Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  My body thinks this will eventually result in death. It doesn’t know when this starvation will end. It doesn’t differentiate between doing this for a magazine assignment and a Northern Irish hunger strike. So was I being healed? Or was I making myself very ill and dicing with death?

  Albert Einsten once said, ‘An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.’ Maybe it is my fuzzy brain, but things other than logic are taking over my decision-making. Vanity, I’m sure. I am dropping dress sizes at an alarming clip. But faith also wins out over logic. I somehow believe the blogs and testimonials. I cling to the idea of a healing crisis. It allows me to remove myself from the horror and mystery of what is going on in my body, and instead take on the role of harsh but fair nurse. ‘Yes,’ I say to my body, ‘this is painful, but it’s for your own good.’

  *

  After spending all day lying in my disgusting bed, I smell something incredible. My housemate, Jo, has cooked bacon in a large pan. The pan is on the stove. Jo cooks wonderful food and had kindly offered to move out of the house for the duration of the fast, so that the apartment would be a totally food-free and therefore temptation-free zone. But Jo had already had to move out once, temporarily, when I contracted whooping cough and, as a public-health risk, was quarantined at home. Being a stoic I assured her that I would not be tempted, not one little bit, even if she cooked multi-course dinner parties consisting mostly of bacon. And no – the smell of the coffee brewing in the morning, that is really nothing that would tempt me. No siree, not at all. Baking a cake? Go for it! So Jo stayed and cooked and I crept into the kitchen when she was gone and pressed my nose to a fresh baguette as furtively as a pervert.

  But right now I am in agony because she’s cooked bacon in the pan. She’s cooked bacon in the pan. How on earth could she be so cruel as to cook bacon in the pan? I put my head close to it and breathe in a whisper of the scent, a fading bacon vapour trail. That it’s congealed and yellowed fails to deter me. It’s such an attractive foodstuff. Bacon is so incredible. I wonder if she truly appreciated the bacon. If she truly appreciated how fucking great bacon is.

  I look around cautiously and run my tongue along the base of the pan. I feel every bump of every crusted-on bit of whatever it is that is stuck there. It’s like I am tongue-kissing a gross giant with a rough mouth: tongue to tongue, gritty, thick, salty, oily, knobbly and gobby. Oh man, I just long to feel something. It’s been ninety hours without food.

  After that shameful moment, I devise a work-around. I tell myself I can put stuff in my mouth; the key is not to swallow. As the week goes on, my behaviour starts to resemble that of a person with an eating disorder. I am obsessed with food, but petrified of swallowing lest it ruin the mysterious alchemy of the fast. (Dr Liu said I can’t even chew gum.)

  I grab chunks of meat Jo has cooked, chew then spit them in the bin. I lick a gravy pan because I crave flavour. I email Mum to let her know how I am faring. She replies, Please DO NOT lick the juices from pans. You could burn your tongue. With my enhanced sense of smell, I am drawn into a Japanese restaurant. I cave and buy some wonderful-smelling gyozas. I do not intend to eat the gyozas, just chew on them. I ram them into my mouth, masticate and spit the undigested lump into a bin. I hope I have not been seen by anyone I know.

  Each night I call my parents and ask them to describe what they are cooking for dinner, what they had for lunch and any snacks they might have enjoyed that day. I particularly like hearing about their cocktail hour – aperitivo at 6pm, neighbours over for a drink or two and some cheese, the table set outside, the mist from the Southern Ocean rolling in from the dunes. It seems healthy, civilised, a proper way to live – rather than drinking a mystery sludge three times a day, sleeping for eighteen hours and spitting food into bins.

  At first my parents are flattered by my interest in the minutiae of their meals. I’ve never listened so keenly to them before, never showed such interest in their nutrition or dietary habits. Such keen, keen interest! As a child, I hid portions of vegetables in my sleeve or spat them out into napkins. But now I long for those childhood stems of steamed broccoli, the mashed pumpkin and potato. On the phone, Mum reels off every ingredient in the salad she has just prepared, Dad describes the different meats he is barbecuing. I ring them after dinner too, just to see how their meal worked out – did they enjoy it? What did their guests think? What did their guests bring? What did they prefer – the lamb chop or the rump steak? Then one night they suddenly stop elaborating, sensing something off. They are terse: ‘Yes, dinner was fine, thanks for asking. We had a barbecue.’ There is something wrong with these long, lovely conversations about food, something unwholesome. I am like the panting man on a phone-sex call, begging for a detailed description of acts from which I was excluded and – far away, in a lonely bedroom – getting off on it.

