Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  ‘Let’s be clear,’ says Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University in an article in the Guardian. ‘There are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t.’ The respectable one, he says, is the medical treatment of people with life-threatening drug addictions. ‘The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed to have accumulated.’

  If toxins did build up in a way your body couldn’t excrete, the professor says, you’d likely be dead or in need of serious medical intervention. ‘The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak. There is no known way – certainly not through detox treatments – to make something that works perfectly well in a healthy body work better.’ So basically, if you have internal organs, you’re detoxing.

  But what is a ‘toxin’? Is it just a word that encompasses all our regrets?

  The word derives from Greek and is defined by Dorland’s Medical Dictionary as ‘a poisonous substance produced within living cells or organisms’ that can be capable of causing disease when absorbed by the body’s tissues. It can be something that enters the body (like lead or pesticide), it can be found in drugs and alcohol, and it can also be poison found in nature such as a bee sting or snake bite.

  But the word ‘toxin’, as thrown around in the wellness world, has come to have a fairly elastic meaning. It’s toxins that make us feel sluggish and toxins that result in disease. It is too many toxins that rob us of our vigour and strip us of our health. Toxins are to blame for many of our modern maladies – the things that make us feel slightly off but not downright sick: the tiredness and exhaustion, the trouble sleeping, the bloating and constipation, joint pain and stiffness, the greasy pallor, the fat around our middles that won’t go away (despite all the Pilates classes, all the stomach crunches), the dull hair, the weak nails, the colds and flus we pick up so easily at every change of season, the moodiness, the irritability, the low-level depression, the spikes of anxiety that wake us in the night. It’s the word we reach for in January with our bodies weak from partying, the slightly sweaty-sour taste of last night’s champagne still in our mouths, a receipt for a burger we don’t remember buying at 2am, eaten in the Uber we don’t remember ordering … In contemplating all of this we utter the words that signal our edge, our limit, our end point, our surrender: ‘I really need to detox.’

  I really need to detox.

  And we mean it, we really do.

  *

  Despite the faddishness of detoxing, fasting itself (or severe calorie restriction) has been around as long as humans have. We’re evolved for it, due to the long periods between food faced by early hunter-gatherer man. When abundance – or at least supply – was established, fasting was co-opted for religious, moral and health purposes. Jesus fasted, as did Buddha and Gandhi.

  Pre–Vatican II Catholic theology teaches that our mortal, impure bodies spend an unspecified time in the fires of Purgatory, where we undergo purification and healing. We need to undergo temporal punishment, according to the Roman Catechism, in order to cleanse ourselves from sin and start healing. All the major religions have incorporated some element of fasting into their catechism and calendars. Jews have Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Muslims fast during Ramadan. Many Christians fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and on Fridays during Lent. Hindus fast on festival days.

  Hunger is deeply linked to spirituality: fasting is seen by religion as a path to purity and enlightenment. It brings us closer to God. In being empty we are able to fully receive.

  In 65AD, the Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman and dramatist Seneca advised his friend Lucilius: ‘Set apart certain days on which you shall withdraw from your business and make yourself at home with the scantiest fare. Establish business relations with poverty.’ Fasting loosened attachments to comfort and material possessions:

  Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby. Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry she grants enough for our needs.

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Galen all advised short fasts to cleanse the mind and the body. ‘Instead of employing medicines, fast a day,’ advised Plutarch, the Greek biographer. Centuries later, Mark Twain agreed: ‘A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors … starvation has been my cold and fever doctor for fifteen years, and has accomplished a cure in all instances.’ A travel journalist I know recommends fasting for jet lag.

  Yet the science surrounding fasting is minimal. I wonder: is the lack of science due to the fact that fasting is free and cannot be monetised or patented? After all, there is no need to take a pill and no need to spend any money. No drug company in the world has manufactured something that mimics the effects of fasting. The basic act of not eating is uncommodifiable. What we pay for is people to make us hold the line – people, as I was to find out, such as Dr Liu.

