Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  January is just a bunch of blank pages in my diary. New Year’s Eve I would spend alone – babysitting an infant. I’ve pulled up at a strange, silent junction in my life. There are a million interesting things behind me – and probably a million yet to come – but the present is a curious blank, non-time. Take a number and sit in the waiting room.

  Not eating would be a further excursion into this non-time non-zone. The thought comes, the one I have been trying to keep at bay: forget my physical health, this could be very bad for my mental health. How much of a crutch is food, giving me structure and something to look forward to, providing me comfort?

  Adrift in a sea of time, untethered from meals – can I cope with that?

  Dr Liu calls me in. He is a Chinese man of neat and dapper appearance in his middle years but whose precise age I cannot guess. He is also very slim. At certain angles, with his hair slicked back, he appears to gleam. Behind the reception area is a long series of rooms set up with massage tables and cabinets for acupuncture needles and scales. Chinese people in white coats move between the rooms.

  Dr Liu briefly explains the process I am about to undertake: during the first stage, lasting for about a month, the organs will cleanse and release toxins. Then stage two, also lasting for a month, is organ repair and recovery, while stages three and four are organ maintenance and balance. His manner is terse and watchful, yet also benevolent. He has a knowingness about him, like he has seen it all before and what is going to happen to you is okay.

  Some of the claims made in his literature are a little wild – for example, if you stick to his program you will live until you are 101 years old. This is quite unappealing. I like the idea of living until my mid-nineties but anything beyond that seems excessive, and since I am the only person I know who is doing the fast I would enter my hundreds friendless, my more toxic friends having died long ago. Dr Liu also promises that if you complete the whole detox your body will maintain its new, good optimum health (and your new weight) for the rest of your life – which I am also sceptical about. What if you go straight back to fast food, degustations and boozing? The fast – even though it is extreme – sounds like a form of cheating if you can eat whatever you want for the rest of your life.

  Yet his appointment book is full to bursting. He has five clinics across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Surely there is something here that works? In the brochure the clinic sends you before you start, your fears are pre-empted: ‘It is important to trust both Dr Liu and what is a tried and test [sic] program with thousands of advocates. There will be moments of doubt and weakness but by finishing the journey and remaining mentally strong there are significant long term health benefits.’

  The first step is assessing my general health. Dr Liu checks my pulse and observes my tongue, eyes and skin, before gauging how much oxygen is getting to my organs. I lie on my stomach as he swiftly heats up glass cups and puts them on my back. I know this is called cupping but have never experienced it before. There’s a sort of strange, suction-y sensation on my skin as the cups are set down. He leaves the room and I can feel them pulling at my skin, like he put the nozzle of an almost-broken vacuum cleaner on my back. When he takes them off, Dr Liu shows me my bare back in a mirror. Gross. I look bruised, or like I’ve had a terrible spray tan.

  ‘You are highly toxic,’ says Dr Liu. ‘These marks show that the oxygen is not reaching your organs.’

  ‘What? What does that mean?’ I ask, alarmed.

  Apparently there is a lot of fat around my organs, preventing them from breathing properly. My fat is sort of crushing them.

  The way Dr Liu describes it, this isn’t the roll of fat on my stomach – this is fat in my body that is crowding my liver, kidneys and spleen. Thin people have this fat as well. Invisible fat. Invisible but deadly. Exercise won’t shift it – not the fanciest gym, not the best personal trainer, says Dr Liu. Only a deep detox will work. If I follow his program, and clean my body from the inside out, eventually my organs will be able to breathe and function properly again. According to Dr Liu’s promotional materials, ‘The key factor in how much weight you will lose is the measure of fat around the stomach area. On average you will expect to trim 5 to 10 centimetres from your waist and 5 to 8 kilograms of weight in the first fourteen days.’ This will ‘improve both your immune system and general metabolism. By default your body will adjust to an ideal short and long term weight and body shape for a healthier, longer life.’

