Health Revolution

2. MY BODY JOURNEY (#ulink_fa1bc471-21d8-5798-be5d-e56a7e0738e0)

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.

‘It’s great, you don’t even feel how hungry you are,’ she said.

But Jane had also suffered from food issues, which she had solved with exercise. She wrote:

‘Go for the burn! Sweat! . . . No distractions. Centre yourself. This is your time! . . . Your goal should be to take your body and make it as healthy, strong, flexible and well-proportioned as you can!’

These felt like powerful mantras for a woman who had just been dumped, a chance to find my way back through hard work.

I lay on the rug on the floor of my studio apartment and tried to imitate the pictures in the book. I had to move the little coffee table in front of my love seat in order to have enough room to do all these new exercises. I had the gas turned on in the oven as usual and the oven door wide open to warm up the apartment. It was noisy in the apartment upstairs as people came and went and the German shepherd barked.

It was hard to lift my butt 250 times, as Jane recommended, but the harder it was, the stronger was my feeling of rebirth. I would move through this pain, to something new and better. I wanted to be like Jane Fonda on the book’s cover.

At around the same time, a good friend of mine was also dumped by her boyfriend. The two of us formed a self-help group for dumped women and spent several weeks dissecting our breakups and who had actually said what to whom. But our conversations always came to the same conclusion, a unanimous condemnation of two completely oblivious young men in Stockholm. Our judgment was broad, covering personality, morals and looks.

After a while, my wise friend thought we should get off the couch, widen our repertoire and maybe get a little exercise. And as I mentioned, by that time Jane Fonda had arrived in Sweden. It was a big event in what was then a calmer and more peaceful Sweden than the Sweden of today. The newspapers Expressen and Aftonbladet reported on the worldwide fad that had landed in Stockholm, via a woman named Yvonne Lin.

Yvonne Lin was then world master in the martial art of Wushu, which I had never heard of. She had gone to Hollywood to learn from Jane Fonda and to absorb her training methods. In an underground training centre on Markvardsgatan, a little side street off Sveavägen, Yvonne Lin started Sweden’s first workout centre.

Now we were going to try Jane Fonda for real.

We stepped into the studio as if into a temple, reverent and quiet – and immediately felt bewildered. A group of grown men were running around in the space, directed by someone who looked a lot like Bruce Lee, the martial arts master from Hong Kong. Instead of legwarmers, they had wooden pistols and were pretending to shoot at each other. One of them was yelling ‘bang!’ as he hit a brick with a series of karate chops. I recognised two very well-known men who were often featured in gossip magazines. But where was Jane?

It turned out that the space was also used by Yvonne Lin’s husband, who was a martial arts master, and that this was some kind of self-defence training.

We cautiously entered the training studio. When Yvonne Lin stepped in, wearing a tight outfit with perfectly rolled legwarmers, and put on Human League singing ‘Don’t You Want Me’ with the bass pumped up, I was swept away.

This was completely new.

The workouts had the rhythms and choreographic awareness of dance routines. They focused on exactly those body parts that I wanted to reshape; they had glamour, elegance and humour and alternated between precision and free expression. There was an upbeat feeling to the workouts, and they boosted our self-confidence, since we all worked in front of a large mirror, looking at ourselves for forty-five minutes. It was like being on Broadway, or participating in a lineup of dancers in Fame, where we would collectively dance our way to success and the perfect body.

Now, more than thirty years later, I can see the narcissism in this. The fixation on the body, disguised as neo-feminism, partnered with a business mindset masquerading as health movement. I also remember Jane Fonda’s almost desperately clenched jaw when I got to interview her on TV a few years later. She was a slim woman who seemed slightly fearful to me then – a far cry from the liberated workout rebel we had all believed in.

But she was a child of her time. The United States and Europe had left the hippies, unisex styles and political demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s behind, in favour of white wine and prawns, Wall Street, padded shoulders, yuppies and a new interpretation of what it meant to be a man or a woman. And yes, it was largely about the body and material things. Or as Melanie Griffith famously told Harrison Ford in the movie Working Girl: ‘I have a head for business and a body for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?’

The ideal probably lay somewhere in between. But we should look at our past with compassion and realise that maybe we needed a daily dose of Jane Fonda in order to grow up and become ‘whole’ human beings. In any case, our little self-help group, ‘The Exes’, needed a daily fix. And little by little, the feeling of being dumped faded away.