  The detox I had signed up for was meant to last 101 days. The brochure promised that if I did it correctly, if I followed it to the letter, the program would restore my organs to their optimum working order, and I would live until I was 101 years old, disease free. But the regimen is not for the faint-hearted. It started with no food for fourteen days, before moving on to small amounts of solids: half a cucumber on the first day, 50 grams of poached chicken the next (think the size of three fingers), then an egg on the third day, then back to the cucumber. Repeat the cycle for the next sixty days. Black tea and water were permitted. The Chinese medicine, a mixture of herbs, was to be taken orally, three times daily. The herbs give you around 250 calories a day. So, although I might feel as if I was fasting (I was to eat nothing), Dr Liu has argued it’s not to be called a ‘fast’ – it’s to be called a detox, because of these calories taken in liquid form.

  The night before I start the detox, I go out. It’s one of those wild, hot Sydney nights where your table in the hotel beer garden swells and shrinks with people. Imagine a time-lapse video: we are three, then we are six, then we are fifteen, then we are twenty-five, then we are eleven, then we are six, then we are four; cigarettes and empty glasses; bowls of chips; ice melting too quickly in the bucket, the wine bottles swimming and bobbing in a warming world.

  Everyone is home for the summer. I am with Erik, Nick, Patrick and Joel. We are at the hotel, then we’re at an artist’s studio drinking whiskey and sitting on tins of paint, then we’re at Oporto on Broadway and it’s 3am and a man at the next table slides off his chair and sinks to the ground like his heart has just stopped.

  Booze and parties still have their allure, but the allure is full of complications. I question whether I should be in Oporto at 3am; I stare at the man on the ground, thinking slightly dispassionately, slightly freaked out, that the difference between him and me is probably only one more drink. We are both here at 3am, tearing through the burgers like animals.

  Yet earlier in the night, on the eve of my fast, I thought with a sureness that seemed so true and right: I could never give this up. I don’t want to give it up. I love this kind of night – a group that is just right, made up of people I love, and who love each other, who have history with each other: brilliant, witty, each a star that is forever circling around others in our constellation.

  It would be great, it would be so great, if only I could leave the party at 10pm, when it’s in full swing. Instead it’s just one more pub, just one more drink, yes to the cigarettes, yes to the shots at the bar, yes to the dram of whiskey, yes to the next place. I can never stop before the party stops.

  Outside Oporto, waiting for an Uber, the sirens and swaying groups and taxis streaming past, I try to put some distance bet
ween me and the slumped man. Every atom of him is not every atom of me, for tomorrow things are going to change. I will be detoxing. And the detox will be a sort of moral excoriation, self-flagellation, a redress, a ferocious kind of back-burning that will run across the organs I’d abused. I’ll be scorching something in order for it to grow again, refreshed and renewed. And at the end I would emerge – clean.

  *

  What I should have done is tail off gradually.

  I should have cut down on caffeine a week – or ideally two – before such an extreme detox. The same with alcohol, meat, sugar, fast food and large portions. Smaller portions would have shrunk my stomach a bit. A detox doctor I meet later in Thailand tells me he puts all fasters on a no-protein, no-dairy, plant-based restrictive diet in the two weeks before they arrive, so the shock on their system when they stop eating is not so great.

  Easing my body into the no-food thing would have helped it adjust. Instead I was going to feel like a plane suddenly dropping from 6000 feet to the runway. The landing was going to be rough. But I cling to my pleasures for as long as I can. In an echo of those more primitive detox clinics – the ones for the addicts – I turn up at the clinic with a hangover and a large, strong takeaway latte, determined to take my drugs of choice with me as close to the threshold as we are allowed to go.

