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.’