  For the majority of the clinic’s fasters, it really is all about the weight, when all is said and done. The program says it’s about organ function, but weight – shedding it, dropping it, burning it, losing it – is the endgame. The number on the scales is your measure of success or failure – and in the curiously empty, strange and suspended zone that is your life while you are on the detox, anchorless in a world without mates or meals, it’s the number on the scales that is the main motivation.

  Of course weight will be lost. You’re not eating.

  But the no-food thing is not negotiable. In its own way, that very clear boundary means that the diet should be easier. You can’t eat anything. So you eat nothing. Milder detoxes that involve elimination – no wheat, sugar, meat, dairy, alcohol or caffeine – can be easy to cheat on or at least renegotiate with yourself. This cake uses agave, which is not real sugar, so I’ll just eat that, or this smoothie only uses a dollop of yoghurt – which won’t really hurt – so I’ll order that. When you are forbidden to eat anything, everything is cheating. And if you cheat, there is a feeling – a very strong feeling – that somehow Dr Liu will know. He emits a sort of spooky vibe, like he is there with you, in your home, as you negotiate with yourself whether to eat an almond.

  But all this is ahead. Right now there is just fear and anticipation. Excitement, even. And there are the scales. There’s no need to be scared – you may never weigh this much again!

  Dr Liu watches impassively as I strip off to my underwear and step on those electronic scales that weigh you to the precise decimal point. I had been very careful not to weigh myself in America. I was in a beautiful northern-hemisphere magical thinking – winter when it should have been summer, night when it should have been day; I was eating like a thin person with the metabolism of a teenager but actually swelling up like a balloon. Now it was time to wake up from the magical thinking.

  Woah. Okay. I’m awake now. That number is kinda large. Maybe it was the latte? The large latte.

  But no matter – it has begun. I am to return to the clinic every day for weigh-in, massage and acupuncture – and the collection of more boxes of herbs. The daily treatment, according to Dr Liu’s materials, is designed to help your body release built-up toxins and fat more quickly and easily. ‘Without daily treatment,’ the brochure says ominously, ‘you are unlikely to cope with the 101 Wellbeing Program.’

  Wellness blogs frame the detox experience differently from my fears. It is not a hardship to be endured; rather I am giving my body a lovely holiday in which my organs and digestive system can just lie around the proverbial swimming pool and relax, order some nachos and put it on room service. Our bodies work hard: hours and hours a day digesting, breaking down, redistributing, burning, storing and expelling food and drink, pharmaceuticals, skincare and street pollution, fire retardants on sofas, etc. You are essentially an eating and shitting machine (or as the rock group TISM would have it, ‘You eat, you shit, you die’). When you’re not forcing it to enact this endless loop of digestion, your body can get around to doing other things – chores it has put off because it’s been too busy. This is the cleaning bit that is so desirable these days. This cleaning and these chores might include repairing old wounds, cleaning out dead or diseased tissue and using these cells for fuel, pulling out toxins from tissues – like old medications or recreational drugs you had years ago – and processing them, repairing muscle damage, cleaning up scar tissue, expelling the excess mucus that hangs around in your body, protecting cells, removing all the old bits of
meat and gristle that have been stuck to your colon wall for decades and draining you of all the excess fluid inside of you, being useless.

  Jared Six, an artist who blogs about clean living and fasting, subscribes to this belief. He writes:

  The best analogy that I can use to describe fasting is to imagine that a grocery store closed for a week but all of the employees still showed up to work as usual that week … Every inch of the floor could be cleaned and polished, all of the walls could be re-painted, all of the old electrical wiring could be stripped out and replaced with faster and more energy efficient wiring that would eventually save the store a lot of money in the long run, and when the week was over it would look like a brand new store on the inside and they could have a ‘grand re-opening’.

