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