An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Text Copyright © Maria Borelius 2019

Maria Borelius asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978-0-00-832155-0

eBook ISBN: 978-0-00-832156-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

FOR RITA AND ANNIE, PATHFINDERS. SISTERS.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

– T. S. Eliot

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT MY JOURNEY

1. A NEW YEAR

2. MY BODY JOURNEY

3. INSIGHT

4. HEAL

5. SALMON AND LINGONBERRIES

6. GUT FEELING

7. BREATHE

8. GLOW

9. BLUE ZONE

10. AWE

11. BLISS

12. PEACE

13. ROOTS

14. ONE VAULT AFTER ANOTHER

15. THE JOURNEY TO AN ANTI-INFLAMMATORY LIFESTYLE

16. SOFT START

BREAKFAST RECIPES FOR AN ANTI-INFLAMMATORY SOFT START

Smart, Good-Looking Smoothies

Classic with a Twist

Rita’s Seed Bowl

17. THE THREE-DAY CURE

Breakfast Smoothie

18. MY NEW LIFE IN THE KITCHEN

BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER AND SNACKS

Jessica’s Pancakes

‘Bread’

African Curry

Veggie Box

ANTI-INFLAMMATORY SAUCES

Creative Pesto (or Gustaf’s Sauce)

Harissa

Sauce Xipister

Caper and Dill Sauce

Emily’s Tahini

DRINKS

Lisa’s Bulletproof Coffee

Healing Water

Greger’s Morning Tea

Blue Zone Tea

Emily’s Great-Skin Tea

Power Matcha

THIS IS WHAT I AVOID

THANK YOU FROM THE AUTHOR

REFERENCES

LIST OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

About the Publisher

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT MY JOURNEY

At the age of fifty-two, I was experiencing menopause symptoms, back pain, fatigue and a general feeling of melancholy about my life. I felt that everything was beginning to go downhill.

But after just a few months with a new lifestyle, my life had changed. I was happier, stronger and pain-free – what had happened?

Through a series of remarkable coincidences, I realised that I had stumbled on something completely new – anti-inflammatory food – that could cure and prevent illness and even mysteriously put the brakes on ageing.

That’s how my journey of knowledge began, a journey during which, filled with wonder, I began to research this new landscape and discovered that it encompassed much more than diet. The contours of a whole new lifestyle emerged, and the clues came to me from many different people, each one amazing in his or her own way.

I encountered, among others, an innovative and inspiring fitness model in Canada; a professor in Lund, Sweden, working at the very forefront of research; an Indian health spa with a punishing enema treatment; a prehistoric hominid in Addis Ababa by the name of Lucy; one of London’s most visionary dermatologists; unusually long-lived members of a religious sect in the outskirts of Los Angeles; a Danish TV celebrity who turned out to be fifteen years older than I thought; a gut group in the English countryside; a top geneticist at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, with a weakness for riddles; a hip-swinging yoga instructor at a New Age meeting in California; and an ethereal detective searching for human wonder.

Each of them has played a role in this drama.

And so has my own experimentation. I have poked around among omega-3 fatty acids, probiotics, gluten, lactose, meditation, bone broth, Ayurvedic nose diagnosis, HIIT training, yoga, sunsets, inflammation markers and spirituality apps. I have set out filled with curiosity but have often encountered failures and had to find a different path.

Step by step, I’ve felt my way forward as I worked to solve the puzzle of how low-degree systemic inflammation causes illness and what we can do to make ourselves stronger, happier and healthier.

All of this has resulted in a five-point programme to bring out the best version of all of us, a programme that combines everything I’ve learned with the conviction that a lifestyle has to work on the practical level, in everyday life, and in our lives together with other people.

There’s a health revolution happening right now, where a whole new way of thinking about food, exercise, rest, awe and health is being constructed – and through this process, we are discovering new tools for living in a lighter and stronger way.

This is my story, and I’m sharing it with you in the hope that you will find inspiration, healing and your path to empowerment.

Maria Borelius

London, November 2017

The unexamined life is not worth living.

– Socrates

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.

What if I fall? Oh, but my darling what if you fly?

– Erin Hanson

2. MY BODY JOURNEY

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.

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.

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

3. INSIGHT

It’s a spring night in Lund, Sweden, 2013.

It’s just the kind of fresh spring evening that creates such expectations of life, love and all the other wonderful things that belong to the light time of year. Students are riding their bikes towards the city centre. Trees are budding in the Lundagård park next to the cathedral’s sandstone walls. The magnolia by the cream-coloured university building will soon begin to bloom, just in time for May Day, when student singers will once again sing a welcome to spring and the beautiful month of May.

Together with the other members of the advisory committee that meets regularly in order to support the university’s big 350-year jubilee, I’m sitting in the old Biskopsgården, just below the library. At the last minute, I’ve decided to attend this meeting, even though my calendar is full. It will turn out to be a significant event.

Every time the group gets together, we have the privilege of meeting one of the most innovative researchers at the biggest university in the Nordic region. Today we’re going to meet a specialist in nutrition research. Professor Inger Björck is introduced and steps forward to talk about her brand-new research. Only a few minutes into her presentation, I realise that her findings are very important, even somewhat sensational.

She gives us a brief background.

Professor Björck leads the Center for Preventive Nutrition Research at Lund University. Scientists there are conducting interdisciplinary research about how a variety of diseases can be counteracted with a proper diet, as well as research into what is known as the metabolic syndrome.

The metabolic syndrome, a medical term that has become more and more common, includes three conditions: diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. Each of these conditions carries risks. But together, they form a type of super risk for serious heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. It is also suspected that this metabolic condition is connected to certain forms of cancer and even to an increased risk of dementia.

Researchers haven’t quite been able to explain the metabolic syndrome. One theory is that it has to do with insulin, the hormone released by the pancreatic gland when you eat sugar-containing foods and whose function it is to move the broken-down sugar into the cells. People with diabetes 1, which often begins to manifest in the teenage years or even earlier, lack the ability to produce enough insulin.

But there is also an acquired form that sneaks up on people later in life, diabetes 2. (Today there are researchers looking into whether there may also be a number of intermediate forms between diabetes 1 and 2, but we’ll leave that aside here for the sake of simplicity.)