  *

  In addition to deep fatigue, listlessness, headaches, hunger and obsessiveness about food, in the first week of the fast I have what feels like a big dip in blood pressure. I guess it’s better than having dangerously high blood pressure. When I stand up from bed or a chair, I get dizzy and have to clutch at something, so as not to fall.

  This occurs because fasting causes blood sugar levels to drop. My body has lost water, sodium and potassium, which produces a condition called postural hypotension (low blood pressure when standing up). Forget dying from starvation or heart attack. Right now, my greatest risk is cracking my skull after fainting.

  When walking around the flat, I stay close to the walls, my palm pressed flat to them in case of sudden vertigo. I cling on to the handrail in the shower, like an old person – frail and liable to fall.

  On day four of the detox, I am almost killed. It’s the hump day of the fast, according to all the literature. In his pamphlet Dr Liu writes in his usual understated way: ‘In general patients find days 4 to 7 of the first 14 days of treatment are the most difficult days.’ My friend Patrick is picking me up to go for a swim and I am almost hit by a car and then another car as I try to cross the road to meet him. Patrick is waving his arms at me, begging me not to cross the road and yelling frantically that he’ll bring the car around. He never brings the car around, I think several seconds later, after I almost get run over for a third time as I turn to cross back and narrowly avoid being struck by the 380 bus. I am a beat behind myself. I am two beats behind the traffic.

  Patrick urges me not to try to cross the road by myself until I break the fast and, apart from going to the fasting clinic every day, avoid leaving the house because of the way I smell and my general ‘very weird, slightly scary demeanour’.

  When we get to the beach, I swim and clutch my jaw, the ache more pronounced in the salt water. It’s like someone has punched me, or I have a gum infection or a mouthful of rotting teeth (perhaps it is the pain of my teeth, missing food, reminding me that they are still there).

  So that’s it for a while. I just go between home and the clinic. The clinic and home. And after a while, the people at the clinic – Dr Liu’s Chinese workers – become my only friends. And I love them all, really I do. The clinic is only closed one day a year, on Christmas Day, and many of the workers appear to be there seven days a week. My favourite is an older, stooped woman. She doesn’t speak English, so we mainly rely on exaggerated facial expressions to communicate. Talking to her is like texting someone using emoji. Sometimes she claps and looks unfathomably delighted when I lose weight. She’ll slap me on the arse and giggle, and record my kilograms in a ledger. But she’s not always high octane. Sometimes she gives me lacklustre stomach massages, and when I sneak open my eyes, her gaze is elsewhere, staring at the wall. She’s lifting up and putting down bits of my midriff flesh like it’s dough, and she’s making her twentieth loaf of sourdough for the day.

  Then there is Peter (which I am sure is not his actual Chinese name), who has the best English of all the workers. He is getting his Chinese medicine qualifications at the University of Technology Sydney. Most of the Chinese doc
tors in China are studying Western medicine, he says. ‘Only a few people do Chinese medicine, but they are out in the countryside.’ They are the pre-moderns, the ancients left over from the Time of the Needles. It’s only the very wealthy Australians, in this wedge of Sydney, who are creating the demand for Chinese doctors, the healers with maps of meridian lines on their office doors, the chakra realigners, the energy cleansers, the apothecaries with their mystery medicine made of roots and leaves.

  Peter leaves for a while to visit his mum back in China. When he comes back, he reels off the incredible delights she fed him – the wontons (oh, wanton wontons!), dumplings, fried rice, roast duck – oblivious to the fact that I am literally starving. (Tell me more, I beg him – were the dumplings pork and were they steamed or fried? And when you had the stopover in Singapore did you have chilli mud crab at that place at Changi Airport, you know the one?)

  There is also a group of older, severe, non-English-speaking male clinicians. I get to know them by their touch. Each has a different hand pressure, and each is brilliant and precise. But I can never relax into the massages – they are too gruelling. The bruises that dot my body are in the shape of their fingerprints.

