Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  *

  Detoxing for two weeks would be the most difficult thing I’ve done – but also the most interesting. Not only do you get to know your body in a different, fascinating and grotesque way, but the central place food and drink takes in our society is sharply illuminated when you take yourself out of the game. For a start, not eating removes you from a large segment of the economy. Suddenly there’s all this stuff you can’t buy: coffees, breakfast, lunch and dinners, drinks (in bars and bottle shops, coconut water, Coke or Gatorade from the servo), groceries, snacks. A whole world of restaurants and cafes becomes forbidden. I take fifty dollars out of the ATM on the first Friday of my new no-food life and it is still in my wallet on Monday. This has never happened before. It becomes startlingly apparent how much time, money and energy I spend procuring, preparing and eating food.

  When I stop eating, suddenly huge amounts of time are freed up, long stretches of it punctuated by nothing. Time to spend thinking – about food. Humans have contemplated the potential of this absence from time to time: what if we were liberated from the drudgery of having to cook and clean up after ourselves? What if we lived in a post-food society? A post-food society could also be a post-feminist society – since most of the food-prep work traditionally falls on women. Think of the other things that could be achieved! All the projects, all the inventions, all the innovations, all the conversations, all the work and all the play.

  Rob Rhinehart, a Silicon Valley nerd, tried it – living off packets of powered protein and supplements. He saved so much time, he said, he got so much work done. This was the way of the future. Become more productive, stop preparing and eating food – just buy his powdered product (called Soylent). It’s now a multi-million-dollar business – and a ‘disruptor’ in our food-production cycle.

  So what do I do with all this newly freed-up time?

  Paradoxically, I find that while I have so many more hours in the day to do stuff, I am either too weak or too vulnerable to leave the house. On the street, I might encounter food. At one point I go out to get some more tea bags and end up walking blocks out of my way, following someone carrying a delicious-smelling box of pizza.

  I try not to look at anyone eating, or stop and stare at any food outlets as I go up Bondi Road on my way home, but, oh man, it is hard. Food is all I can think about. I gravitate towards greasy spoons – the burger joints where only the most hungover unperson would cross the threshold, where the man behind the counter is handling a chemical sausage full of pink dye with his bare, tattoo-knuckled hands … I just stand at the counter and watch, like a creep.

  At home, in my room, depleted of energy, the only thing I do with any gusto is google ‘cleanse’, ‘detox’ and ‘fasting’, desperate to find people out there who are going through the same thing. All I discover is a patchwork of anecdotes on blogs, a lot of pseudo-science, strange theories and very little in the way of rigorous scientific research. There are – unsurprisingly – few of us that are eating nothing but herbs. The 5:2 diet is popular at the time, but the 0:7 diet is for outliers. Fasting is a political act, for the religious, the mentally and terminally ill or for sects such as Breatharians, who claim to live on air alone.

  Most people in the forums on the internet are on juice cleanses that only last for a few days. Gwyneth Paltrow, with her much-maligned ‘cleanse program’ (people say it is too harsh, but compared with what I’m doing, it is a total walk in the park – there is some broth, some vegetables), is a solace and a spirit guide during this time.

  The Queen of Clean – what would GP do? I ask myself later in that first week, lanced and bruised by the needles, swollen with sleep, disturbed by strange dreams – standing in the fridge light at 1am. I am staring at the olives. I am staring at the olives. I am staring so hard at the olives, but keeping my fists in a ball, so they can’t reach in. What would GP do?

  I also take comfort from some of the world’s great religions. Staying at a Zen Buddhist temple in Japan in 2016, I fasted with the resident monks for cycles of eighteen hours a day, having a six-hour eating window (no breakfast, lunch at 11.30am, dinner at 5.30pm). For some Catholics, such as my father as a child in the early ’60s, fasting occurred prior to receiving Communion, starting at midnight on Saturday before Sunday mass. (At Catholic dances on Saturday night, a late supper would be served in a nod to the fasting that would soon follow.) The communal aspect of the fasts is appealing. I feel quite isolated on my detox. I want to go through this hardship with others.