To sketch out a simple explanatory diagram for this process, when you eat sugar and your blood sugar level rises, a signal is sent to the pancreatic gland, which releases insulin. The insulin is sluiced out and ‘opens up’ the cells in order to sluice in the broken-down sugar, along with proteins and fat.

When the body constantly takes in large amounts of sugar and insulin levels have to stay elevated in order to shuttle the sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cells, it creates a so-called insulin resistance. In other words, there is insulin in the blood that’s supposed to deal with the sugar, and that makes the insulin attach to the cells, but something goes wrong in the communication between the insulin and the cells. The cells simply lose their ability to react to the presence of insulin. The number of people who have metabolic syndrome is growing rapidly, because more and more people eat the wrong kind of food, have a sedentary lifestyle, and/or suffer from stress and other psychosocial problems.

The above-mentioned triple combination, with diabetes/belly fat/high blood pressure, used to be a medical condition that affected mainly older people. But now it’s increasing even among younger men and women. Altogether it’s estimated that one quarter of the adult population in the United States, Canada and Europe have metabolic syndrome. In short, we are talking about an epidemic that is increasing like an avalanche in the Western world, an enormous threat to public health.

In the past, each of these diseases was studied separately. But Inger Björck and many other researchers worldwide are now beginning to realise that the diseases are in fact connected.

‘Then you have to wonder, how can suffering be prevented?’ she says.

Inger Björck is carrying out innovative research in this area. For example, she’s studied mice that have been fed either a high-fat or a low-fat diet. In addition to that diet, the mice were given different berries and fruits like lingonberries, raspberries, prunes and currants. It turned out that the mice who ate berries – especially lingonberries – maintained the same weight regardless of whether they ate a high-fat or low-fat diet. The lingonberry group actually lost some weight, even with a high-fat diet.

Björck believes that the risk of diabetes 2 and coronary artery disease can be decreased by means of an entirely new method, a new category of food in which berries are part of a larger food group.

‘These foods are called anti-inflammatory,’ she says.

I make a note of the name. It calls to mind what I read about in Dr Perricone’s books ten years earlier.

Then Professor Björck begins to explain how these new foods can affect the whole person, not only blood pressure and cholesterol levels but also cognitive ability, or the brain function that includes a person’s intelligence, in the broad sense of the word – our capacity to think, remember, solve problems and learn new things. This research sounds both creative and worthwhile, and so far I’m following her presentation with interest. This is worth supporting, my professional self acknowledges in an observant yet slightly distant fashion.

But when she shows us the list of the foods the researchers have been using to achieve these results in people, I get a shock. A slow-motion lightning bolt strikes my brain, and I sit at the very edge of my chair, suddenly wide awake.

First, there are things like decreasing sugar, doing away with white flour, increasing the intake of all kinds of berries, increasing the amount of vegetables and fatty fish, and adding vinegar and probiotic supplements. But then comes a concrete list of foods, and it looks like . . . Rita’s food list?

My heart does a quiet leap of recognition and time stands still. I gaze around me at the old meeting room, with its view of the university library’s stepped gable in brick. The great linden trees shimmer with fresh new leaves in the spring evening.

What is this? Have I unknowingly been eating anti-inflammatory foods and thus affected my body much more deeply than I had realised?

The effects I’ve felt are exactly the ones that Inger Björck describes in her test subjects. They grew stronger, reduced their waistlines, expanded their mental capacity and developed more of a zest for life.

Or is it just an amazing coincidence?

After the talk, we are served an anti-inflammatory buffet that the researchers have designed themselves. They’ve even baked their own bread, similar to Danish rye bread, using whole barley. There are salads, fatty fish and nuts, and everything is delicious. Over one of the salads, I share my insight with another woman. I lean forward confidentially, almost a little embarrassed.

‘I’ve actually been eating like this for a few months. Or at least trying to.’

‘I thought you looked energetic, somehow,’ she says, looking at me appraisingly.

I go up to Professor Björck and tell her that there are in fact people who live like this every day but who haven’t quite made the scientific connection to anti-inflammation that Björck’s team has. They just do it because they’ve discovered that it works.

‘Who are they?’ she wonders.

‘Well . . . fitness people in the United States and Canada,’ I say.

She looks surprised. We agree to stay in touch. And that’s where my own journey of knowledge begins.

Inflammation and anti-inflammation. What is this all about? I have to learn more.

I begin racking my brain for long-ago facts from my university studies in immunology. I think I took that course in the red building at the old Veterinary College in Frescati in Stockholm, if I remember correctly, and we learned something about the two forms of inflammation – because inflammation is not always a bad thing.

The first type of inflammation is purely positive, a helping process. Imagine a cut from a kitchen knife, a finger squeezed in the car door, a urinary tract infection or a sore throat. When you’re injured or infected, your immune system starts producing inflammation as a defence mechanism. A teacher I once had used this image to describe it: imagine a land that is being attacked by an external enemy and wants to defend itself. That’s how the immune system works. The outer injury is the external enemy, the immune response is the country’s government and defence, and the inflammation is part of what you have to do to defend yourself. There are a number of different foot soldiers who help. These soldiers in turn have many different specialist functions, just like in a regular army, with bridge builders, telegraph operators, explosives experts and intelligence agents.

In human blood, the blood platelets constantly wander around looking for problems in the blood. The blood platelets gather around the problem – the cut, the bruise or the infected body part – and then send a chemical signal to the immune system.

‘Problem at g, come here right away,’ say the blood platelets.

The signal is intercepted by the white blood cells, who answer, ‘On our way.’

An advanced line of defence is set up, with many different types of foot soldiers. They’re called cytokines, leukotrienes, prostaglandins, chemokines, thromboxanes and so forth, and they function like support troops, where each one sets out with its own task. They expand the blood vessels at the site of the affected tissue and make the area around it more ‘transparent’. This means that more cells from the immune system can reach the injury, attack enemy bacteria, clean out old junk and then repair and build up new and fresh tissue.

In medical training around the world and through the centuries, students have had to learn to recognise an inflammation the traditional way, which originates with the ancient Roman Celsus, who wrote great reference books about the body. Celsus’s favourite treatment was to simply open the veins and empty out the ‘extra blood’, a procedure he recommended for many types of health problems, as well as for people ‘with big heads’. Celsus also described the signs of inflammation in Latin: rubor, tumor, caldor, dolor. Redness, swelling, warmth, pain. Which is exactly what you feel in your throat when you have a sore throat. These signs of inflammation can in turn be counteracted by RICE, or rest, ice, compression, elevation. (Exactly what you do with a sprained ankle.)

