Carole Caplin – Being Lifesmart

Carole Caplin is nervous about our meeting. There’s the initial phone call to discuss the story angle, a pre-meeting at Lifesmart, her health centre in London, and then a reluctance on her part to get too involved in the health assessment they’re giving me. She wants the experience to be more about me and less about my perception of her.

I can’t say I blame her. I am, after all, a woman journalist. And Caplin’s had a bit of rough ride with those to date. Not all women journalists, mind. Working in the health and wellbeing sector for the past 20 years, she’s had rafts of men and women journalists as clients and friends. It’s just a certain few.

When she started out, Caplin was anything but nervous about the media. Her exercise classes and approach to health and fitness was attracting nationwide attention. As well as tripling the attendance at her central London fitness classes, which included yoga and pilates before their time, she did health seminars across the country for Tatler and Harpers & Queen, wrote for national newspapers and even co-presented a show on Talk Radio, discussing health issues.

Then, in 2002, it all came to a halt. Working for the prime minister’s wife, Cherie Blair, as a stylist and presumably lifestyle adviser (Caplin still won’t talk about their relationship today), she became embroiled in controversy when her then boyfriend assisted Mrs Blair in buying two flats in Bristol. The boyfriend turned out to be a convicted fraudster, and the press had a field day.

Together with a political backlash, Caplin’s relationship with Mrs Blair came under scrutiny. Who was she? What did she do? And what was this obsession with her new age techniques? Then stories started being printed, largely by women journalists, who called her bossy, manipulative, and a woman who could cast a spell over her high-profile, high-achieving clients.

What was Caplin’s response? Along with resigning from her work with Mrs Blair and focusing on her other clients, she waited for it all to pass. Except it never really did. Sue Croft, director of Consumers for Health Choice, who Caplin has helped with campaigning for positive supplements regulation in the UK, says: “She’s gone out on a limb numerous times for us, and other issues she believes in, and risks all sorts of ridicule. I get so angry because she is not the person you end up reading about.”

Put simply, Carole Caplin became an easy target. Her stance on campaigns was sniffed at, her health and wellbeing methods questioned, her personality was ridiculed and her looks were attacked. Originally, she told herself it wasn’t personal. “It felt like it, but then I understood that journalists are under huge stress to deliver in a certain way that they often don’t want to.”

“I’m averagely attractive, certainly not a cover girl, but I walk tall and make the most of myself. And I was having that used as a weapon against me in an incredibly undignified way”

When they continued writing about her, she began to feel differently. “I experienced unbelievable prejudice, particularly from women in journalism. I’m averagely attractive, certainly not a cover girl by any stretch of the imagination, but I walk tall and make the most of myself. And I was having that used as a weapon against me in an incredibly undignified way.”

It’s been seven years since then and Caplin feels she has come out the other side. It’s her work she credits with this. Throughout that period, and today, she’s still training and treating high profile clients beyond the glare of the media, still running health seminars across the country and still writing for newspapers intermittently. She now also works with an inner city school, teaching young people about their health and bodies early. And, of course, there’s also Lifesmart, her pride and joy.

It’s a unique and intriguing club with a holistic approach to health - all delivered under one roof. Weight, wellbeing, fitness and lifestyle issues are challenged in a variety of ways; through nutrition, personal training, massage, homeopathy, correctional exercise and more (see below).

Seeing its success now makes her glad she didn’t give up and go down other routes open to her seven years ago. These included taking part in ‘nutty’ reality TV shows, and leaving the country altogether. “I’d spent decades building up a fantastic business, doing absolutely what I love, and I thought ‘I’m not going to change that’,” she admits.

“The difficult stuff lasted a long, long time. Threat, terror, bullying to a degree, you’re just so out of your depth”

She decided to stay and fight the fear. And there was plenty to be scared about. “Threat, terror, bullying to a degree, you’re just so out of your depth,” she says about the backlash from the political and media world.

In fact, aside from her choice in former boyfriends, the one regret Caplin has about that time is not having more advice available. “The difficult stuff lasted a long, long time and no matter how much I loved my work, I still lived with fear,” she admits. “I was a single woman and [with more advice] perhaps might have been a little more assertive or gutsy when it came to dealing with aspects of the press. But I didn’t want any more embarrassment, so I made a judgement to hold back.”

One thing she has never held back on, and where most of her media criticism falls, is her clients’ health. “I’m incredibly bossy when people mess around with their health,” she admits. “But I’m bossy at a person rather than over them. I have a great relationship with my clients.”

She herself has learnt the hard way. Diagnosed with a curvature of the spine at 18, then a dancer, she decided to ignore the problem, got a sales and marketing job and went on to gain three stone over three years. Her body began to crumble, her skin went bad and her back was constantly out. But it wasn’t until her osteopath refused to treat her, because she wasn’t doing enough to help herself, that she realised something had to change. It kick started her life-long search for the holy grail of health, woke her up to the fact that it had to be an integrated approach – a balance of food, fitness and therapies - and, years later, led to the creation of Lifesmart.

It’s difficult to imagine Caplin as anything other than the slim, long-haired, smooth skinned 47-year-old she is now. But then, as with her media portrayal, there’s actually more to Caplin than meets the eye. She may be an advocate of holistic medicine now but she admits being ‘quite cynical’ initially, and ‘hated’ acupuncture enough in her 20s to not try it again for another ten years.

She’s also not always the super healthy human being she can come across as. Honest about having a ‘little bit’ of Botox and a nose job which helped her ‘stop covering up my nose when I thought someone was looking at me sideways’, she says: ‘“I’m not a do-gooder, no one can have a binge better than me and I’m a bit of lazy cow!

“But, while I do think people are remarkably different in their needs, there are core things that every individual needs that work – like hydration, sleeping for the right amount of time, in the right hours. So I try to stay on my game. I pretty much practise what I preach.”

The health assessment
Wheat, coffee, tea… these are the things I agree to cut out of my diet after my first visit to Lifesmart. I’m fit, relatively healthy, I enjoy salads and understand that carbohydrates can be a killer if you go overboard on them. But wheat? I’d never thought much about that before, nor about my one coffee or tea-a-day habit.

I’m not one of the biggest health offenders that Lifesmart’s nutrionist, Sarah Carolides, has come across, but it’s about the little changes I can make to help myself. As a nation, we eat so much wheat that it’s become hard work for our gut. Cutting it out and introducing Millet cereals and Quinoa increases my ‘food vocabulary’ and becomes easy to adopt.

It’s a similar story when I visit the correctional exercise coach, Dirk. After hours of testing and checks to ensure my body is aligned and well, I learn my right shoulder is raised significantly higher than my left. Put simply, it’s been shouldering the burden of my weaker, left side for years which is why I can’t stretch that arm as far and why I develop pains along my back.

As well as needing to adjust my breathing and posture, I also learn I have ‘forward head protrude’ from stretching my head too far when concentrating or using my laptop (with the rise in computers, this is a problem huge numbers of people will face in years). I’m given a small book of exercises that will help correct this.

Where would I ever have learned this? I don’t actually know. Lifesmart is unique in that the team not only focus on the problems you may be experiencing right now, but also look at what may affect you in the future. It’s about prevention as much as rehabilitation. And with a premises that is stylish, fully equipped and has a true Zen-like quality, it’s a unique health service I’d highly recommend.

Lifesmart is located Little Albany St, London NW1 4DY. Memberships start from three months. For more information, visit www.Lifesmart.co.uk or call 0203 214 5038

By Barbara Walshe