Gradually, the swinging food pendulum calmed down as well. I had a breakthrough one morning. I was sitting at the dining table at home in my apartment. The table faced out over a courtyard where two little children were playing. The night before, I had eaten sandwiches, ice cream and sweets. I felt anxious and guilty and was now considering whether I had the right to eat breakfast.

I drew a diagram, looked at it, and tried to think about what my relationship to food looked like and what feelings it triggered. Out of these thoughts an image emerged, a circle or spiral where crash dieting was followed by hunger, which was followed by overeating, which in turn was followed by feeling bad, which in turn made me feel that I had to start dieting again. It kept turning, around and around and around. Dieting – hunger – overeating – bad feelings – dieting – hunger . . .

I couldn’t control the hunger that appeared when I had been eating only little broccoli florets and some cottage cheese for several days in a row. It was also impossible for me to control the overeating once it started. Nor could I control the anguish that overeating brought with it. But between the anguish and the decision to start dieting there was actually a little window – a window of willpower.

There and then, at the dining table, the thought struck me. I could feel anguish – but still decide that I was allowed to have breakfast.

A new spiral was born. It was a better spiral, where I always allowed myself to eat, even if I had overeaten the night before. Since I didn’t diet as strictly anymore, I was less hungry and my indulgences became more modest, eventually tapering off. Jane Fonda gave me this victory. But it was a brittle harmony. I had to exercise in order for the balance to work.

Yvonne Lin decided to train workout instructors. We were a large group of hopeful young women who came to the audition that preceded the training itself. I was now a completely different person than I had been just a few months before. My relationship with food was more balanced; I was stronger and had higher and more consistent energy levels. And I was dependent on exercising, which had saved me.

When the audition came, it felt like a matter of life and death. I stood in a row with the other women and did aerobics like crazy. Even though I had never been much of an athlete, I hoped to be able to become an instructor, to be able to get into the training.

And I was chosen. When we gathered for the first time and introduced ourselves, all of Sweden was there. We were a cross-section of the country, cutting across educational levels and family backgrounds. We waited tables, we fixed teeth and we worked in shops. We were students. We danced or taught. We were ordinary girls but also girls with mysterious occupations who seemed to glide around in Stockholm’s underground/fashion/artistic/glamour world. We formed a true sisterhood in our way-too-cramped dressing rooms.

When one of the sisterhood had just had a baby, her boyfriend cheated on her with a TV celebrity. After our training buddy found someone else’s black lace undies in bed when she came home with her newborn – and when the TV celebrity also gave an interview in a tabloid where she talked about how she seduced men in carpenter trousers – there was no end to the sisterhood and the primal power that came roaring out of our group. Wasn’t the TV celebrity a snake and the boyfriend a swine? We watched over the abandoned mother like lionesses. No one would be able to hurt her.

We exercised for hours at a time, day after day.

And now I began to see the structure behind the training. How you started with a warmup, and then worked the shoulders, back, abs and waist, legs, butt and finally abs again. There was a system. I also understood which types of exercises were good for each body part. And how to find your place in the music and count the eights correctly, with the beginning impetus of an exercise on beats one, three, five and so on.

We learned how to stand, move and speak in front of a large group of people and get everyone to move in the same direction – literally. How to get the energy and joy going and build up the participants’ motivation. It was extremely useful.

We also learned to do things many times. Since we didn’t use any weights, we added extra resistance to the movements and did endless repetitions – for example, lifting your leg 155 times at a certain angle. It required toughness, but we learned to be tough. That too was extremely useful.

I had studied physics and maths in Stockholm, then biology. Biology was exciting and I wanted to continue, so when there weren’t any courses in human biology in Stockholm that spring, I went to Lund. It was March when I came down from Stockholm by train, and the Lund night was damp, raw and cold. There were no rolling suitcases back then, so I was carrying two heavy suitcases from the Central Station to the apartment that a friend had let me borrow. The apartment was supposed to be furnished. That was debatable, as it turned out.

There was a kitchen table, a built-in bed, a stuffed eagle and a saltwater aquarium with fish from a Norwegian fjord that the owner had caught during a course in marine biology.

At first I felt lonely in a city full of young people who all seemed to know each other. My genetics course had few students and didn’t really provide a context where I could meet other people. And there wasn’t anything like Jane Fonda’s workouts or Yvonne Lin.

A thought struck me, and I called my self-help friend.

‘We should open up something here,’ I said.

‘Do you really think people are ready for it?’ she asked.