Health Revolution

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Text Copyright © Maria Borelius 2019

Maria Borelius asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978-0-00-832155-0

eBook ISBN: 978-0-00-832156-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

FOR RITA AND ANNIE, PATHFINDERS. SISTERS.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

– T. S. Eliot

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT MY JOURNEY

1. A NEW YEAR

2. MY BODY JOURNEY

3. INSIGHT

4. HEAL

5. SALMON AND LINGONBERRIES

6. GUT FEELING

7. BREATHE

8. GLOW

9. BLUE ZONE

10. AWE

11. BLISS

12. PEACE

13. ROOTS

14. ONE VAULT AFTER ANOTHER

15. THE JOURNEY TO AN ANTI-INFLAMMATORY LIFESTYLE

16. SOFT START

BREAKFAST RECIPES FOR AN ANTI-INFLAMMATORY SOFT START

Smart, Good-Looking Smoothies

Classic with a Twist

Rita’s Seed Bowl

17. THE THREE-DAY CURE

Breakfast Smoothie

18. MY NEW LIFE IN THE KITCHEN

BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER AND SNACKS

Jessica’s Pancakes

‘Bread’

African Curry

Veggie Box

ANTI-INFLAMMATORY SAUCES

Creative Pesto (or Gustaf’s Sauce)

Harissa

Sauce Xipister

Caper and Dill Sauce

Emily’s Tahini

DRINKS

Lisa’s Bulletproof Coffee

Healing Water

Greger’s Morning Tea

Blue Zone Tea

Emily’s Great-Skin Tea

Power Matcha

THIS IS WHAT I AVOID

THANK YOU FROM THE AUTHOR

REFERENCES

LIST OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

About the Publisher

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT MY JOURNEY

At the age of fifty-two, I was experiencing menopause symptoms, back pain, fatigue and a general feeling of melancholy about my life. I felt that everything was beginning to go downhill.

But after just a few months with a new lifestyle, my life had changed. I was happier, stronger and pain-free – what had happened?

Through a series of remarkable coincidences, I realised that I had stumbled on something completely new – anti-inflammatory food – that could cure and prevent illness and even mysteriously put the brakes on ageing.

That’s how my journey of knowledge began, a journey during which, filled with wonder, I began to research this new landscape and discovered that it encompassed much more than diet. The contours of a whole new lifestyle emerged, and the clues came to me from many different people, each one amazing in his or her own way.

I encountered, among others, an innovative and inspiring fitness model in Canada; a professor in Lund, Sweden, working at the very forefront of research; an Indian health spa with a punishing enema treatment; a prehistoric hominid in Addis Ababa by the name of Lucy; one of London’s most visionary dermatologists; unusually long-lived members of a religious sect in the outskirts of Los Angeles; a Danish TV celebrity who turned out to be fifteen years older than I thought; a gut group in the English countryside; a top geneticist at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, with a weakness for riddles; a hip-swinging yoga instructor at a New Age meeting in California; and an ethereal detective searching for human wonder.

Each of them has played a role in this drama.

And so has my own experimentation. I have poked around among omega-3 fatty acids, probiotics, gluten, lactose, meditation, bone broth, Ayurvedic nose diagnosis, HIIT training, yoga, sunsets, inflammation markers and spirituality apps. I have set out filled with curiosity but have often encountered failures and had to find a different path.

Step by step, I’ve felt my way forward as I worked to solve the puzzle of how low-degree systemic inflammation causes illness and what we can do to make ourselves stronger, happier and healthier.

All of this has resulted in a five-point programme to bring out the best version of all of us, a programme that combines everything I’ve learned with the conviction that a lifestyle has to work on the practical level, in everyday life, and in our lives together with other people.

There’s a health revolution happening right now, where a whole new way of thinking about food, exercise, rest, awe and health is being constructed – and through this process, we are discovering new tools for living in a lighter and stronger way.

This is my story, and I’m sharing it with you in the hope that you will find inspiration, healing and your path to empowerment.

Maria Borelius

London, November 2017

The unexamined life is not worth living.

– Socrates

1. A NEW YEAR

It’s a new year, 2013.

I’m fifty-two years old, and I’m feeling puffy and washed out. Christmas has brought way too much of everything: pickled herring, gingerbread, cheese sandwiches on raisin-studded Christmas bread, schnapps, toffee and boxes of chocolates devoured at lightning speed. And on the heels of this festive excess came a New Year’s trip to the shores of Kenya, with cocktails at sunset and three-course dinners with wine in the velvety African night.