The whole point, in short, is that inflammation works like a kind of fire department. It rushes out, attacks the enemies, cleans out and repairs. Then the system goes back to resting status.

This acute type of inflammation has a rhythm. There’s an ebb and flow, a clear beginning and an end, and the rhythm signals a healthy and active immune defence. It isn’t this type of inflammation that’s problematic but rather another one, which seems to be affected by food and contributes to illness. I wondered who might be able to tell me more about it.

I investigate some more, and after a while I find a new trail. There’s a researcher in the United States, Barry Sears, who has been on this track for a long time and founded an organisation for research in that area, the Inflammation Research Foundation. I’m not able to travel to meet him, but I don’t want to just send him an email, since there’s so much that I don’t understand. We need to actually talk.

I’m able to reach him by phone, and he gets right to the point.

‘This is a new area for most doctors. I’ve been working in the field for a while, but in general way too little research has been done.’

He mentions how many different kinds of diseases the low-grade systemic type of inflammation is linked to. We’re talking about heart disease, high cholesterol values, diabetes, joint problems and neurodegenerative disease, but also certain forms of cancer.

‘But what exactly does this low-grade systemic type of inflammation do?’ I wonder.

He begins to explain very fast, and it’s hard to follow him since the connection breaks several times during our call.

‘Okay, how about this: I’ll send you a scientific article,’ Dr Sears says.

He soon emails me an article from European Review of Medical and Pharmacological Sciences. I click it open.

‘The inflammatory response was developed over millions of years and allowed us to coexist with a number of microbes. The same inflammatory response also made it possible to repair physical damage . . .’

Okay, I think, acute inflammation is an ancient mechanism with benefits, millions of years old . . .

‘But there are also equally important anti-inflammatory mechanisms in the inflammation cycle that allow cell repair and renewal. Only when these two phases are continually balanced can the cells effectively repair the small damages that arise with inflammation.’

This is new to me. Does this mean there’s a need for balance inside the system itself – perhaps that just as there’s an inflammation yin, there also needs to be an inflammation yang?

‘But if the proinflammatory phase continues in a low but chronic level under the pain threshold, it can drive many chronic illnesses. In the end it can result in organ damage, loss of organ function and lead to severe illness, in spite of the fact that the initiating illness-causing events may have taken place decades earlier, triggered by an underlying and ongoing chronic inflammation process.’

So, low-grade inflammation arises from imbalance – from a steadily ongoing inflammation that doesn’t cause a ‘fire department’ type of acute inflammatory response but in the long run can act as a catalyst for small seeds of illness that have been germinating in the body for a long time.

Is this the type of inflammation that we bring about through an unhealthy lifestyle? In other words, might bad nutrition, stress, environmental toxins and other lifestyle factors give us inflammation, which in turn makes us sick? Perhaps that’s why the wrong food can lead to illness and not just to us ingesting too many calories.

And is it true that long before we actually become ill, the low-grade inflammation affects us so that we start to ‘lose steam’? When I went to the doctor complaining about my back pain, depression and listlessness and looked for explanations based on external things (‘the kids are moving away from home’), maybe it was actually a low-grade inflammation, an imbalance in my immune defence caused by a number of lifestyle choices, leading to my bad back, blue mood and bloated stomach. And maybe this is what I’ve ‘cured’ with my new lifestyle choices?

I go on looking to see if my symptoms, like back pain, fatigue and a ‘low’ feeling, could have been signs of low-grade inflammation. I find the following symptom list:

• The skin looks older, is drier, and has more wrinkles

• Lower energy

• Less stamina when exercising

• Swelling in the face

• Swelling around the belly

• Increased risk of either constipation or loose bowels

• Less ability to concentrate

• Fluctuating appetite

• Fluctuating blood sugar levels

• Weaker immune defence

• Joint pain

• More depressed mood

I can tick off several of the points but not all. So far, we’re just talking about what a doctor would call ‘everyday troubles’. But how does inflammation work in relation to serious illnesses?

I realise that I’ll have to become a detective in order to get to the bottom of this riddle. No single researcher seems to have the whole picture. I will have to solve a jigsaw puzzle.

A few years earlier, an editor in a publishing house gave me a book called Anticancer. I didn’t read it then, but one day it falls off the bookshelf as if some friendly soul in there wants to help me on my way. It turns out to be a good lead.

The book is by the French neurologist and Médecins Sans Frontières activist David Servan-Schreiber, who developed a brain tumour at the age of thirty and set out on a journey of knowledge to save himself. In the book, which became a bestseller in many countries, he reported on some of the leading research about the essence of cancer, as well as strategies for keeping up resistance. Servan-Schreiber eloquently describes how cancer and inflammation are intertwined and drive each other on in a kind of evil witch dance.

‘I realise that I’ll have to become a detective in order to get to the bottom of this riddle. No single researcher seems to have the whole picture. I will have to solve a jigsaw puzzle.’

A tumour is a number of cells that begin to grow wildly and unchecked. In the beginning, there’s enough nourishment for the tumour in its immediate surroundings, but after a while it outgrows its small neighbourhood. The tumour now begins to operate with a devilish intelligence, causing an inflammation around itself. Why? Fascinated, I continue reading. The tumour uses the inflammation to manipulate the immune defence and make it ‘attack’ the tumour from inside.

Once the immune defence has got into the tumour, it faithfully begins to work according to its usual procedure when it encounters inflammation, which involves, among other things, producing certain substances that are going to help repair the tissue. It’s just that the tissue being repaired this time is an enemy – the tumour itself. The immune defence is literally fooled by the tumour. Instead of protecting the body against the tumour, it begins to fuel its further growth out into the body. New blood vessels are built to bring new nourishment to the tumour, and little supporting structures help to anchor the tumour even further.

To sum up, the tumour creates an inflammation that in turn feeds the tumour, which in turn creates even more inflammation in its surroundings, spreading the disease further. The effect of the inflammation is like pouring petrol on the cancer fire. That’s why cancer is such a diabolical disease and so hard to fight.

