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.
What if I fall? Oh, but my darling what if you fly?
– Erin Hanson
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