  A few years ago in the Philippines, chasing a clean body, I’d had my blood tested and they said the platelets showed the undesirable profile of a lifelong meat eater. To cleanse me, they quickly put me on a raw, vegan diet, and I spent the rest of the week eating shaved zucchini trying to pass itself off as pasta.

  And it wasn’t just meat. I was also an occasional smoker, regular drinker and a person who has tried Valium, LSD, hash, ecstasy, MDMA, cocaine, speed and marijuana. My store – to use Jared Six’s analogy – was like one of those two-dollar shops with a storekeeper who was also a bit of a hoarder. There was cheap plastic crap from China clogging up the aisles, stuff was piled to the ceiling, and there were things shoved to the back with dust and dirt all over them that no one had looked at for years. The clean-up – such as it was – would be gruelling.

  *

  After I am weighed, Dr Liu gives me his mobile number and tells me to contact him at any time during the program if I have questions or concerns. The receptionist hands me the boxes of herbs, which have been made up especially for me – like a prescription. It is all the food I need for the next two weeks. They are heavy – so heavy that I need to make three trips on the bus to bring them all home. I am to drink the herbs, which have been liquefied and placed in individual sachets (like large packets of soy sauce), three times a day.

  When it’s time for dinner, I drop the contents of a sachet in a saucepan of hot water. Apparently they are more palatable heated up. I probably should be more concerned that I am putting something in my body whose ingredients are unknown. Instead I focus on the odour. It’s cloying and medicinal, and smells like I’ve wandered deep into a woodland where an animal has died. Then the taste … imagine swigging from a flat beer the morning after a party and discovering that there are ten cigarette butts floating in the bottom. It is rank. But Dr Liu has assured me the herbs will contain all the nutrients I need to get through the next fourteen days without dying.

  *

  Researching fasting, I find old blogs from people who live in northern California, in the woods, and haven’t eaten for like … ever. Scrolling down long, long pages of sans serif fonts and late-1990s HTML is both encouraging and alarming. Some of the blogs have pictures that look like conceptual art, but on closer inspection are the contents of very full, very messy toilet bowls. They have advice on DIY enemas and recipes for fast-breaking vegetable broth. They explain their shit to you in loving detail – its shapes, texture and odours.

  Then I find a fascinating article in Harper’s from 2012. It asks and tries to answer questions that keep on coming up for me – particularly in weeks two and beyond of the detox. Does fasting or detoxing have a healing mechanism, just like sleep? Is abstaining from food the path to vigour? And can you reverse some aspects of the ageing process through fasting and detoxing?

  I am intrigued about what could happen to my body, apart from weight loss. There is a lot of mystery around it. How, for example, does detoxing affect metabolism long term? Dr Liu said little to clarify what is actually going on inside my body when I am starving it.

  I find other first-person accounts of long detoxes and these read like wild, primitive experiments that are on the frontier of something, the way early researchers recorded their experiences with LSD. We don’t know why this is happening to our bodies, or how – but this is what is happening. Candace Chua on her wellness blog and the late David Rakoff on This American Life (as well as Steve Hendricks in Harper’s) went before me and detailed, imprecisely, lyrically, with wonder and bewilderment – what happened to their bodies, minds, relationships, work and emotions while they fasted for long periods of time.

  Any results were of course impressionistic – not scientific. As it is here with me.

  *

  Day one of any diet and you’re gung-ho and ready to go. I’m no exception. I plan to stay inside (hide inside) all day so I will not encounter any food out there in the wild. It is December in Bondi – party time in a hedonistic place. Icy plunges into the sea off the rocks at Ben Buckler, the sun warming the grass, the sandstone glowing the colour of buttery chardonnay, the hot white sand and smell of oil and sunscreen and perfume, the heat and bare bodies, salty skin, barbecues and cold beers as the sun goes down …

  It seems an affront to nature to stay inside. I can see the ocean from my window – deep blue, vital and shimmering. Breakfast is the herbs, of course. I pierce the packet with a knife, sending the warm brown liquid shooting onto my chest – like lancing a particularly fetid boil. I drink the herbs in the manner of a tequila shot. It becomes apparent I will always need to have a chaser of water handy to wash the taste away. I like the action of shooting the herbs, how the motion of my arm, with my head tipped back and a chaser at my elbow, carries echoes from a more debauched recent past.