Professor Björck has also explained that inflammation is linked to coronary artery disease, obesity, diabetes 2 and joint problems. Is it true then that inflammation is either the basic cause, or least the promoter, of our main public health diseases – the diseases that cause so much human suffering – as well as ageing and human breakdown?

And how does inflammation work, generally? Is it like a wildfire that burns down the healthy parts of a human being? Or more like a flood wave that beats and beats against a barricade until it finally falls apart? Or is it more like a low-level conflict between two people that distracts and weakens them so they are no longer able to defend themselves against an external threat?

Which one is the most reasonable scenario? I must keep searching.

But right now, I can state one thing that seems obvious: low-grade systemic inflammation is harmful and either triggers or speeds up disease. At this stage it’s also apparent that there are foods that counteract the broad negative effects of inflammation and that these foods to some extent are similar to the Rita Diet, which is like the Inger Björck Diet – and also like the David Servan-Schreiber Diet, which kept him alive for almost twenty years after his brain tumour diagnosis, even though he was supposed to survive for only a few months.

I have found a lot to think about, and I’m encouraged about my new lifestyle. In general, I’ve started to like the ‘Rita programme,’ as I still call it. And I’ve begun to feel results. They are modest results, but noticeable. My body is stronger, my belly flatter and I’m sturdier both in my psyche and across my shoulders.

‘You seem stronger, Mum,’ says my older daughter, unexpectedly.

That’s good. I want to feel strong, and my new lifestyle grounds me with a new feeling of security. I’m slowly gaining more insights into this lifestyle, about what it is and what it’s like to live it and not just talk about it. It’s both surprisingly simple and complex, since it demands a new kind of awareness.

To have an anti-inflammatory lifestyle was never a goal in itself for me. I hadn’t even heard of this as a lifestyle until that fresh spring evening in Lund, when I was already a few months into my new lifestyle. I just thought I would get a training programme via the internet.

The fact is that I don’t have time to spend dealing with food and exercise, I don’t feel like losing weight and I can’t spend all my energy on it since I have a life to live too. You have to live your life in the human village, as Mowgli says in The Jungle Book. You can’t live a life that’s too different, because that’s like settling down on a dry little patch of grass by yourself outside the village, surrounded by your pills, protein powders and strange food. As a mother of four, I neither can nor want to live like that. After all, I live in a very loud and lively human village that consists of family, job and friends, a context that’s much bigger than just me.

But still I’m driven onwards by this new feelgood sensation. The biggest change is that I have to start planning for eating well, to go from a lifestyle where I eat whatever I happen to find, or what tastes good, to strategically planning my food intake for health.

People say that if you fail at planning, you plan to fail. Everyone who has children learns to plan food at home to some degree. It doesn’t work to come home from work tired and have hungry kids digging through the fridge. (Those evenings always end with fries, fish sticks and ice cream . . .) You just have to learn to be a few steps ahead. It’s easy when it’s about the children, but to think like that about my own nutritional needs is something I’ve never done.

The first thing I need to learn is how to eat in a more conscious and planned way, and that also includes thinking about my specific needs. It sounds pretentious and, above all, time-consuming. Let me explain.

We humans have a limited window from the time a feeling arises to when we want to act on it. The more we’re aware of that window, the more impulse control we have and the smarter we get. But when it comes to food, hunger and eating, this control is being disabled by the miraculous innovations of the modern food industry.

Today we can get hungry one minute and theoretically find food within the hour, as long as we don’t find ourselves in a kayak on an expedition along the northeastern coast of Greenland, or looking for hidden treasure in inner Amazonia. There are little biscuits in the pantry and fig marmalade in the fridge. At work, there are some leftover biscuits by the coffeemaker. At the counter at the 7-Eleven are ready-made sandwiches. Our ability to plan food and think strategically about food doesn’t bother trying anymore. It simply isn’t needed.

I begin to think about how I in particular, and human beings in general, have ended up here.

Just imagine if we were as spontaneous about getting ourselves to work. We would get up and get ready, and just as we were leaving the house, we would begin to think about how to get there and what address we’re going to. But of course we don’t do that.

Most people check the calendar in advance to see what time the meeting is, Google addresses, check that the car has petrol, look up the tube lines, and see how far we have to go between the station and the meeting place. Not many of us would get to our jobs or our meetings on time if we didn’t do all this. We need an inner map. A road plan.

We need this for food as well.

This is what I have to learn – that in the pause between feeling and action, there’s a rainbow leading to a pot of gold, and it’s easier to find that pot if I’m well prepared.

My basic plan becomes this: I plan how I’m going to eat as soon as I wake up in the morning. I plan for a good day. Many people do that anyway when it comes to work, family and leisure activities. Why not do it for your own health as well?

In Rita’s plan I wasn’t given calories, quantities or forbidden foods. Instead, I have a number of guidelines. The most important thing is to eat food that is as unprocessed as possible – food that you could pick, fish or hunt. ‘Made by nature, not by man,’ as someone I met said.

Rita doesn’t just want me to reduce sugar – something that I’ve known I should be doing for a long time – but also to avoid bread and pasta, which get broken down into glucose, or sugar. She wants me to replace these with sweet potato, quinoa and brown rice. She wants me to eat protein-rich foods, often and in large quantities. Four or five times every day, I’m supposed to eat eggs, turkey, mussels, prawns, fish, meat or vegetarian protein. Can I even eat that much protein? I’m supposed to eat lots of leafy greens and vegetables, preferably four times a day. And good fats like olive oil, coconut oil and nuts. All this advice goes into planning four or five meals per day.

Now this advice needs to be transformed into habits that will work in my everyday life. Then I have to have time for work and also exercise four times a week. It’s stressful. How is that supposed to happen?

I can be undisciplined and lazy, with a tendency to overeat. Even worse, I tend to eat for emotional reasons: when I’m anxious, bored or exhausted; or when I just have a craving for something good and make the usual mistake of satisfying this craving with food that ends up giving me only momentary relief.

How am I supposed to manage to eat in such a disciplined way?

I face several big challenges, which begin as soon as I wake up. I continue to look for a new standard breakfast. I don’t want to have to think in the morning, when I’m a little sleepy and everything’s spinning around in my head. What can I come up with?