  There are lots of blogs on how to get through Ramadan without gnawing your arm off. I like the set-up: you are all in it together – being hungry, getting irritable, thinking about food between sunrise and sunset, but the greater glory is God. It means more than just detoxing your own body, which is necessarily a singular and solipsistic pursuit that seems more about disconnection and punishment than enlightenment. During Ramadan you break the fast together – in large, late-night suppers.

  It is hard detoxing on your own, particularly in a city as obsessed with food as Sydney.

  *

  For the first few days I feel exhausted and am sleeping a lot. When I return from the fasting clinic and lie down for a minute or two, I wake hours later, foggy and confused – a jet-laggy, displaced feeling of not knowing if I’ve woken at the start of the day or the middle of night. I listen as the suburb goes about its business – the cries of the lorikeets from the fig trees, a backpacker sitting under a large tree outside my room strumming Jeff Buckley on a banjo, bottles of wine clinking in plastic bags and people laughing, on their way to a party.

  When the hunger wakes me at 4am, growling, my stomach clenching, I prowl the flat. It’s one of those solid, lovely 1950s blocks – faded Florence Broadhurst wallpaper in the lobby, thick walls and high ceilings, strangely shaped rooms, a hexagon-tiled bathroom and a sunroom that looks down over the roofs of Bondi to the beach. To fill myself up, I drink water, make cups of tea and squirt in a juicy portion of honey to cut through the bitterness.

  Writing distracts from the hunger. Sometimes writing focuses me on the hunger. The moon floods over my writing desk and I sit and scribble notes. My nose is running like I have a bad cold. And: Dreamt I was a horse midwife – again.

  I drift around the place. My jaw aches – a strange feeling, like a toothache. In my mouth there is a feeling of absence – like I’m missing all my teeth. But in reality, my teeth are missing food. Their only real job is to chew stuff and now they are useless, just sort of there, hanging out in my mouth. In the kitchen, when I’m sure my housemate, Jo, is asleep, I stand by the sink and masticate but don’t swallow stuff that I can literally sink my teeth into – cardboard, plastic, bubble wrap – just so I can keep them in action, fit for duty for when I return to eating. I’m aware of how this looks and I don’t want to be seen.

  On day three there is a shift in gear for the worse. The low-level depression has mostly lifted and in its place is … nothing, a blank. I’m a zombie, someone with not enough energy to feel depressed. I stare out windows. I stare at windows. I cannot concentrate. I remember I have to do something but then forget a minute or so later what that something is. My brain is foggy – that superb, mysterious engine that I take for granted, that has got me all my jobs, that is responsible for keeping me in cash to buy interesting shoes and lattes and mid-priced champagne – is now spluttering to a standstill. I need to keep writing articles to pay my rent but I can’t remember the password for my computer, let alone how to pick up the phone or structure a story. I don’t get how people do this fast while working. It takes me fifteen minutes just to put on my socks.

  Now I understand why some people on heavy sedatives plead to come off them, preferring ragged madness to the sort of stupefied, glassy world they inhabit on the pills. I spend hours in the too-warm house, the plastic fan blades turning, staring out the window at the thin blue line of the ocean in the distance. It’s a Rothko painting or positive pregnancy test and I’m a lobotomised patient – like the y
oung woman in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, with her ‘perpetual marble calm’. Thoughts are not quite forming, like water about to boil. There are almost bubbles, something is about to rise to the surface; it’s trying to get there really, really hard … but not quite yet. My eyeballs have been replaced by stones, my tongue is furry and useless and heavy – imagine a carpet that’s been left out in the rain.

  My brain during this time is ravenous. Usually the brain uses 20 per cent of the body’s resting energy expenditure (so, calories) – but takes glycogen (sugar) as fuel. It won’t use amino acids, which are broken down from proteins, or fatty acids and glycerol, which are broken down from fats. As a back-up it can switch to ketone bodies, produced by the liver from fatty acids during periods of fasting, low- or no-carbohydrate diets, starvation and intense exercise. This metabolic switch to ketone bodies takes several days. After fasting for three days, the brain gets 30 per cent of its energy from ketone bodies. After four days, this goes up to 75 per cent.

