'Life is not fair': Dr Eva on fat prejudice and body confidence

I would easily put on a half-stone over Christmas,” says Dr Eva Orsmond. “And it shows on me.” She puffs out her cheeks to show me how it would show. “Right now,” she says, “I’m the lightest that I’ve been in 10 years, so I need to have a serious chat to myself there [about not putting the weight back on again], because I was worried that I was doing the same thing that I warn my clients about. You put on 2kg to 3kg, and then you get so comfortable with it that you put another two or three, and then, the next moment, you’re a stone over. And a stone is hard to lose. It is commitment.”

“Obviously,” Eva adds with a laugh, “I have the benefit, the incentive, that if I don’t listen to my advice, I would lose my job.”

What Eva calls a benefit, other people might consider a burden. The prospect of losing one’s job because of one’s weight might also be called, in some circumstances, discrimination, but, as we all know about Eva at this stage, she’s not one for such sensitivity. In fact, Eva is what could be called intolerant of anyone who can’t or won’t lose weight.

This is a woman whose business is weight loss, through her clinics, her time on RTE’s Operation Transformation and now, as she and her husband, Wyatt, put the finishing touches to their 21-bedroom ‘health hotel’ in Portugal. She hasn’t got where she is today by mincing her words. Eva has got where she is today through sheer Finnish frankness, and she’d be mad to change her ways now.

Please log in or register with Independent.ie for free access to this article.

Log In

New to Independent.ie? Create an account

The strings to her bow have Eva exhausted, however, not something she happily admits. She is back and forth between the four Orsmond Clinics in Ireland and the hotel in Portugal, and also had her first Finnish Christmas in many years, with her mother, sister and extended family.

She tells me it’s the first Christmas she’s felt “really grown-up”, as she felt able to tell her mother that she’d only stay with her for a few days, before relocating to her sister’s house, just in case they started fighting. That felt manageable, Eva says, though the lure of traditional Finnish Christmas food presented more of a problem.

“I’ve recently managed to get a few kilos off,” she says, adding that she’s currently 58kg. “But we have this dark rye bread in Finland. You toast it and put a nice salty butter over it, and it’s divine. I love it.”

Stop making excuses As we ponder New Year’s resolutions and pounds gained over Christmas, Eva has both comforting and kick-starting things to say. First, we need to get things in perspective, and then stop making excuses.

“Somebody was asking me about the Christmas dinner,” she says, “and how to count how many calories would a person have on Christmas Day. And I said, ‘I think it’s wrong to start counting Christmas-dinner calories. Because, like, honestly, it is not one day [that is the problem]. It’s what’s happening all around it.”

It’s the picking, she says, and the snacking and the loose meal times over weeks and weeks, and it’s the alcohol which, particularly in Ireland, is built into everything. “And you need to feed those few extra drinks the next day,” she says, not actually using the word ‘hangover’. “There’s no other way. You need to eat carbs, and that adds up if there are lots of nights out and lots of days.”

A planned regime is what’s required to lose that weight, however, and Eva has very little patience with people who moan about making a plan and sticking to it.

“It’s hard work and it’s not sexy,” Eva says bluntly. “People come to me and I tell them what they need to do, and they worry that they will become obsessed with weight and everything they eat. I tell them, ‘Yes! That is what you have to do!'”

That is what you have to do, Eva explains, when you have her years of experience of working with people with weight issues and obesity and you see the damage it does. She comes at this strictly from a health perspective. Her long preoccupation has been with the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, and its link to the “visceral fat”, which sits around our middles.

That link, Eva has always been at pains to explain, is why she takes no prisoners when it comes to weight, whether it be an overweight child or adult. It’s not about vanity or sparing people’s feelings, she says, it’s about preserving one’s health, even saving one’s life.

And in some cases, you are pushing an open door when it comes to getting people to take charge of their health, she explains, while with others, it’s a brick wall.

“What I see,’ says Eva, “is a polarisation of the situation. You have those people who are becoming more and more aware, and really ready to do anything, then you have those who don’t care at all. And then there are these body-confident people, who don’t see and won’t see.”

If you imagine Dr Eva’s gone quiet in recent years, or has mellowed since her days on Operation Transformation, where she caused consternation by telling a team leader to “cop on”, then think again. Or ask her what she thinks about the social-media march of body confidence, which promotes being happy and at ease with one’s body, no matter what its shape or size.

“I really have a lot to say about that,” Eva says. “This is ridiculous, these young girls who act like a small little thing, and actually they are two or three times [the size of an average] woman. It’s, you know, ‘I am confident in my body’, and that’s great that you’re confident, but the whole thing is that this is a disease called obesity. It has consequences, and as a young woman already putting weight on at this age, what about if you fell pregnant? That’s immediately a risk factor for the child and yourself, and good luck to them in future years to take it off – there’s too much there.”

She feels that this form of positive enforcement is doing more harm than good, because “there are so many of them now who are that size, it’s not unusual any more”.

There is a danger in that attitude, however, that you fall into characterising slim people as good and overweight or bigger people as bad.

“I don’t think we’re characterising them as they are bad,” Eva says. “But it’s very difficult not to think that as overweight and obese that you wouldn’t have certain – sorry, this might be lost in translation, English is not my mother tongue – not lazy, but a person who doesn’t want to put as much effort in.”

She talks about studies of interview situations, where a slimmer but less qualified person was more likely to get a job than a person with more qualifications, but also more weight.

“This is what we as humans tend to do,” Eva says. “Yes, it’s great in a world that you try to be equal. But life is not equal. Life is not fair. Even the whole carry-on of the last person in a race getting a better prize [than the person who won] – that’s great, but what happens when you come to the real world? Life is not fair.”