Most of what goes into a typical Swedish or British breakfast is wrong, according to the new thinking. Juice, bread, yogurt, cheese, rolls, cereal – none of that works anymore. So I look for something that can become the new breakfast.

I test different things and arrive at smoothies for breakfast. Almond milk, berries, nuts and protein powder. It breaks up our family’s mornings, since my habits are so different.

Snacks are simple: a couple of hardboiled eggs and a tomato; nuts and fruit. But dinner demands more thought.

I was no cook before I became a mother, but once I had children I became interested in cooking to nourish the family and create a happy mealtime. In my old life, it was easy to make food taste good and dress things up with extra butter, sugar, cheese and breading, or by frying, adding good bread toasted with garlic butter, and so on. There were soup and pancakes on Thursdays. My husband cooks just as often, usually with extra everything.

ANTI-INFLAMMATORY VEGETABLES AND MUSHROOMS

Think of the rainbow – purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. The more colours you eat every day, the prettier your plate and the more beautiful you will be, inside and out, since each colour represents a certain kind of active polyphenol.

• Asparagus

• Aubergine

• Beetroots

• Pak choi

• Broccoli

• Brussels sprouts

• Cabbage – white, red, cauliflower, green cabbage

• Celery – celery root and stalks

• Courgettes

• Cucumber

• Dandelion leaves

• Endive

• Fennel

• Kohlrabi

• Mushrooms – white mushrooms, ceps, oyster mushrooms, chanterelles

• Nasturtium

• Nettles

• Onion – red, yellow, garlic, leeks, spring onions

• Parsnips

• Peppers – red, orange, yellow and green

• Radishes

• Salad – rocket, iceberg, mâche – go wild!

• Spinach

• Sprouts – alfalfa and all others

• Tomatoes

• Watercress

Certain vegetables, like beetroots, parsnips and celery root, have a higher glycaemic index (GI) value than others. Mix them with vegetables that have a lower GI value, for example beetroots on a bed of rocket with a dressing of vinaigrette and nuts. Perfect!

I still want to eat good food, feel satisfied and enjoy food together with my family, by myself or with friends or colleagues, so I have to become more creative. But I don’t have all the time in the world.

I decide to compromise. I plan meals with food that is natural but with a little glamorous twist. A little more taste, a little more spice, good sauces and dips made of tomatoes, avocado, grilled vegetables, spices, oils and garlic.

The trick is to achieve good proportions. A plate divided into four parts, where 25 per cent is protein, 25 per cent salad, 25 per cent other vegetables and 25 per cent rice or quinoa – more or less.

But there are many challenges.

‘Where’s dessert?’ asks my son, with his big brown eyes. ‘You used to make that good chocolate cake.’

It’s true. Since I started cooking with my new method, I’ve increasingly lost interest in baking big, fluffy cakes. It’s not about body weight but just the feeling that I want to serve my family something other than 2 cups of sugar, which my former prize cake contained.

So I experiment, with mixed results.

‘Sorry, Mum, but this is a failure,’ my blue-eyed son laughs when I serve his best friend some courgette cake.

The friend is too polite to say anything, but he stares listlessly at his piece of cake. A few strips of courgette are swimming around like threads in the dry almond flour.

My brown-eyed son brings his new girlfriend home, and I serve them some protein muffins. I’ve found a recipe with protein powder, sweet potato and almond flour. The new girlfriend smiles but doesn’t take seconds.

My son grunts.

‘What is this?’

It sounds like I have spoiled children, but I don’t. They’re just used to a different kind of food. It’s said that Chinese children don’t like cinnamon buns. Why? Because they never eat cinnamon buns. You like what you are used to. This way of eating is the opposite of how we used to eat, and the change takes time. But I don’t really care; I have patience. I feel happy in some way. It’s not just the spring light. It’s something more – that’s hard to put into words.

Then I find the explanation. Again, by chance.

I’m working on a book that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

I once had a brother who died. My handsome, mischievous, idolised brother got sick in his twenties and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a grim psychiatric diagnosis. In 1986, I lost him in a fire in a Stockholm apartment. Through a contractor project I’ve done for Karolinska Institutet, I’ve begun to think a lot about the stigmatisation of mental illness.

Now I’ve decided to write a book that illuminates and looks into the taboo around mental health problems. This also involves dealing with the taboo within myself, the shame that I’ve felt – because mental health problems are looked at differently than physical disease. Aside from the sorrow, there’s this damned feeling of shame that rests over both the afflicted and their loved ones. And that makes us doubly ashamed. We’re ashamed because people we love have a shameful illness, and then we’re ashamed because we’re ashamed.

I root around eagerly in everything that’s connected to this issue. I talk to researchers, read and interview lots of people with different illnesses, as well as doctors and nurses.

While I’m looking through the latest research, a new branch emerges. It has a very long name: psychoneuroimmunology. It’s the study of how mental illness can arise in the brain, and how it’s linked to– here it is again – inflammation. Hmm . . .

In other words, on the one hand there’s a connection between immune defence and inflammation, and on the other hand, a connection to brain health? Fascinated, I look more closely into this connection.

We’ve already mentioned all the foot soldiers that are sent out by the immune system. Among them are the cytokines, triggered by inflammation to show up in huge numbers – something called a cytokine storm. This storm, like a swarm of bees, starts up the body’s defence system in the form of the so-called B and T lymphocytes. But the cytokines also talk directly to the brain.

Let’s say that again. The immune system and the brain talk to each other.

This is a new piece of knowledge, a new puzzle piece. I investigate further.

The American researcher Robert Dantzer did the pioneering work that showed that the cytokines triggered by inflammation also affect the brain’s signalling substances: dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. Since these substances directly affect how we feel, physically and mentally, cytokines can change how we feel in emotional terms.

When you have a high inflammation level, the cytokines decrease the levels of dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin. You get a feeling of illness, like when you’re coming down with something. You feel low, tired, withdrawn. And when the inflammation decreases, the number of cytokines also decreases, and the signalling substances can flow again at a normal level in the synapses of the brain.

I add this to what we now know about signalling substances, highly simplified. Balanced dopamine levels provide more energy and self-confidence. Balanced serotonin levels lead to more calm and less anxiety. Balanced noradrenaline levels lead to increased alertness.

That’s exactly the change that I’ve felt in myself. This is interesting . . .