  This is where I am – stalled like a car on the side of the road, yet to switch gear to the ketones. Maybe because of this lack of fuel, I’m sleeping a lot. It seems the best way through this early ‘shock’ phase of the fast. Without caffeine artificially geeing me up and alcohol and other soporifics bringing me down, my body is finding its natural resting rhythm – which seems to be to sleep for sixteen to eighteen hours a day.

  Blogs from other fasters talk about sleeping a lot. Everyone just takes to their cots in the hard early days of the fast. The bloggers reckon they are sleepy because the body is pulling energy from where it can in order to kick off its mammoth cleaning and detox effort.

  I speak to Associate Professor Amanda Salis from the University of Sydney, who leads research and multidisciplinary clinical trials at the Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition, Exercise and Eating Disorders. Her research focuses on understanding and circumventing the body’s responses to ongoing energy restriction, a phenomenon she terms the ‘famine reaction’. She says the reason I am sleeping so much is that ‘your body goes into conservation mode when you are fasting. There is not enough fuel to enable your muscles to move. Neurochemical changes are occurring in your brain, also making you feel lethargic. It’s like being hit by a train.’ Indeed.

  Sleeping also makes time go by. It relieves the tedium. But even sleep does not bring relief. The texture of my sleep has become strange – viscous, its fathoms so deep I get the bends coming up in the morning. I’ve always been a dreamer, spending those first few moments of consciousness trying to hold on to the tail ends of dreams – the unlikely scenarios, the jumble of places, the emotional weather of each scene. But fasting is taking my dream life to a different, higher and scarier level. It’s as if, bereft of stimulation, my subconscious is busy creating the most freaky, scary horror show each and every night.

  Coursing through everything is anxiety. I am running from gate lounge to gate lounge trying to find the gate for my departure to Barkly. Where is Barkly? What is Barkly? I don’t know but I have to go there. I run onto the tarmac but they won’t let me get on the plane.

  The dreams seem so real that my life undergoes a curious kind of inversion. Dreams are more vivid than my actual life, crowded with big emotion and drama, brilliant, teeming and terrifying, while my waking life is non-time in which my brain, slowing right down without any fuel, is having trouble making connections. I’m thinking of the name for that thing – you know the thing – the thing you boil water in – what’s it called? It’s in the kitchen next to the toaster.

  And all the while there is still the hunger. The brilliant British essayist George Orwell writes in Down and Out in Paris and London, ‘Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.’ Orwell’s ‘hunger mentor’, his friend Boris, provides this advice: ‘It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.’

  I am still under self-imposed house arrest. They can’t kick you if they can’t see you, and I have retreated deep into this corner of Bondi – the bed pushed up against the wall, its soft tangle of white sheets, its pink floral summer quilt – in the small room in the ground-floor flat, where no one can find me.

  All the wellness blogs say days three and four are the worst. And so it comes to pass.

  I have a sore lower back. My fevered, glucose-starved brain is craving answers – and the answers I find are on the internet. Steve Hendricks in Harper’s says that lower back pain is common with fasters, and that many believe it’s caused by toxins exiting the body, although there is little evidence to support this hypothesis.

  So maybe it’s all the unprocessed drugs now leaving my tissue – the decades-old ecstasy tablets, or Valiums, or the diet pills I misused to help me finish my novel, the Panadols, Naprogesics, the antimalarials or the blood pressure medication. In the sweat and stink of my mid-afternoon fugue (the twist of the dampening sheets, the fetid floral summer quilt) I imagine the inside of my body. It’s 2007 in there, eternally 3am, and I’m still in the club in Shoreditch. The half a tab of ecstasy I took is finally ready, many years later, to make its journey out of my body. It’s been trapped in a tissue – where? – somewhere in there, for all this time. But now its moment has arrived. The fast and its mysterious forces have pulled the chemical compound into my bloodstream, and it’s recirculating through my body like a partly activated landmine or a roused sleeper cell. I am not getting high. I am not loving everyone and waving my arms in the air like I just don’t care. This is the mother of all comedowns.

