats, stay with the flock and take care of our offspring. We act on instinct, and catastrophe is always nearby. The other being, who acts inside us at the same time, is the human being, our higher self, which is guided by the frontal lobes, or outer parts of the brain. That’s where those skills are located that human beings acquired later in their evolution. That’s where we can use our good sense and plan ahead, but also interpret feelings in an empathetic way and withstand impulses that we know are confused or even dangerous for us.

My ape and my human being are now having a pretty heated inner dialogue.

‘She’s not going to want to take you on,’ says the ape.

‘Why not?’ says the human being.

‘Because you aren’t sharp enough. A hardworking career woman and mother with cellulite, fifty-two years old, doesn’t belong in her fitness world.’

‘That’s exactly why you need her,’ the human answers inside me. ‘She knows new things that you don’t know yet.’

‘But it’s expensive.’

‘What’s the cost of having a ruined back?’

‘What if she says no?’

‘What if she says yes?’

Finally, I send my email. And I get an incredibly friendly answer. I have to complete a long questionnaire, and Rita also tells me to keep a journal of everything I eat for three days.

It’s interesting to see what slips into my mouth during these days, especially one day when I have an early flight followed by a hard workday, and finish with a plane trip back in the evening. Hmm, let’s see . . . olives, nuts, rye crackers, a piece of chocolate, a little bottle of wine . . . When I read through the food diary later I wonder if the airline had a single piece of food left on the plane when I got off.

But that’s my life. I dutifully account for the three days, just as they were, and send off the answers to a number of other questions about old aches, exercise habits, energy and sleep. I also have to indicate if I’m pregnant.

Um, I don’t think so . . .

Then Rita’s training packet arrives by email.

A new programme for a new me.

It sounds promising and contains almost twenty different files that I open one by one, along with a message in which Rita promises to answer all my questions and asks me to communicate if I don’t understand anything.

Let’s see . . . Training . . . Hmm . . . It seems to be mostly about food. Is this a mistake?

I know about food already, and I eat well – I think. Except for certain exceptions, like that late night on the plane, but I had been working incredibly hard then, after all. I glance through the packet.

Eat homemade food. Less junk. More vegetables. Fewer trans fats. I know all this. Old news. Then we get to the order of the meals. Now there’s some biochemistry. Certain meals should consist of protein, fruit and fat. Other meals should only have protein and fat. A third type of meal should have proteins and complex carbohydrates. There are five to six meals every day with pure nutritional science. I understand the content, but what’s the logic behind it?

Then it seems like there are certain foods you should eat. There are long lists of vegetables and allowable fruits. I see that bananas aren’t included, a food I eat every day. The only complex carbohydrates on the list are quinoa, sweet potatoes and brown rice. And oats, ‘if you don’t swell up.’

I observe that there are foods that I already eat, more or less, but also foods that are new to me, like quinoa and chia seeds. And protein powder, which I don’t know anything about. Most importantly, things that I really like are missing: crusty bread with butter and cheese; pasta; the occasional piece of cinnamon-topped apple pie, with creamy vanilla sauce; pickled herring . . . just to give a few examples.

So, I compose an email.

Dear Rita,

Thank you for your tips. The exercise programme sounds amazing. I’ll do it. But the rest of it feels a little odd to me. I already have good eating habits and I like both bread and desserts. Why should I eat quinoa, but not pasta, for example? So, I’m following some of your advice but plan to do exactly as I like for the rest of it.

Best regards,

Maria

No, that message doesn’t get sent. And not the next one either, where I ask the questions I have about how everything fits together.

I can’t quite explain why, except that I’ve simply decided to take care of myself. Partly I don’t want to bother Rita, for some reason; partly I want to have space to do things my own way, which has been a small speciality of mine ever since my childhood.

I’ll confess that at the beginning, I’m not completely on board. I decide to try a few little things now and then.

My first challenge is breakfast. How are you supposed to eat? For the past thirty years, ever since I cured my disastrous binge-eating lifestyle, I’ve eaten whole-grain bread, cheese and eggs in the morning. Now I’m supposed to have warm water with lemon juice, pills and a powder with a name that starts with ‘I’. After that I have a few different breakfasts to choose from: protein powder with fruit, something called a ‘seed bowl’, and pancakes made with coconut flour.

People are probably at their most habit-bound when it comes to breakfast, in particular, and these breakfast suggestions feel very foreign to me. On the other hand, I dive in to the vegetables, fish, garlic and olive oil with a feeling of both familiarity and happy expectation.