Not only does this train of thought offer new possibilities for understanding how mental illness begins, but perhaps it might also account for my new, brighter mood. A signal sent directly from my decreased inflammation level up to my brain might actually be affecting my mood. Has the new diet rearranged my brain chemistry?

I have to keep digging.

Researchers can demonstrate a connection between the degree of inflammation and depression, as well as between the degree of inflammation and the risk of suicide.

Suicide is today the most common cause of death among young men. One of the explanations is that there are too few resources available in the scandalously downsized psychiatric acute care centres. The doctors are forced to make a brutal selection among all the people who are seeking help, asking themselves terrible questions like ‘Who is actively likely to commit suicide? Who can we consider to be managing adequately at home, in spite of their depression?’ They are forced to look for those patients who have the highest risk for suicide and send home the rest even if they are feeling unwell.

Since the price of making the wrong judgement call is so incredibly high, people have looked for more objective markers, something that can be measured, instead of simply asking the patient questions. As most people who have known someone who committed suicide realise, a person who really wants to commit suicide will hide it.

At Lund University, the researcher Lena Brundin found that in people with depression, the will to commit suicide was directly linked to the degree of inflammatory markers in the blood. Not only that, but the degree of violence used in the suicide could also be correlated with the degree of inflammation.

In autumn 2017, new research was presented in London, where scientists from the University of Cambridge argued that there is a ‘very robust link between inflammation and depressive symptoms.’ Professor Ed Bullmore, chief of psychiatric staff, pointed to the fact that people who have just received vaccinations and people who take inflammatory medicines get depressed more often. The teams are now thinking of depression as a physical illness that might be treatable with anti-inflammatory measures.

It turns out that 30 per cent of people who suffer from inflammatory diseases like rheumatism are also depressed, making that group four times more likely to develop depression than the general population.

Schizophrenia has also turned out to have connections to inflammation, in research carried out at the Karolinska University Hospital by the psychoneuroimmunologist Sophie Erhardt, a pioneering scientist I had the privilege of meeting when we both became involved in the Swedish Psychiatry Foundation’s work. The same goes for bipolar illness.

It’s clear that cytokines are linked to poorer mental health for people, and cytokines are produced when there is inflammation.

I’m now hearing more and more researchers say that there’s a real connection between immune defence and the mind. Might these mental illnesses actually be immunological diseases? Which one is the chicken and which is the egg?

More and more doctors are coming to radical conclusions.

‘Our old model of care, where we make a distinction between body and mind, is completely outdated, where psychiatric care is provided by psychiatric specialists and physical care by doctors and nurses who specialise in the body. We have to begin to educate people within healthcare who can bridge this gap – between immune defence and the nervous system,’ thunders Professor Robert Lechler, chairman of the British Academy of Medical Sciences, in an interview in the Daily Telegraph.

Everything is connected, and the link is inflammation.

This is the very front line of research. I’m standing right at this front line and probing it as I’m writing this book, and I see the inflammation trail grow red hot again. I have to dig deeper, even though it’s sometimes tough going – very tough.

I have the twenty-five-year-old grief of a big sister simmering away inside. It’s been shut up in a closet with the door bolted shut and marked with a sign saying ‘Open at your own risk!’ In that closet lives the grief I feel for not being able to save my brother. It sometimes feels like I’ve gone straight down into a black hole while I’m working on this book. I also encounter the sorrow and anxiety of the people I interview, people who have been stricken with serious illnesses and sometimes met with little understanding from the outside world; who feel alone and vulnerable even though they’re fighting with such courage. It touches me at my very core, since I understand them all too well.

But then I notice something. The afflicted and their families say almost exactly the same thing: when they eat junk food, or bad food, their symptoms get worse. When they choose better food, the symptoms decrease.

The new lifestyle that I’m learning about shines so brightly in the midst of all this darkness, and it’s signalling from all directions. It turns into a kind of lift that leads me up towards joy, out of my grey mine shaft.

Up in the daylight again, a journey to completely ordinary things – things that might be trivial but that absolutely need to work, things that used to be self-evident before, in my old life, but that I now have to relearn.

Like how to shop for food, for example.

I used to wander around fairly randomly and pick out things that looked interesting when I wasn’t shopping for a recipe or based on sale prices. I bought things mainly based on what my family likes to eat every day. Crisps, bread, jam, cereal, milk, chicken, pasta, muffins and vegetables. Nothing strange. That’s what a regular shopping list might look like.

Now I’m starting to see the supermarket in a whole new way. It has its agenda, I have mine. That’s why it’s important to examine the supermarket’s setup. You are often met by freshly baked bread that’s meant to tempt you with its warm aroma, and then you’re supposed to walk all the way inside the shop to find the milk, a product that almost everyone buys. The vegetables are often hidden far inside, along some wall.

I decide to outsmart the shop’s selling agenda and my own old reflexes. I’ll get a maximum amount of good and nutritious foods while minimising gluten, lactose and sugar, and I’ll shop economically.

The first step is to make a plan for the day’s meals every morning. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. And then shop according to that. Just like an architect, you have to begin with a drawing in order to build a good house.

My plan might look like this:

Breakfast: Smoothie with protein powder, green spirulina powder, chia seeds, raisins, blueberries and spinach.

Snack: Boiled egg, tomato.

Lunch: Chicken, sweet potato, raw grated carrot and cooked broccoli.

Snack: Fruit and nuts.

Dinner: Lentil patties, spinach and tomato salad.

If the kids are eating at home I add things that they like, but only then.

I’m beginning to dig around a lot more in the vegetable bins. I’m starting to pick up onions, tomatoes, carrots, lemons, garlic, broccoli, green beans, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, squash, aubergine and so on, according to season and price; I inspect them and smell them. I find green cabbage. And white cabbage! This is an unassuming but wonderful, cheap delicacy – especially in the springtime, when the delicate spring cabbage arrives. Here I also find my clumsy, ugly, new best friend – the sweet potato.

I buy blueberries, especially if they’re on sale, since you can freeze them. Strawberries and raspberries according to the season. Lots of frozen berries. Rita doesn’t want me to eat too many bananas since they have a high GI value. Okay, I’ll try.

I’m starting to think about the store in unpoetical terms. Like for example ‘protein shelves’. That’s where there are chicken fillets, meatloaf, pork chops. The egg shelf, and the shelves with canned sardines, mussels and tuna, are also protein shelves. What has good quality and reasonable prices?