The trip back takes twenty-four hours. When we get home and I have to carry my bag upstairs, I feel like I’m eighty years old, even though I’ve just spent a week in the sun. There’s a dull ache in my lower back and my joints hurt. I’m in the throes of perimenopause, and my period shows up fitfully, on its own schedule. My feet are sore and swollen.

And then there’s my belly. Or my ‘muffin top’, as the women’s magazines like to call it: a jiggling roll that desperately wants to spill out over the waistband of my jeans. These days, every visit to a clothing shop ends the same way. After admiring all the figure-hugging pieces, I’m drawn like a magnet to long tops that cover and disguise.

I also have constant little infections and keep coming down with colds and sore throats. An ongoing low-grade urinary tract infection has led to repeated courses of antibiotics, which make me feel tired and a little sick.

This is what it’s like to start ageing. Sigh.

I guess there’s only one direction to go now, and that’s downhill.

So thinks a melancholic part of me.

Another part of me snorts. ‘Don’t be so pretentious. Be happy you’re alive! You have healthy children and can work. Get on with life.’

Fair enough.

But a third side of me is looking for something more.

It’s part of human nature to want to improve yourself. You don’t always have to accept the cards that life deals you. We want to shape our own destiny. The questions burn in me – because it’s more than just my back, my belly and my infections.

Whatever happened to that strong and happy younger woman?

She may still be strong and happy, but there are longer stretches between the bright days. More and more often, I wake up feeling melancholy, or ‘blue’, as people say. I feel blue all over . . . or grey.

I regret all the things that I didn’t have time to do with the children when they were younger. I grieve for my dead father and brother and for my mother, who is ill. I become annoyed more easily when I run into problems at work, and I see obstacles as personal defeats, instead of seeing them as challenges that can be solved with creativity and willpower, the way I would have done in the past.

I make a mental checklist.

How is that life balance going?

My eating habits are okay, I think. After the binge-eating lifestyle of my teenage years, my eating habits have gradually become normal. I eat what I feel like eating, which mostly means home cooking with lots of vegetables and olive oil. When I feel like baking a chocolate cake or mixing vanilla ice cream with pralines and caramel sauce, I do it without reflecting too much about it. On a hungry evening, I can easily put away three pieces of toast with plenty of butter, cheese and orange marmalade and then feel vaguely guilty; I don’t know exactly why.

But my everyday food doesn’t feel extreme by any means. I love tea, which I drink in large quantities, just like my mother and my English grandmother, but I’ve cut back on coffee because it gives me headaches and makes me feel edgy and then tired.

I like exercising, but it’s a journey without any compass.

I’ll find a few newspaper articles about a new kind of exercise programme and follow it for a week or two. I do a little jogging when I have time and the weather allows it. Light weight-lifting at the gym a few times a week; a little swimming; a yoga class. Everything’s possible, but nothing has any real shape except for the walks with our beloved dog, Luna. I meditate. And I can still remember my own mantra. All in all, I’m not a wreck.

Still, it’s as if gravity is pulling me downwards. Life is weighing down my whole being.

I have an appointment with my gynaecologist.

‘I think I’m a little depressed,’ I tell him.

‘No, you’re going through menopause,’ he answers.

Is all of this just to be expected? Should I simply resign myself?

That’s not in my nature.

Buddha supposedly said, ‘When the pupil is ready, the master will appear.’ In the Bible, Jesus says the same thing: ‘Seek and ye shall find.’ The idea that you can learn new things by setting out on a journey to find insight and knowledge is part of our spiritual tradition.

So that’s exactly what I do.

On a business trip to the United States, I happen to see a book on display in an airport bookshop. It has a typically American title: Your Best Body Now: Look and Feel Fabulous at Any Age the Eat-Clean Way. The woman who graces the cover is not a twenty-five-year-old model but a woman my age who is glowing with health. She seems to welcome me.

Her name is Tosca Reno, and she writes about her journey towards better health in an intelligent and convincing way. She describes how, in her forties, as an overweight and depressed housewife who would binge on ice cream and peanut butter at night, she managed to escape her depressive lifestyle and embark on a journey of personal health.