Then there’s the exercise programme. I realise now that this programme is mainly about weight training, starting carefully and gradually increasing intensity. There are detailed instructions and references. For the first few days, I feel both uplifted and lost. I print out the programme and make a little folder, then I sit down and Google the exercises to get the right balance and technique. YouTube turns out to be full of American muscle men who demonstrate in less than four minutes how to lift weights, while talking enough to give the expression ‘detailed description’ a new meaning. I watch these videos when I don’t understand something, then try it for myself. Above all, I’m buoyed by the feeling of having a plan at the gym. Most of it goes well, but some of the new exercises fill me with anxiety.

On one list is ‘dead lift’. I Google my American muscle-building guides and see a man with a barbell on the ground in front of him. On the barbell are large round weights. He bends over and grips the bar with both hands then lifts it up with straight legs and straight hips, with the bar hanging in his arms. He says that this is the Rolls-Royce of exercises, with a gigantic effect on strength and back health, and that every fibre in the body becomes activated. I see how his whole back tautens and feel sheer terror.

How will I manage this?

I go to the gym to try it out, and I’m able to lift 2 kilograms in each hand, with bent knees. Then I feel a pulling in my back. When I look around, people are lifting 30, 35 or 40 kilograms in the same exercise. Dead lifts are not my thing. Not at all my thing.

My first real setback comes a few days later.

I still don’t understand why, but I develop an abscess in one armpit. It starts out as a small inflamed knot in a hair follicle, which grows into a golf ball at a dramatic pace. The thing looks grotesque, like a kind of baboon nose in the middle of my armpit, and is incredibly painful. I can’t work out for a week. During this week, a car needs to be driven from Great Britain to Sweden, with a dog, and I sit in the car for twenty-four hours with my husband and the carsick dog in the backseat, elevating my arm by holding on to the handle above the door, while poor Luna throws up.

An anti-inflammatory snack.

And so the first communication Rita has from me is not a well-written email with questions about why and how, but instead this:

Hi Rita,

I’ve come down with an abscess in my armpit the size of a golf ball, and have to sit with my arm elevated and can’t work out. I’ll be in touch when I feel better.

Maria

It sounds like the all-time worst excuse, kind of like ‘the dog ate my homework’. But it’s the truth.

The golf ball finally disappears, and I resume my new lifestyle. I move forward with baby steps but I fall down all the time.

It’s hard to follow the lifestyle at work. I’m out having lunch with a client, and I already know that she struggles with her weight. When she sees me order salad with smoked salmon and pass on the bread, she looks irritated.

‘But you don’t have to diet – look at me,’ she says.

‘This isn’t dieting,’ I say, defensively.

The intimacy that we used to have on a private level is marred by this conversation. I feel that she thinks I’m indirectly criticising her, which just isn’t true. I have friends who ask if I’ve become anorexic or developed a fear of fat when I turn down a piece of chocolate cake.

‘Don’t you eat anything anymore?’ they ask.

‘Yes, I eat lots, five times a day – I’m just eating different things.’

A TYPICAL ANTI-INFLAMMATORY DAY

A typical day in my life might look like this:

• 6:30 Meditation and gratitude. Make my bliss plan for the day: food, exercise, de-stressing, awe.

• 7:00 Smoothie with protein powder, almond milk, green powder, spinach, berries and nuts. Two cups of super strong tea with honey.

• 8:30 On my way to work, listen to my own bliss music.

• 10:00 At work I have two eggs, two rice cakes and some tomatoes that I’ve brought from home, plus a cup of coffee with real milk.

• 12:00 Leg day at the gym – squats, dead lifts, hip lifts, etc. My bliss music in the headphones.

• 13:00 A protein shake and an apple. After showering, I eat a bag lunch with leftovers from yesterday (chicken/fish, potatoes, etc.) that I’ve added to a big salad with colourful vegetables.

• 17:00 A bowl of kefir with chia seeds.

• 18:00 Twenty minutes of meditation with my spirituality app or deep breathing.

• 19:30 Dinner – salmon fried in coconut oil and turmeric, oven-baked sweet potatoes, cooked green beans, homemade pesto and a spinach salad, then a few pieces of dark chocolate and a cup of ginger tea.

• 22:00 Digital detox – time to calm down my system for the night. Reading and gratitude list.

Another friend accuses me of betraying the collective global feminism by focusing on my body and my food. I ask her if women will get higher pay just because I have back pain.

‘But those are patriarchal ideals for women,’ she says, clearly hurt.

‘Is it feminism when women don’t feel well?’ I continue.

I begin to realise that anyone who starts a big lifestyle change will always have to deal with other people’s reactions. Some of it is concern. Some of it is based on feelings. Suspicion? Anxiety about changes, because we want people around us to always be the same? Or does it come out of religion – a kind of asceticism, the idea that anyone who turns their focus on the body and their own lifestyle becomes self-absorbed?

I’m blown away by the resistance.

Rita and I begin communicating about all this.