I often come home with different kinds of fish, preferably ethically sourced. Chicken thighs have more taste than breast fillets, and you can buy them in bigger packages with six or twelve thighs and then freeze the part you don’t use in smaller bags. I buy according to season, price and quality. Cans of mussels, salmon and sardines, and quick protein solutions with lots of omega-3 fats. And also lots of eggs. They have to be from cage-free, happy chickens. I also buy beans and lentils of all kinds and shapes, since it turns out not everything is a good fit for my stomach.

I buy low-lactose milk, yogurt and sometimes soy yogurt. I often try different kinds of nut milk, like almond, coconut and hazelnut, and soy milk. I use butter once in a while, preferably organic.

The spice shelf expands. New tastes turn up there, and more experiments. At the base are of course salt and pepper of different kinds, and now also turmeric, which I’m beginning to learn is extremely anti-inflammatory. But other spices reduce inflammation as well. I check lists and find cinnamon, oregano, cumin, coriander, thyme, rosemary, basil, different kinds of chilli, garlic, ginger, capers . . .

I buy different kinds of oil and begin flavouring it myself. A sprig of rosemary, some garlic and a few lemon peels quickly add a new taste in a couple of days. I try new kinds of vinegar – there are so many to choose from. I learn more about my trigger points – whipped cream and toasted bread.

ANTI-INFLAMMATORY SPICES

• Basil

• Capers

• Chilli

• Cinnamon

• Cloves

• Coriander

• Cumin

• Garlic

• Ginger

• Lovage

• Oregano

• Rosemary

• Thyme

• Turmeric

• and many more!

I become a seed and nut eater and also buy lots of dried fruit, with favourites like goji berries, dried apricots, dried plums, figs and cranberries. Little delicacies.

I put all these little things in plastic jars in a row at home.

My usually good-natured husband bangs around angrily among all the new jars that are crowding out his tubes of caviar, fig marmalade and cheese, when he’s in his home-economics-teacher mood. We start having new types of arguments. About foods in the cupboards. What goes where? It is not dignified but it is the new reality at home.

I also learn to make more food than I need.

Apparently, this is called ‘food prep’ in bodybuilder language. You’re prepping food when you grill long rows of chicken thighs, for example, and save them in the freezer. Or boil sixteen eggs at once. Or make a big batch of vegetable stew at a time.

Rita thinks I should cook in bulk twice a week so that there’s always something at home that’s easy to serve. I wonder if I have the time, but I soon discover that it doesn’t take more time to make food in advance. It takes exactly the same amount of time, sometimes even less. But the difference is that you eat better when you’ve planned better.

But what if you’re not eating at home? This will be a big challenge for me. With work in several countries and with children who are studying or working abroad as well, the year includes many days of travel. At such times, I’ll set off early, on crowded morning flights where they serve sandwiches packed in plastic and a cup of coffee, and return late on other planes, where they serve even more sandwiches in plastic and more coffee. Food on the go, food in canteens, meals with clients – always on the road to somewhere.

How will I manage this?

It will be especially hard when I’m headed out on a really long trip to a completely different corner of the world, where I might be able to get a few more leads to how all the remarkable things I’m experiencing actually fit together.

Ayurveda is the holy science of life and serves the whole human being. Both in this life and the next one.

– Charaka, the father of Indian medicine, c. 300 BCE

4. HEAL

When you travel to India, the plane flies through the night and over the Indian Ocean.

On this night, there is so much turbulence that the red safety belt sign never turns off. No food or drinks can be served, and the toilets are closed for hours. Luckily, I’ve learned to bring food with me. Little cherry tomatoes, almonds and protein bars become my salvation when the food trolley is chained down all through the shaky trip.

We land in Mumbai early in the morning. I see an older woman in a sari leaning on her son’s arm. She looks pale and worn out from the trip. We all desperately want to use the bathroom. But I’m continuing on and take the bus to the domestic terminal. It’s been a few years since I was last here. The development has been rapid.

What was then like a sea of walking people now consists more and more of people on motor scooters, often carrying two or three people. Young women dressed in saris sit behind the men in their white shirts and black gabardine trousers. The women sit sideways, sidesaddle, with a tight grip on the waist of the person in front; they travel at high speed on the road between terminals. Through the bus window I watch this bustling city pass by.

India has everything, extra everything, of everything.

More colours and more joy, but also more pain and a vaguely menacing feeling. The poverty hits you like a blow to the gut. We pass slum districts where little children play among piles of rubbish and puddles of brown water. But beyond the poverty, there are many other aspects to India.

India has one of the world’s most sophisticated and cohesive systems of integrative medicine. It’s called Ayur-Veda in Sanskrit, the ancient Indic language that was spoken by India’s conquerors around 2000 BCE and is distantly related to all the languages of Europe, even our Nordic ones. Veda is basically the same as our word for wisdom, and ayur means life, youth and health. When I was working in India, people explained this to me as the eternal and genuine knowing.

I’ve been invited to a course especially for women. It’s a leadership course, but Ayurveda treatments are also included. Might I find more knowledge there?

I’m going to head to one of India’s most advanced health spas for Ayurveda, outside Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of the state of Kerala. The name of this city is almost unpronounceable. I just have to cross my fingers and hope that I’ve booked a flight to the right place.

When I arrive, I get to meet a doctor.

An Ayurvedic doctor is not like a medical school doctor, like the ones we are used to in Europe. She does take my blood pressure and measure my pulse. She is also professional, with a white jacket over an exquisite sari in blood red and gold. She asks me about any apparent diseases and ongoing medication, after having first asked about my medical history and past surgeries.

But that’s where the similarities end.

I get a questionnaire with forty questions. What kind of food do I like the most? What kind of exercise do I do? Which smells and sounds do I react to? Digestive habits are extensively handled, as are sex drive, sleep rhythm and the colour and intensity of my dreams. The doctor looks through the questionnaire and makes some remarks to her assistant.

‘Sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.’ She nods meaningfully.

The doctor creeps closer to me and suddenly peers up my nose at very close quarters. She listens to my voice and my way of talking. She takes my pulse for a long time and gently rotates my hand on my wrist.

Then the last question.

‘You like bitter tastes?’ she asks again.