  The clinic is on level four, on the way to nowhere. You do not go to this part of the mall by accident – you go because you have an appointment, because you need something about your body fixed. Run by a Chinese medicine practitioner, Dr Shuquan Liu (his surname eerily prescient of where I would be spending much of my time in the later stages of the detox), the clinic is next to a botox place and looks blank and anodyne. Around it hangs the odour of wet and decaying branches, which I would later learn came from the Chinese herbs being prepared in a back room. The shopfront could be selling anything, or nothing. In a strange way, it is doing both. People are forking out thousands of dollars in order not to eat (it costs around $2000 a week). We are paying for an absence to be enforced.

  At the clinic’s front desk is a receptionist and a glass cabinet. In the cabinet are identical boxes filled with liquid herbs, waiting for collection. Each box is decorated with Chinese calligraphy and has a person’s name on it. I discreetly try to read the names – my fellow fasters, doyennes of deprivation, soulmates in starvation. Maybe a celebrity is also doing the detox?

  I am incredibly nervous. I have been anxious about the detox for weeks now and have thought about it almost constantly: what would it actually feel like to stop eating? Can I handle it? I’ve had a few dry runs of not eating for a day or so – but using super-strong prescription-only diet pills to stop the hunger. My relationship with food has been quite uncomplicated. I eat what I want, when I want. I share the Hannah Horvath (of Girls) view of dieting, which is that there is too much going on in life to devote time and mental space to ‘food issues’.

  Besides, my job as a travel writer often requires me to eat rich, beautiful food in some of the best restaurants around the world. One assignment had me travel to Bologna and eat twelve different bowls of bolognaise over two days. Pig livers and spinal cords, mashed eye mixed with blood and spice, pasta as light as hair – all washed down with Modena red. On a recent trip to Georgetown in Penang we ate – in one day – nasi goreng for breakfast, elevenses of elderberry pop and curry puffs in a marquee in the Malaysian jungle, a ten-course degustation for lunch at a new French-inspired, all-white-interior restaurant, high tea of scones and cakes at the jewel of the colonial Pacific – the Eastern & Oriental Hotel, canapés and champagne at an art gallery, a multi-course Chinese banquet for dinner, then supper at a nightclub where you could snack on Malaysian hawker cuisine. In one day. How on earth will I find the willpower to not eat for fourteen days (not a scrap, not a crumb, not a morsel) and then another eighty-six on a highly restricted diet? The only way I can imagine lasting that long without food is if I am put into an induced coma.

  Mainly I am worried about any physical pain or discomfort that might arise from continual hunger. I also worry that I may die.

  The receptionist sits me down and hands me a copy of Harper’s Bazaar while I wait to see Dr Liu. In the magazine is an article by a journalist who has done the detox. She writes: ‘Word-of-mouth converts grimaced about this mysterious, vile-smelling concoction you had to drink three times a day, adding it was the best thing they’d ever done. They warned me it was torture and required willpower because of the no-food factor. But I had to know more.’

  I also have to know more. I wonder if I too will become a ‘convert’, ‘grimacing’ while swallowing the medicine.

  I have read other things about the detox. It first came to prominence when the now Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife, Lucy, did it. ‘I must say that I found the fast extremely informative because it made me realise I am in control of my own body and can control my appetite. It is a very good insight,’ Turnbull told the Global Mail. When Turnbull appeared in public after a break of several weeks, he looked dramatically different. People thought he had cancer. Since then he has kept the 14-kilogram weight loss off, but not publicly discussed the fast.

  It isn’t just Turnbull. There are other famous fasters, including members of Sydney’s business elite: Aussie Home Loans founder John Symond (20 kilograms), PR supremo Max Markson and game-show host Larry Emdur (10 kilograms). It is a detox for a certain high-achieving class of Sydney men – power lunchers with a paunch.

  Reading Rear Window in the Australian Financial Review or the Media Diary in the Australian you would see snippets of someone’s incredible weight loss. Was it gastric banding? Was it lipo? No, it was Doctor Liu.

