HOW I FOUND LOVE AGAIN
... with my ex-husband
LOVE is a lot like weight control — you have to work at it.
This was what toughtalking health expert Dr Eva Orsmond discovered when she split from her husband in 2016 after 21 years of marriage.
But their story didn’t end there. Lately, Dr Orsmond has been having romantic late-night swims and found herself in the first throes of love again. And who is this mystery man who has stolen her heart? The very man she left.
Dr Eva tells the Sunday Independent that she and Wyatt are back together and this time it’s different.
“I don’t think we would be where we are if we hadn’t had the clean cut,” she says.
“I think it was needed so that we could wake up and listen to the other person’s needs because what often ends up happening is that you can take another person for granted.”
Speaking about their reignited romance, she says: “Every evening now, we go for a swim. It could sometimes be 20 past eight but we still take the car and we go to the beach. We are 5km from the sea. And we go in just before the sun sets and it is just magical. And then we could go for drinks afterwards.”
She laughs as she adds: “That’s why I am carrying those few extra kilos.”
Maybe it’s the glow of love again but she looks better than ever. And she is back with a new reality show, Dr Eva’s Great Escape, produced by Tyrone Productions.
The cameras follow the Finnish doctor and her husband as they work at their marriage, while refurbishing an old hotel in Portugal to transform it into a retreat named Solar Alvura Health Hotel, where people can lose weight under her watchful eye.
“Their luggage is searched. There is no hiding and if they set a target that they need to lose, we will make sure they get there. There is no way that they can fail. I will be protecting you from yourself.”
The doctor, who has two clinics in Dublin, another in Galway and a recently opened practice in Cork, will divide her time between Dublin and Portugal and jokes that she is “still policing” Irish waistlines.
Her new passion is the fight against Type 2 diabetes: “It is ridiculous that in Ireland alone 10pc of the health budget is going towards the treatment of one single disease. It is not normal considering it’s a lifestyle disease.”
She adds: “All these Type 2 diabetics are in the chronic payment scheme and once you get your Type 2 diagnosis you get all your drugs free. If you were paying €200 or €300 a month, you would actually think about [your lifestyle choices].”
She also highlights the growing number of overweight mothers and stresses there is no excuse for a woman to get pregnant when she is over her healthy BMI range. “In my opinion, I think it is very selfish because you are putting the child at risk before the child is even born.”
She cites scientific evidence to show how overweight pregnant mothers can change the DNA of their growing baby, and says: “I don’t think that we should accept or make it so easy for people to say, ‘okay I am just going to stay like this because it’s comfortable’.”
Wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Truth: It’s more important now than ever’, it’s obvious Dr Eva is not going to soften her colourful advice for the snowflake generation.
But the hardest truths are most recently the lessons that she and her husband have had to face at home.
“Don’t take another person for granted,” she says. “When you start treating another person like they are a piece of furniture, that’s guaranteed there [things can go amiss]. And once you stop doing that, you look after them differently.”
Giving your partner quality “time” is another important lesson, she says. On love, she adds that “the extreme excitement chemical doesn’t last”.
“Long-term love is when you can tolerate someone even in situations where you are not comfortable.”
The couple have gone on two skiing holidays to rekindle their romance and Dr Eva is dressing up more at home and making an effort now for her husband.
She says that some of their daily stresses are easier now their young children have grown up.
In the meantime, she warns: “I don’t think anything in life comes easy. Everything important, we have to work on. I don’t want to say forever right now. The key is to take it day by day.”