JOURNEY TO CLEAN LIVING WAS WORTH THE WEIGHT
▶ After years of failing, one mum finally mastered the secret of better health, Panna Munyal writes
The beach has always been Rachael Sacerdoti’s happy place. Growing up, it’s where she spent the most time with her “always working” parents, when they took Sacerdoti and her three brothers on annual holidays to the likes of Hawaii, Phuket or Santa Barbara in California.
It’s where she makes a beeline for each time she’s back in Singapore, the country of her birth before she moved to “vitamin D-deficient” London by way of Los Angeles, Boston and New York.
It was also on a beach, in Bali, when she was 38, that the British-Iraqi transformation coach decided to shake up her own way of life, if only to “become a more involved mother” to her three children. When she jetted off on a family holiday to the tropical haven, she had no idea it would be the setting for a sea change to long-term happiness in every aspect of her life.
It came about as her brother Ben noticed with mounting concern that an 87kg Sacerdoti, body aching and short of breath, was having trouble keeping up with her active children – David was five, Rebecca four and Gabriella was one at the time. “You don’t look like yourself,” he remarked in what she looks back on gratefully as a one-man intervention with radical repercussions.
“Boom! That was the moment it dawned on me: people notice that I’m different,” Sacerdoti tells The National. “I had always struggled with my weight and health, but those words sparked something. The day I returned to London was the day I took my first walk around the block.”
The approach was uncharacteristic for someone with an all-or-nothing mentality, but the time had come to find a sustainable alternative to the methods resorted to in the past – dangerous weight-loss pills, every fad diet imaginable, bingeing and starving in turn.
“At my heaviest, I felt sad, lonely and angry, like I was caged and couldn’t break free,” she says. “When your feet and back can no longer support your body weight, you know you’re in trouble … I think the biggest thing was recognising that I needed to take baby steps.”
That initial excruciating walk gradually turned into a jog and then a run in the nearby park. The workouts, once furtively done behind a closed bedroom door for fear of anyone seeing, became sessions at the gym.
When the “magic began” and the weight dropped off – 25kg in six months with more to follow – Sacerdoti felt like a lioness released from captivity.
Along the way, she educated herself on macronutrients and undertook a personal training qualification. At a weight of 53kg in July 2020, she launched It’s So Simple, an online body and mind transformation course based on the four pillars of exercise, nutrition, accountability and community.
This goes some way to explaining why Sacerdoti, slimmed down and, brimming with energy, was on a beach again earlier this month jumping about in a celebratory dance next to a large “10k” scraped into a strip of sand on Tenerife.
“We have had only holistic growth from day one and I’m very proud of this,” she says. “Our community is super-engaged and this is what is important to me. I was celebrating them and not the milestone of reaching 10,000 Instagram followers per se. Though it is a big achievement.”
In essence, Sacerdoti wants to help other girls and women in ways she couldn’t help her younger self by ensuring that they are not alone or lacking the knowledge required to transform their lives. “I was never able to sustain healthy living because I didn’t know how,” she says. “This was the biggest contributing factor to me being the way I was for so many years.
“You can’t do what you don’t understand. Now that I understand, I own the changes.
“It makes me angry that nutrition is not taught in school, that resources are not available to teenagers who need them most to create good habits. I want so much to change that.”
She was born in 1979 in Singapore to Mavis and Frank Benjamin, both third-generation Iraqi Jewish immigrants regarded by Sacerdoti as her “guiding lights”.
The family became one of the most wellknown on the island after Frank, sensing a consumer swing towards sophistication and style, began to bring franchises of brands such as Lanvin, Gucci, Fendi and Guess to South-East Asia.
“I watched my parents put themselves out there to build their fashion company and, while I missed not having them around much when I was growing up, it was from them that I learnt you’re never too important to work hard. Everyone needs to do it, and so that is the way I have run my life, my business and my marriage.”
Sacerdoti recalls getting along well with her three older brothers in spite of the occasional brawl, all four largely brought up by a “fierce but full of love” warrior-like grandmother. Quality family time, however, was usually to be found on trips to beach destinations, Disneyland in Los Angeles and the ski slopes of Aspen. “We had lovely holidays,” she says. “My parents really spoilt us in terms of showing us the world.”