  Dr Liu told the Daily Mail: ‘Everybody should be at optimum health but many people have poor levels … Food can’t process because organs aren’t working and they put on weight, they can’t think straight, they are tired. We fill the gap between current health levels and maximum health levels.’

  In response to Turnbull’s rapid weight loss, warnings were issued about extreme fasting. The Australian Medical Association’s vice president, Dr Geoffrey Dobb, told Seven News that starvation and herbal tea were not the answer to losing weight. ‘Any rapid weight loss can be followed by a rebound if people are unable to sustain the program they have entered into,’ he said. ‘It’s up to the individuals, but one would hope that people like Malcolm Turnbull use their influence responsibly.’ The Harper’s Bazaar writer white-knuckles it through the detox, although she has a few close calls. She must flee a black-tie banquet to avoid tempting platters of food. Starving, she returns to her hotel room and – in a scenario I will come to know well – looks at pictures of dessert on Instagram. But ultimately deprivation wins over desire and soon the weight is dropping off. She writes: ‘When my personal trainer catches wind of what I’ve done he’s furious. This goes against everything health professionals tell you, but I feel amazing.’

  I don’t have a furious personal trainer (instead I have a cautious and circumspect editor) but everyone is disapproving, intrigued and freaked out when I tell them I am not eating for two weeks and thereafter only permitted a small ‘meal’ of cucumber or an egg each day. My friend Erik applauds my move into this niche: a gonzo journalist for the wellness industry, a Breatharian version of Hunter S. Thompson. But many friends think what I am doing is unsafe. I’ve gone to my GP for advice – a sensible, lovely English guy who just shrugs and says, ‘Keep an eye on how you feel, come and see me if it gets weird.’ Then as a coda – and in an echo of Seneca – he mentions if anything, fasting will serve as a sort of moral instruction. ‘So many people in the world go hungry and we have so much. You’ll get to appreciate the true value of food, and what happens when it becomes scarce.’

  He takes my blood pressure, which is at its usual hysterically high reading, and fills out a script for a new batch of pills to keep it down. He also prescribes statins for high cholesterol. I am too young to be taking these drugs.

&
nbsp; When we have our first consultation, Dr Liu tells me that if I stick to his program, my blood pressure and cholesterol will lower dramatically and I’ll be able to go off the medication. In fact, this is the one piece of science that has been proven time and time again with fasting – it’s great for reducing hypertension.

  ‘Come and see me when the fast is over and we’ll see if anything has changed for you,’ says my GP.

  *

  At the counter of the detox clinic a man – late forties, corporate type, with a largish stomach and a well-fed – but not fat – face is negotiating with the receptionist. His issue is when to start – you see, he has this important dinner on, and he is going on holidays, then there is this crucial meeting, the sort of meeting you can’t do on an empty stomach. His body tells a story of success without discipline, cutting a lavish figure under an expensive suit, the receptacle of good dinners and corporate lunches, too much time spent at a desk or at the pointy end of the plane. Coffee in the morning to wind him up. Booze in the evening to wind him down. He probably had the warning from his doctor, the same one I got – high blood pressure, crazy cholesterol, the tarot cards turning over, forewarning a heart attack.

  But he is not looking into his future – he is looking at his diary and it is full of stuff. How can you detox when you have an important dinner coming up, or your own birthday party? Detoxing is what doesn’t happen when life gets in the way. There is never going to be a good time to start.

  My timing is okay. In fact it is probably ideal. I have no life to interrupt. I returned from New York a week ago with no job and no money. Undertaking a detox makes sense not only from a work and (possibly) a health perspective but also financially. Even if I wanted to eat, I can’t afford it. I’m flat broke. My credit cards are maxed out. And there is no money in the future – no cheque coming my way, no job to start, no rich relative who is just hanging on. As Seneca counselled Lucilius, a fast helps you ‘establish business relations with poverty’.