‘Yes, I do,’ I say, thinking of my favourites: tea, Campari and rocket.

‘Vata-pitta,’ she tells her assistant.

Both of them nod solemnly. A decoding of this follows.

Ayurveda describes the human being as consisting of three basic elements, or doshas in Sanskrit. Vata is the creative and innovative aspect of a person. Pitta is the organised and structured leader aspect. Kapha is the warm and integrating element in all of us. We have all three of these aspects in us, but in different amounts – partly based on our innate constitution but also varying by season, climate and during different phases of life.

If you have stronger vata-pitta, like I do, it means that these elements are more prominent. It also implies that you more easily succumb to illnesses that are linked to these so-called doshas when in a condition of imbalance and stress.

For vata, it’s the stomach that easily goes on strike, or the nerves. For pitta, it’s often the skin or the heart and lungs that are sensitive, and too much pitta stress results in increased aggression and perfectionism. For kapha, it can be weight gain, lethargy or depression.

A simple and quick test of which dosha is dominant is to imagine that you’re sitting in a traffic jam on the way to a meeting, and you’re late. The traffic is moving at a snail’s pace.

If you become anxious and think the client you’re going to meet will cancel your contract, the vatta element is dominant.

If you get angry, think that all the people around you are driving stupidly and are idiots, and you start giving the finger to people in other cars, you are a pitta.

Do you sit there calmly listening to the radio and figure that there’s no point in getting stressed out? You’re the kapha type.

Another categorisation is by basic body type. Vattas are naturally slim and have a hard time building up muscle, pitta is the natural athlete, and kapha is the one who gains weight the most easily and builds muscle mass.

Ayurveda is a life art that describes both health and sickness, my doctor tells me. It was born from the observations made by tens of thousands of Ayurvedic doctors over thousands of years, all over India, which used to consist of a number of independent kingdoms governed by a long series of maharajas and nawabs. All of these hundreds of thousands of observations about how the body and soul of human beings worked were put together into a larger system.

The interesting thing about Ayurveda is that disease is described as something that takes place in several systems simultaneously, when too much total stress gathers. (Again, the idea that stress triggers inflammation.) I wonder if this might be the first system in the world that actually describes how low-degree systemic inflammation affects people’s health. Perhaps a person who is seriously studying human health intuitively gets a feeling for inflammation and anti-inflammation?

That’s why I’m curious about Ayurveda, and during this week in sunny Kerala, my plan is not just to attend a leadership course but also to carry out some private studies and to investigate this ancient healing art more deeply.

When we in the West reach the stage where we begin to treat an illness, Ayurveda considers that it’s already too late. Illness must be met at the gate, early, before it’s had time to develop into a full-blown disease, by actively counteracting the stressors that make disease develop. But there are many differences between the two ways of looking at health.

‘The greatest difference is that we see that people are different. You in the West think that all people should have the same type of treatment,’ my Ayurvedic doctor tells me.

Instead of standard treatments based on the same criteria for everyone, and standard doses, they believe in individual treatment based on the needs that a person manifests through their vata, pitta or kapha type.

Could Ayurveda possibly be describing the very thing that modern medicine is now beginning to investigate: the idea that low-grade inflammation can lie simmering in the body and contribute to making a variety of diseases surface – and that the specific illness is determined by the type of innate vulnerability the individual has? Today medical researchers are beginning to talk about the need for individually tailored treatments, and all doctors know that people respond differently to different medicines. But Ayurveda has always held that point of view.

‘We also believe that food is medicine,’ says the doctor.

‘How do you know that?’

‘From observation,’ she says. ‘If you look at enough people and see the same things over and over again, you can see a pattern.’

In Ayurveda, food is even considered to be the most important medication, more important than everything else, simply because we humans eat so often and take in numerous nutrients through our food. These nutritional elements, my doctor says, have the full capacity to either build, protect and heal the body or create stress and disease.

This way of looking at the connection between food and health in many ways resembles the conclusions that conventional medical science is now beginning to draw. The difference is that most doctors who are educated in academic medicine and practice in Europe and the United States barely talk about this with their patients.

At the end of my first Ayurvedic medical visit, I receive my personal treatment schedule.

06:00 | walk
07:15 | meditation
09:00–12:00 | treatment
16:00 | meditation

In addition, we’ll be attending the course for several hours each day, and we’re given a number of different tasks to do during the week of the course, in groups or individually; we also need time to try to illuminate deeper sides of ourselves, or what our course leaders call our ‘shadow sides’, to find out how they affect our ability to work. All of this in one week.

That’s a lot to do, I think as I move into my simple bungalow, which is situated close to other little bungalows. You might describe them as an Indian kind of little cabin, in the middle of a semi-jungle of vegetation with abundant, large green leaves. For some reason, there are three ominous ravens watching over my patio. There is a plastic table and two aluminium chairs, and along the side, a washing line sways in the wind. The ravens come flapping in with their powerful beaks as soon as I’ve had breakfast the next day. They eat everything, even the paper label of the tea bag. I see a few monkeys climbing around a little farther away.

Here wild herbs grow everywhere you go, because the health resort grows all the plants that are used in treatment and food preparation. The next day I look at the elegant handwritten signs that have been stuck into the ground, to see if anything looks familiar. Abutilon indicum? Some kind of mallow-like herb? Acacia catechu seems to grow into a mighty tree. There’s a thin shrub with stubby little leaves that I don’t recognise at all. I ask a passing doctor in a white coat about the plant.

‘Ah, that’s a guggulu. Very good for haemorrhoids.’

People are sitting in a long line on the veranda of the treatment house, waiting. Women, men, Indians, Europeans, Asians, old and young. Doctors in white coats bustle around a large table on which a bunch of papers with scrawled notes are spread out. It’s time for the female head doctor to assign the therapists who work at the centre to those of us who have just arrived.

There are rows of Indian therapists sitting on the veranda. Almost all of them are women, dressed in yellow treatment clothes, a tunic and trousers – sweet, soft women with gentle smiles. The only therapist who’s standing is a completely different type of person. She stands with her feet widely planted and arms crossed over her chest. She has an eagle nose, a Clint Eastwood gaze – though with brown eyes – and she looks like she would take no prisoners. I hope I don’t get her, I think sulkily, like a schoolchild who doesn’t want to end up with the strict teacher.

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