I can relate completely to the part about ice cream and peanut butter. I begin following her blog.

Tosca makes smoothies, does weight-training exercises and eats lots of protein. But suddenly one day, the content of the blog changes, from pleasant tips about healthy living to grave tragedy. Tosca’s husband has lung cancer and only a few days left to live. Part of me feels ashamed for following an American health blogger’s story of her husband’s death struggle, complete with pictures from his deathbed. They show the dying man greeting Arnold Schwarzenegger, apparently an old friend of his. Good for both of them – but it’s embarrassing that I’m sitting here reading all this.

In spite of that, I’m hooked.

Tosca Reno writes about her husband’s final hours in an open and sincere way that invites her readers in. After his death and funeral, she finds a personal trainer who is going to help her move past her grief. This trainer is a blonde Canadian by the name of Rita Catolino. The two begin training for some kind of competition in which Tosca is planning to participate in memory of her dead husband.

What is this? I think to myself.

But at the same time – who am I to judge someone who has just lost a loved one?

Tosca and her personal trainer, Rita Catolino, start blogging together about health, work, love and their inner life. When the trainer writes, it sparks something in me. This is about more than just lifting weights or running. This is about inner light.

Around this time, along with two other women, I’ve decided to start an aid organisation that will support vulnerable immigrant women by helping them to start small businesses. We plan to empower them through education, moral support and microloans, so that they can realise their dreams of having work and income of their own. We’re going to call it the Ester Foundation, and we’ve been preparing the launch for two years. Now it’s about to happen. But the work is non-profit, and I have to squeeze it in between my regular work as an entrepreneur and journalist and my family responsibilities.

The paradox I’m facing is this: I will need more energy, but I have less. I think of the airline flight attendants and their oxygen masks. What is it they always say before the plane takes off? Put on your own oxygen mask first, before assisting others. I’m forced to lift myself up, energise myself somehow in order to be able to give to others and to carry out this project that I am passionate about. And the situation is urgent.

I suddenly have an idea. I’ll seek out this Rita Catolino and ask her if she could train me too – online, across the Atlantic.

I soon realise that Rita Catolino is a kind of fitness star in a world that’s foreign to me, where she trains women who participate in American bodybuilding and fitness competitions. Way out of my league, in other words.

So I write her an email.

Dear Rita Catolino,

I’m writing to you from across the Atlantic. I’m far from being an American fitness star; in fact I’m a fifty-two-year-old woman with four children and a heavy workload. In addition to my work, I’m about to start up an aid organisation to support marginalised immigrant women. But if I’m going to have the energy to support others, I need to be strong myself.

That’s why I need your help. I’m flabby, I have backaches and I’m going through perimenopause. But I’m dreaming of something else. I need a plan.

Can you help me?

Best regards,

Maria B

Click.

Very quickly, I get a reply. She asks me to answer a number of questions and send pictures of myself in my underwear, and then we’ll see.

My husband wonders where these pictures are going to end up. I tell him that they really aren’t much to look at, and I send along both photos and questionnaire. And we – Rita and I – agree to work together for three months.

Then I receive the first training programme. At least I think that it’s a training programme, but it’s also about food, gratitude and wholeness.

In many ways it’s totally bewildering.

But three months later, my life is transformed. My body has changed shape, my muffin belly has melted down to its previous shape. And above all: my aching back has calmed down and my inner light has grown brighter. I wake up feeling energetic and happy, full of faith, just as I used to earlier in my life. I feel stronger than I have in twenty years.

I get questions about why my skin looks smoother, what kind of exercise I’m doing and what I’ve done to get a slimmer waist. People come up to me and tell me that I’m looking younger and happier. My brighter inner light somehow seems to have become magnetic. New and more positive people come into my life, with new ideas and a more positive flow. I also find a way to let go and to resolve a conflict that I’ve had with a close relative, which has been gnawing at me for more than a decade.

At the same time, I’m motivated to try to understand, on a deeper level, what is happening in my body and soul. Is there a medical explanation? Propelled by chance coincidences and a large dose of curiosity, I soon find myself on the very front line of medical research. It’s about how low-degree inflammation affects the body and ages it prematurely. It’s about a new body of knowledge that demonstrates the connection between inflammation and many of our common diseases. And it’s about how an anti-inflammatory lifestyle, which is exactly what I had unknowingly embarked on, can counteract ageing and decline, making you a stronger, smarter and more toned version of yourself.

