Health Revolution

Then there’s the exercise programme. I realise now that this programme is mainly about weight training, starting carefully and gradually increasing intensity. There are detailed instructions and references. For the first few days, I feel both uplifted and lost. I print out the programme and make a little folder, then I sit down and Google the exercises to get the right balance and technique. YouTube turns out to be full of American muscle men who demonstrate in less than four minutes how to lift weights, while talking enough to give the expression ‘detailed description’ a new meaning. I watch these videos when I don’t understand something, then try it for myself. Above all, I’m buoyed by the feeling of having a plan at the gym. Most of it goes well, but some of the new exercises fill me with anxiety.

On one list is ‘dead lift’. I Google my American muscle-building guides and see a man with a barbell on the ground in front of him. On the barbell are large round weights. He bends over and grips the bar with both hands then lifts it up with straight legs and straight hips, with the bar hanging in his arms. He says that this is the Rolls-Royce of exercises, with a gigantic effect on strength and back health, and that every fibre in the body becomes activated. I see how his whole back tautens and feel sheer terror.

How will I manage this?

I go to the gym to try it out, and I’m able to lift 2 kilograms in each hand, with bent knees. Then I feel a pulling in my back. When I look around, people are lifting 30, 35 or 40 kilograms in the same exercise. Dead lifts are not my thing. Not at all my thing.

My first real setback comes a few days later.

I still don’t understand why, but I develop an abscess in one armpit. It starts out as a small inflamed knot in a hair follicle, which grows into a golf ball at a dramatic pace. The thing looks grotesque, like a kind of baboon nose in the middle of my armpit, and is incredibly painful. I can’t work out for a week. During this week, a car needs to be driven from Great Britain to Sweden, with a dog, and I sit in the car for twenty-four hours with my husband and the carsick dog in the backseat, elevating my arm by holding on to the handle above the door, while poor Luna throws up.

An anti-inflammatory snack.

And so the first communication Rita has from me is not a well-written email with questions about why and how, but instead this:

Hi Rita,

I’ve come down with an abscess in my armpit the size of a golf ball, and have to sit with my arm elevated and can’t work out. I’ll be in touch when I feel better.

Maria

It sounds like the all-time worst excuse, kind of like ‘the dog ate my homework’. But it’s the truth.

The golf ball finally disappears, and I resume my new lifestyle. I move forward with baby steps but I fall down all the time.

It’s hard to follow the lifestyle at work. I’m out having lunch with a client, and I already know that she struggles with her weight. When she sees me order salad with smoked salmon and pass on the bread, she looks irritated.

‘But you don’t have to diet – look at me,’ she says.

‘This isn’t dieting,’ I say, defensively.

The intimacy that we used to have on a private level is marred by this conversation. I feel that she thinks I’m indirectly criticising her, which just isn’t true. I have friends who ask if I’ve become anorexic or developed a fear of fat when I turn down a piece of chocolate cake.

‘Don’t you eat anything anymore?’ they ask.

‘Yes, I eat lots, five times a day – I’m just eating different things.’

A TYPICAL ANTI-INFLAMMATORY DAY

A typical day in my life might look like this:

• 6:30 Meditation and gratitude. Make my bliss plan for the day: food, exercise, de-stressing, awe.

• 7:00 Smoothie with protein powder, almond milk, green powder, spinach, berries and nuts. Two cups of super strong tea with honey.

• 8:30 On my way to work, listen to my own bliss music.

• 10:00 At work I have two eggs, two rice cakes and some tomatoes that I’ve brought from home, plus a cup of coffee with real milk.

• 12:00 Leg day at the gym – squats, dead lifts, hip lifts, etc. My bliss music in the headphones.

• 13:00 A protein shake and an apple. After showering, I eat a bag lunch with leftovers from yesterday (chicken/fish, potatoes, etc.) that I’ve added to a big salad with colourful vegetables.

• 17:00 A bowl of kefir with chia seeds.

• 18:00 Twenty minutes of meditation with my spirituality app or deep breathing.

• 19:30 Dinner – salmon fried in coconut oil and turmeric, oven-baked sweet potatoes, cooked green beans, homemade pesto and a spinach salad, then a few pieces of dark chocolate and a cup of ginger tea.

• 22:00 Digital detox – time to calm down my system for the night. Reading and gratitude list.

Another friend accuses me of betraying the collective global feminism by focusing on my body and my food. I ask her if women will get higher pay just because I have back pain.

‘But those are patriarchal ideals for women,’ she says, clearly hurt.

‘Is it feminism when women don’t feel well?’ I continue.

I begin to realise that anyone who starts a big lifestyle change will always have to deal with other people’s reactions. Some of it is concern. Some of it is based on feelings. Suspicion? Anxiety about changes, because we want people around us to always be the same? Or does it come out of religion – a kind of asceticism, the idea that anyone who turns their focus on the body and their own lifestyle becomes self-absorbed?

I’m blown away by the resistance.

Rita and I begin communicating about all this.

I now understand that many people who change their dietary habits encounter exactly the same resistance from those around them – even at home. But Rita is not only smart and empathetic but also fun and ingenious, and she offers suggestions as to how I can meet these challenges.

She says I need to stand up for myself and my lifestyle more clearly, without placing blame on anyone else. If others then choose to feel bad about my choices, it’s their own problem. I need to learn this, again and again, and oh, how hard it is. I take it personally, and have always done so, if anyone in my circle feels bad because of something connected to me. I carry this like a heavy backpack, and I see the same phenomenon in many women around me. The trick is to lighten that backpack, since it’s no use to anyone. Then there are the practical issues.

My family protests because the cupboards and fridge are suddenly too full when I put in new, space-hogging things like bags of flaxseeds, hazelnuts and goji berries. The freezer is packed with different kinds of frozen berries and big bags of frozen vegetables. My husband, who has many wonderful traits, has a strict inner home economics teacher – we’re talking sturdy cooking lady from the 1950s here. He loves a semi-fanatical order in the cupboards and the doors closed, which becomes hard to achieve when my new foods have to jostle for space with the foods we’ve always eaten.

And all these new powders, where can I store them? Like L-glutamine, as it turns out it’s called, and green powders – a new phenomenon – and protein powder. That’s also new, this thing with protein powder. I use it either as an ingredient in my breakfast, with nuts and fruit (protein, fruit, fat as it’s called in Rita’s language), or after working out. I find a kind of protein powder at my local health food shop that tastes like banana muffins. The only problem is my stomach, which also turns into a banana muffin and starts to produce gas on a scale that could drive the heating system of a medium-sized town.

Another kind of powder turns my stomach into an even bigger balloon. Rita urges me to look for a protein powder that doesn’t make me gassy, and she recommends a vegan powder that’s easy on the stomach. But it turns out that one is impossible to dissolve in water without a blender.

So that’s how I end up on a trip with a client to Geneva with my immersion blender packed in my bag. I arrive early at the hotel, and the first thing I do is go down to the gym and do the day’s workout. Then I get out the wand from my luggage, and the powder I brought with me in a bag, and make a hotel room smoothie in the toothbrush glass, with the Swiss sparkling mineral water Gerolsteiner Sprudel.

In short, a sprudel schmoothie.

I’ve had better tasting drinks. But worse ones too.

Then there’s my mood. Is it the spring light here in Geneva? My fun travelling companions? Or is it . . . me?

Something is starting to happen.

’My family protests because the cupboards and fridge are suddenly too full when I put in new, space-hogging things like bags of flaxseeds, hazelnuts and goji berries.’

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

– Marie Curie, chemist and Nobel Prize winner