скачать книгу бесплатно
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.
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.