  The back pain can also – says the internet – be a reactivation of an old injury or illness. Could it be a weird echo from the past? I’d been hospitalised for an untreated UTI that turned into a kidney infection fifteen years before, when I was living in Dublin. Now in Bondi, so many years later, I recognised the pain. Hello, old friend. It was dull and tender, like I’d been badly bruised on the inside, like a muscle strain in my lower back, but deeper.

  Is this what the fasters on the internet call a ‘healing crisis’? They say that fasting dissolves or expels diseased tissue in the body – say, from the site of an old injury – and redistributes nutrients. In other words, I’m being healed and cleaned from the inside. Which is a less metaphorical explanation of exactly what Jared Six described: during a long fast, the body is like a store closed for clean-up and stocktake.

  But what if the joint and muscle pain is not a healing crisis but a sign of malnutrition? Health websites such as LiveStrong and MedlinePlus take this view: ‘Muscle pains and aches may be caused by malnourishment and insufficient levels of nutrients. In particular, potassium and calcium deficiencies can cause muscle pains due to an imbalance of electrolytes.’

  This malnutrition explanation for physical pain clashes with the almost romantic thesis on the fasting blogs – that past injuries and hurts are being healed.

  Associate Professor Amanda Salis is also sceptical of the notion of a healing crisis. She puts it viscerally:

  When you are fasting or eating very little, your body is eating itself from the inside out. It eats up bones, muscles and organs for energy. It takes a chomp out of your liver and spleen, and in terms of whether fasting uses up dead tissues – these tissues would be eliminated anyway. A healing crisis sounds like something people would say to make you feel better psychologically when your body is fighting back against starvation – a condition your body responds to in a life-or-death manner, because your body knows that fasting or semi-fasting will eventually result in death.

  I am taking in around 250 calories a day with the herbs – so the body does have some nutrients and energy coming in. But if you go long enough without food, the ultimate risk is death by starvation.

  When all you have left is your body – when it is your only form of protest, the only instrument of your agency – you can starve it
, or cut it, or set it alight. Your body is yours and if in the detention centre, the hospital or the prison, they take away the sheets and the razor blades, the pills and the plastic bags, you can refuse to eat if you want to slip out, if you want to do it on your own terms. Fasting kills.

  In the 1950s and ’60s, fasting was used as an experimental treatment for obesity, and several patients died from heart failure.

  In 2010, a woman in Florida died from heart failure after twenty-one days of fasting. According to a report in 2017 in the British Medical Journal, a 47-year-old woman was admitted to hospital, suffering from seizures brought on by low sodium levels in her blood. She had been on a ‘herbal medication’ detox, also drinking vast amounts of water, green tea and sage. She recovered once her sodium levels returned to normal.

  In 1981 Irish political prisoners went on a hunger strike, protesting the British presence in Northern Ireland. Ten prisoners – including their leader, Bobby Sands – died after periods of between forty-six and seventy-three days without food.

  At the age of seventy-four and already skinny, Mahatma Gandhi survived twenty-one days of total starvation, only allowing himself sips of water.

  Doctors treating patients with anorexia nervosa found death from organ failure or heart attack is fairly common (up to 20 per cent of cases end this way) and tends to happen when body weight has fallen to between 30 and 40 kilograms, corresponding to a body mass index (BMI) approximately half of normal. Unless other causes intervene, a patient with end-stage cancer often dies after losing 35–45 per cent of their body weight.

  But the science is inexact. According to the Scientific American, mortality rates vary enormously depending on size, metabolism and other factors, such as any pre-existing illness.

  Even if you don’t die, the website Quackwatch says, ‘People who survive prolonged fasts (starvation) may suffer anemia, decreased immunity, osteoporosis, kidney damage, or liver damage. Depressed gastrointestinal or digestive functions may persist for weeks or months. The worst thing about fasting is its destruction of lean and vital tissue needed for a healthy and active life.’