Perhaps because her sister died at the age of nine before Sacerdoti was born, the only surviving daughter of the Benjamins was wrapped in “cotton wool” for her formative years. “Being overly protected was a big part of my life,” she says. “There was a running joke about it in my family. I was the indulged one, the naughty one and mummy’s favourite, as my brothers used to say.
“But it was also difficult to have to adhere to different rules to your siblings. I feel like I matured late because of it, that I didn’t necessarily develop the independence that comes from being able to go out and make mistakes. I just never had a good sense of self.
“Because there wasn’t much outside stimulus to help me grow, I struggled with feeling like I could achieve anything. And also, because we are Middle Eastern, it adds another layer – that of a conservative, traditional background.”
Growing up, Sacerdoti had no concept of the amount of fat, calories or protein in the food on “free flow to us”, and a decades-long battle to control her weight began. That she eventually won the war is why before-and-after shots appear on the Instagram page of It’s So Simple in her quest to inspire other women dealing with the same issues she had faced. The premise of Sacerdoti’s programme is that weight loss is not rocket science, it is simple: stay in a calorie deficit by burning more than what is consumed. Many of the metamorphoses that It’s So Simple has brought about are captured in testimonials by hundreds of women around the world, from the UAE to Australia, Saudi Arabia to South Africa.
Her achievements are a source of pride for Sacerdoti, too, particularly on a post-pandemic internet awash with fitness coaches, but her husband Daniel never lets it all go to her head. The two got together when she was working in fashion advertising in New York after studying public relations and a psychology degree at Boston University. One day, a cousin rang with the news: “I’ve met your husband. Come to London, all right?”
When your feet and back can no longer support your body weight, you know you’re in trouble … RACHAEL SACERDOTI
Body transformation coach
“I knew I was going to marry Daniel after 20 minutes of meeting him,” Sacerdoti says. “He is my perfect balance. He is serious but he’s got a great sense of humour. He is very, very responsible and extremely down to earth. So sometimes when I can get a bit dramatic, he anchors me.”
Daniel, not a gym-goer, has gradually come around to the idea that ingredients cooked in the air fryer taste as good as those done in a vat of oil – “so little goals”, Sacerdoti notes wryly – but takes great joy in pillorying his wife’s company.
On an Instagram account called It’s So Complicated, the antithesis of her brand, he can be seen making triple-fried French fries and pizza dough with the flour flying everywhere, or asleep sprawled on the sofa.
“While he’s clearly mocking me, he is my number one supporter in the business and our home,” he says.
The couple and their children, now 10, nine and six, live in Queen’s Park, London, in an elegant house sometimes hired out as a set for films like the action thriller London Has Fallen. Daniel’s prowess as a father is another boon. “Mum’s guilt is real. It’s a struggle because I was very hands-on with my children
– I was mother, cook, nanny, driver, everything – up until I started working again,” she says.
“There was no settling-in period in my business, it went from zero to 100 overnight, until there came a point when I realised I missed my kids. It did bother me that it was a nanny or driver who fetched me from school when all my friends were getting picked up by their mums. But I think in those days, mothers don’t think about what mothers today do. The expectations and output are different now. That doesn’t make me a better mum than my own. It just makes me different.
“I am lucky that Daniel is a wonderful father, who’s helping me bring up the children so beautifully.”
Sacerdoti has managed to drip-feed age-appropriate messages about the importance of exercise and good nutrition to the children for whom she embarked on the fitness journey in the first place.
These days, she wakes early five or six times a week, drinks a pre-exercise espresso and heads to the gym for high-intensity interval or resistance training to an upbeat playlist of music.
Then a steady flow of vanilla rooibos tea and healthy meals fuel a frenetic workload that might result in Sacerdoti hunching over a laptop or phone for hours on end if not broken up by a 10,000-stepsa-day regimen. “Routine is my saviour,” she says.
Asked if she ever lets loose, Sacerdoti outlines her 80:20 split approach to sticking to a healthy lifestyle. It is this that allows the occasional indulgence of a spoonful of her guilty pleasure: Nutella.
“I am so happy I can eat it now and enjoy it in moderation without feeling guilty or having a binge episode and then starving myself,” she says. “How much of a gift is that?”