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
