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

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