Читать книгу Health Revolution - Maria Borelius - Страница 9

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.