The Portugal adventure This all sounds very hard-hearted, but to Eva – and, she says, to Finnish ears – it just sounds sensible. If you want good health yourself, if you want good, healthy children, you have to have discipline. And you have to keep off the visceral fat.

She tells this to parents who come to clinics with their children, and, she’s always been honest about it, Eva also tells this to her own sons, Christopher and Evan. The boys are young men in their early 20s now. Christopher is working in an investment company in Limerick, and Evan graduated from engineering before Christmas.

Christopher is the son, Eva says, with a laugh, she “made obese before he was six months old,” though he is lean and athletic now. Evan is the son about whom she used to talk on the TV and radio as having to watch his tummy. Or, rather, Eva used to watch his tummy and keep it in check.

People accused her often of micro-managing her boys, and she was massively involved in nurturing them into conscientious, accomplished and hard-working people. The fact that this phase of life is over does not seem to bother her, though. In fact, you could say that the Portugal project more than filled that gap. After all, as Eva points out, she and her husband Wyatt could not have taken on the hotel, Solar Alvura, if the boys were still small.

Life is full of twists and turns, Eva says, and a big project helps to keep you feeling alive and vital.

Interestingly, the first time I interviewed Eva Orsmond, she and Wyatt had separated after 21 years of marriage. Then, last year, I met her again, and they were back together. The signs that a reunion was possible were there in the first interview. She said that her friends kept asking if she thought it was really over; she talked about loss of romance but deep friendship. They remained business partners in the clinics, though. Wyatt is an engineer.

Last year, they were back together and embarking on the Portugal adventure. In fact, it was the Portugal adventure that had brought them back together. They looked at it first as business partners, and then, somehow, the personal partnership was back on. It was a new phase, but one to be enjoyed together – with the bonus of TV cameras along for the ride, filming everything for the forthcoming three-part fly-on-the-wall documentary for RTE.

The experience has not necessarily been cementing, Eva says with a laugh, when I ask if it’s been a boon to their marriage.

“Talk about a roller coaster,” says Eva. “Of course it’s been a wonderful time, but it’s been extremely testing.

“You have to understand it’s quite stressful,” she says of taking on a massive building and business project, such as their hotel, which was a ruin when they bought it. “It’s fine when you have the honeymoon period, when you have no water, no electricity and you just think about this huge place that you own, and it is wonderful, and it’s warm, and nice over there for camping on the grounds. But when the weather gets a little bit cooler and then you wake up in the morning and there is no toilet, and there are ants everywhere – then, it’s not fun any more.

“So it’s just tests your patience and that’s when I would express my feelings. But the whole thing is that, you know, I always like to say what I have to say and move on,” says Eva.

I think she means that there might have been cross words from time to time and, when I then ask what it was like to have a camera crew along, this seems to be confirmed.

“In a way, I was used to cameras,” she says. “And also it was the same team all the time, so that was good and bad, because then you forget about them and they get a little bit too much [material].”

“I remember one particular time, we were totally exhausted,” Eva continues. “And I was a bit pissed off with Wyatt about something and I said to the cameraman, ‘Do not film this!’ And the director was OK with that, but then she said, ‘No, sorry, this is too good to miss’. So I’m now worrying how much of that is going to go in.”

All of it, we agree, and Eva laughs heartily, more than able to laugh at herself and pragmatic enough to see that it’s all good publicity for the hotel.

Unique destination She hopes it will be a unique destination – it is five kilometeres from the beach, with small but luxurious rooms, and a meticulous programme of facilities and treatments to suit specific health, weight-loss and detox needs.

She plans to spend two-thirds of each month in Portugal and the rest of the time in Ireland, maintaining her clinics. Eva admits she now gets itchy feet if she stays in either place too long, but Wyatt has been a consistent presence in Portugal, while also working on other major engineering jobs in Ghana and Jamaica.

“I had such a romantic picture when I got into the project,” says Eva of her ignorance/innocence of what they took on with the hotel. “And it would have totally failed if it wasn’t for the fact that we had a steady business here in Ireland. That kept us going, but Wyatt has been amazing and knows so much, and took the right attitude and rose to the challenge.”

She would have been “sent to prison”, Eva says, if she’d been the one on-site all the time, and driven to speaking her mind.

Even though she doesn’t admit this, it seems to have been a bonding exercise for her and Wyatt. They went through a very sticky financial patch last year, she says, and though they got through it stronger, it was very difficult while it was going on.

“When you have been with somebody for so long,” she says, “of course there must be a good friendship, but that romantic thing can fade away, particularly when there are challenges.

“But, but then other things come and take that place of romance, and we have always been really good friends. I’ve always appreciated intelligent people, and definitely Wyatt is super intelligent. But what I’m just saying, because obviously I’m sure many people will be watching this programme and be thinking they’d always want to buy a house or castle or something, you really need to make sure that it is right, because we only have that many years to live in this life, so it’s important to make it really right.”

The hotel will open 11 months of the year, says Eva, and, she hopes, will offer boot camps and digital-detox programmes down the line. The next phase, she says, is the interiors and fixtures and fittings, and small details, which she hopes will be like playing dolls’ house. She hopes, she says with a laugh.

In truth, she admits, the reality may be far from that playful hope, but Eva will cope with that. She can commit to it, because commitment is what Eva Orsmond is all about.

‘Dr Eva’s Great Escape’ begins tonight at 9.30pm on RTE One

 

Edited by Kip Carroll

Photography by Chloe Brennan

Source: Read Full Article