I will be making this journey on several planes.

First, geographically. I wish that I could say it was like in Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s astonishing story about how she travelled for a year to Italy, India and Indonesia to find herself. But that’s not what my life looks like. There’s a job to do, a family to care for, bills to pay, extensive commitments, clients to serve, columns to write; in short, the million small obligations of daily life.

My journey will continue for four years, in small steps, while the rest of my life continues in parallel. Whenever I travel, for business or pleasure, I try to fit in a piece of what gradually becomes not only my lifestyle but also my passion.

The process will develop into a life story – about the enormous challenge of changing my lifestyle, about my many failures, but also about my slow and unexpected victories.

It will also be a journey of knowledge in which, using my background as a science journalist and biologist, I set out to examine facts from a range of different medical disciplines – puzzle pieces that I get from nutritionists, physiologists, geneticists and psychologists. It’s a journey right down to our human roots, and its goal is to find out why the anti-inflammatory lifestyle has changed my life and whether it could change the lives of others as well.

This journey of knowledge will not be the way I first imagined it at all. It will take me to completely unexpected places and force me to think about conventional Western medicine, which has so much to offer yet also needs to broaden its approach and become more open to the role of emotions, the whole human being and the ancient traditions of wisdom and healing arts.

But above all, it will be a story about the growing health revolution that is happening here and now and is only just beginning.

What if I fall? Oh, but my darling what if you fly?

– Erin Hanson

2. MY BODY JOURNEY

The year was 1982, and Jane Fonda was sweeping across the world in yet another incarnation.

Like some kind of three-stage rocket, she had transformed herself from the space traveller Barbarella, by way of the Vietnam protests, to glowing fitness queen. Leg lifts and legwarmers were the order of the day, along with something called a ‘workout’.

In Sweden, the fitness club ‘Friskis & Svettis’ (roughly, ‘Health and Sweat’) had attracted huge numbers of Swedes who just wanted to get some everyday exercise. With all due respect for founder Johan Holmsäter and his cheerful troops of exercisers, this was not my tribe. I never really clicked with all the big gymnasiums, the big T-shirts and the loose shorts that might let everything hang out.

But Jane Fonda . . . There was something about her combination of glamour and discipline that spoke not only to me but to masses of young women that spring.

Jane Fonda’s Original Workout.

The book had a cover that I still remember in detail. Jane Fonda with Farrah Fawcett-style hair, fluffily blow-dried back from the sides of her face. She’s wearing a red and black striped leotard, black tights and legwarmers. Resting her left hip and elbow on the floor, she holds on to her right leg with her right hand, lifting it high, straight up towards the ceiling, while her left leg reaches up towards the right one. She looks happy and strong.

I bought her book and gave it a ceremonial place on its own shelf in my little studio in a run-down building in the Kungsholmen district of Stockholm, where I was living directly under some heavily speeded-up amphetamine addicts. Their scruffy German shepherd barked every time someone came or went, which seemed to be around the clock.

At the time, my then-boyfriend had just broken up with me. The eternal theme: getting dumped, with the pain and humiliation that followed. Since he couldn’t explain why he wanted to leave in a way that I understood, my natural interpretation of the situation was that I was lacking somehow; I wasn’t attractive enough, smart enough or good enough. My pain expressed itself in the form of binge eating. One day, I would have only cottage cheese and broccoli; the next day, large amounts of ice cream, biscuits and self-loathing.

And so it rolled along, in a cycle that alternated between half starvation and gorging on carbohydrates. I felt bad and often had headaches because of my chaotic eating habits. This affected my studies and my part-time job as a medical assistant at a nearby hospital. The apartment where I was living was cold, and I was forced to heat it by using the oven, turning it on and leaving the door open. It smelled like gas everywhere.

I had friends who would regularly induce vomiting. But I wasn’t able to vomit on command – I was a failed bulimic. My weight could fluctuate by as much as four to five kilograms in a month. And when I ate extra, I punished myself by only drinking water the following day.

My friends and I tried all the diet methods that the women’s magazines published, week in and week out. The Stewardess Diet. The Egg Diet. The Scars-dale Diet. A friend recommended the new Wine Diet, which was based on white wine and eggs, even for breakfast.

Jane Fonda’s classic workout book and video came out in 1981.