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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