  The hunger I thought would appear on that first day doesn’t. I am too waterlogged to feel hungry. In addition to the herbs I am drinking black tea with a bit of honey, and a load of water. I sort of slosh around the house in a restless and agitated state, waiting for the hunger pangs to hit.

  I have only one thing to give the day – and all the days – shape: the visit to Bondi Junction to the clinic, where I am given traditional Chinese medicine treatment and weighed. Before I start the program, I am excited by the idea of a daily massage. It gives the whole enterprise a sort of day-spa, muzak, scented-oil indulgence. But I quickly discover this is not the case. The detox massage feels like being roughed up for your phone and wallet on a dark side street. The clinic workers pull at my legs and stomach, they press and they pinch, they knead me like a lump of dough and they stick their fingers deep into my stomach – presumably jiggling around my internal organs, as if loosening the jackets of fat around them. I come to dread the stomach massage even more than the needles.

  After the rough massage, fifteen to twenty needles are applied to my bruised stomach and head, around the temples and in my hair. I then rest for a bit on one of the massage tables. After the needles are removed, I am weighed. Then it’s home to drink my herbs, consume lots of water and rest. The next day, repeat, ad finitum.

  So what’s going on in my body in the early stages of the detox?

  On the first day, six to twenty-four hours after beginning the detox (known as the post-absorptive phase) insulin levels start to fall. Glycogen breaks down and releases glucose for energy and these glycogen stores last for roughly twenty-four hours. Then gluconeogenesis (literally meaning ‘making new glucose’) occurs in the next twenty-four hours to two days. This is when the liver manufactures new glucose from amino acids. Glucose levels fall but stay within the normal range – providing you are not diabetic. This is the body using the last of its sugar supplies before it switches into ketosis – the fat-burning mode beloved by body builders, anorexics and paleo devotees.

  On day two I discover I have lost a kilogram already – an even, satisfying one kilogram. ‘It’s working!’ I say excitedly to the receptionist. The neatness of the number bodes well. My friends – who are sceptical of my detox – aren’t so impressed. ‘It’s just water,’ they say of the weight loss. ‘You’re probably pissing like a donkey.’

  On day three I lose almost two kilograms – so that is almost three kil
ograms in three days. Is it still water?

  It’s good that progress on the scales is swift because week one without food is passing slowly, like a sickness or fever has taken hold. For the first couple of days I am restless, vaguely depressed and anxious. The jitters, muscle aches and intense headaches I put down to caffeine withdrawal. I’d been on three lattes a day and hadn’t tapered off. Everything is heavy; I can feel the energy leeching out of me, as if it were physical matter escaping my body. Small movements such as filling up the saucepan with water feel strangely laborious, like I have been pumped full of lead or injected with some sort of tranquilliser. Outside my window, the sun is too strong – that bright Sydney light, making everything both too stark and too washed-out all at once. I lower the shades.

  Yet, despite my lethargy, for the first few nights I can’t sleep, jacked up on whatever is in the herbs. I feel speedy – but maybe it’s the hunger. It’s ferocious, and my only respite from thinking about food is when I go to sleep. Even then my empty belly wakes me at odd times: 12:30am, 4am, 5:23am.

  In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes, ‘The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.’ And more now. It wants more now. Yet I am also aware how staged this all is – I’m not Ivan Denisovich starving in a labour camp, with no way of knowing if or when the hunger will end, if it will end with – and be the cause of – my death. I can stop at any time. It is resisting food and temptation, not genuine scarcity, that I face. I may as well be sitting on the floor of a larder. I am surrounded by food.