I now understand that many people who change their dietary habits encounter exactly the same resistance from those around them – even at home. But Rita is not only smart and empathetic but also fun and ingenious, and she offers suggestions as to how I can meet these challenges.

She says I need to stand up for myself and my lifestyle more clearly, without placing blame on anyone else. If others then choose to feel bad about my choices, it’s their own problem. I need to learn this, again and again, and oh, how hard it is. I take it personally, and have always done so, if anyone in my circle feels bad because of something connected to me. I carry this like a heavy backpack, and I see the same phenomenon in many women around me. The trick is to lighten that backpack, since it’s no use to anyone. Then there are the practical issues.

My family protests because the cupboards and fridge are suddenly too full when I put in new, space-hogging things like bags of flaxseeds, hazelnuts and goji berries. The freezer is packed with different kinds of frozen berries and big bags of frozen vegetables. My husband, who has many wonderful traits, has a strict inner home economics teacher – we’re talking sturdy cooking lady from the 1950s here. He loves a semi-fanatical order in the cupboards and the doors closed, which becomes hard to achieve when my new foods have to jostle for space with the foods we’ve always eaten.

And all these new powders, where can I store them? Like L-glutamine, as it turns out it’s called, and green powders – a new phenomenon – and protein powder. That’s also new, this thing with protein powder. I use it either as an ingredient in my breakfast, with nuts and fruit (protein, fruit, fat as it’s called in Rita’s language), or after working out. I find a kind of protein powder at my local health food shop that tastes like banana muffins. The only problem is my stomach, which also turns into a banana muffin and starts to produce gas on a scale that could drive the heating system of a medium-sized town.

Another kind of powder turns my stomach into an even bigger balloon. Rita urges me to look for a protein powder that doesn’t make me gassy, and she recommends a vegan powder that’s easy on the stomach. But it turns out that one is impossible to dissolve in water without a blender.

So that’s how I end up on a trip with a client to Geneva with my immersion blender packed in my bag. I arrive early at the hotel, and the first thing I do is go down to the gym and do the day’s workout. Then I get out the wand from my luggage, and the powder I brought with me in a bag, and make a hotel room smoothie in the toothbrush glass, with the Swiss sparkling mineral water Gerolsteiner Sprudel.

In short, a sprudel schmoothie.

I’ve had better tasting drinks. But worse ones too.

Then there’s my mood. Is it the spring light here in Geneva? My fun travelling companions? Or is it . . . me?

Something is starting to happen.

’My family protests because the cupboards and fridge are suddenly too full when I put in new, space-hogging things like bags of flaxseeds, hazelnuts and goji berries.’

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

– Marie Curie, chemist and Nobel Prize winner

3. INSIGHT

It’s a spring night in Lund, Sweden, 2013.

It’s just the kind of fresh spring evening that creates such expectations of life, love and all the other wonderful things that belong to the light time of year. Students are riding their bikes towards the city centre. Trees are budding in the Lundagård park next to the cathedral’s sandstone walls. The magnolia by the cream-coloured university building will soon begin to bloom, just in time for May Day, when student singers will once again sing a welcome to spring and the beautiful month of May.

Together with the other members of the advisory committee that meets regularly in order to support the university’s big 350-year jubilee, I’m sitting in the old Biskopsgården, just below the library. At the last minute, I’ve decided to attend this meeting, even though my calendar is full. It will turn out to be a significant event.

Every time the group gets together, we have the privilege of meeting one of the most innovative researchers at the biggest university in the Nordic region. Today we’re going to meet a specialist in nutrition research. Professor Inger Björck is introduced and steps forward to talk about her brand-new research. Only a few minutes into her presentation, I realise that her findings are very important, even somewhat sensational.

She gives us a brief background.

Professor Björck leads the Center for Preventive Nutrition Research at Lund University. Scientists there are conducting interdisciplinary research about how a variety of diseases can be counteracted with a proper diet, as well as research into what is known as the metabolic syndrome.

The metabolic syndrome, a medical term that has become more and more common, includes three conditions: diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. Each of these conditions carries risks. But together, they form a type of super risk for serious heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. It is also suspected that this metabolic condition is connected to certain forms of cancer and even to an increased risk of dementia.

Researchers haven’t quite been able to explain the metabolic syndrome. One theory is that it has to do with insulin, the hormone released by the pancreatic gland when you eat sugar-containing foods and whose function it is to move the broken-down sugar into the cells. People with diabetes 1, which often begins to manifest in the teenage years or even earlier, lack the ability to produce enough insulin.

But there is also an acquired form that sneaks up on people later in life, diabetes 2. (Today there are researchers looking into whether there may also be a number of intermediate forms between diabetes 1 and 2, but we’ll leave that aside here for the sake of simplicity.)