  After the massage they put a dozen needles in my forehead and scalp and across my stomach, which becomes black and blue with bruises big and small. ‘Sorry, stomach; sorry, old bean,’ I whisper when they leave the room. ‘You’ve served me well. You’ve made room, uncomplainingly, for all those pies. And this is how I reward you.’ Peter tells me the acupuncture is to get rid of the headaches I am experiencing and to calm me down so I can sleep (but sleep is all I do!). The needles on the stomach are to assist my organs achieve optimum function. I’m not sure why they put needles in my legs. Maybe something to do with meridian lines. According to some fasting blogs, that is where a lot of pain of the detox is felt – in the legs. Towards the end of a week of this, there is no part of my stomach that doesn’t look like a bouquet of cabbage flowers: purples and pinks, bright, florid and tender with bruises.

  *

  By day five without food, there is no hiding from the truth: I smell bad. Really bad. Not sweaty, but like something that’s been left in the bin too long and is rotting.

  At first, lying in bed on a beautiful sunny day, with the windows open and the breeze blowing in, I think a backpacker must have left chicken carcasses in the bins in the neighbouring park. Revolting, I think, whoever left meat out to rot is gross. (Or in my slow state of cognition, what I actually think is: Smell meat bad, chicken, gross, rotting backpacker.)

  The smell is not dissimilar to an incident from my university days. I minded a friend’s car when she went to Japan for the summer, but she took the keys with her, unfortunately locking in a tray of meat I had accidentally left under the seat. It cooked in the car all summer, through a string of those dry, shimmering Melbourne days when the temperature doesn’t dip below 40 degrees. The smell was first unignorable, then unimaginable. The whole street – a genteel Parkville cul-de-sac of rose gardens and renovated terraces, professors and paediatric surgeons – seemed to be clouded in the odour coming from our garage. The meat rotted through the rubber mat and then the metal floor of the car. The RACV people had to come over in hazard suits to unlock the vehicle.

  That is what I am smelling now. Rotting meat. It’s grim. After closing my bedroom window I realise with horror that the rotting smell has not gone away. It is worse. And it is coming from within me. Even my tears smell bad.

  Is this part of the cleaning process, I wonder? I ask Associate Professor Amanda Salis about this odour. She says, ‘Bad breath is associated with fasting. This is partly due to ketones. There is also less hydration of the mouth, so saliva is not replenished. Skin cells in your mouth rot by bacteria that produce gases that smell bad.’

  She can’t explain my whole-body smell.

  Dr Liu warned of smells in his materials, which I am now consulting constantly: ‘You may have bad breath because your body is releasing toxins, you could brush your teeth as many times as you like, but no chewing gum.’ The pamphlet is silent on the issue of body odour. I apply expensive lotions to my skin and start showering more than once a day, but nothing is removing the smell.

  This fast has turned me into a bedroom depressive with very little in the way of social engagements (no one wants to hang out with you when you are not eating) but I resolve to have no contact with anybody while I smell like this. People will gag – possibly vomit – if I get too close. I decide that when I am forced to interact with someone, I will stand at least 50 metres away from them and shout, or communicate via text message. The fasting clinic staff don’t count because the clinic itself has a weird smell.

  Despite smelling like an open drain, being foggy in the head, feeling constantly miserable and listless, behaving in a disgusting and weird way in public, having bloodshot eyes and doing strange things late at night (I have been chewing pantry items and then spitting the ball of stuff into the bin and putting heaps of tissues over the clump of masticated food – a trick used by anorexics) and almost being killed by traffic – I am getting thinner! Much thinner!

  By day six I have lost 5.3 kilograms. It’s the most weight I have ever lost in one go. The weight is coming off my face, my chest, my stomach and my thighs. I am shrinking, like a grape turning into a sultana.

  While I should feel pleased that the fast is having one of its desired effects, my life is the most boring it’s ever been. I can’t focus on anything on TV for longer than ten minutes and I can’t concentrate on reading unless it’s cookbooks, which I stare at – not reading so much as horsily inhaling pictures of super-stylised food in a sort of magical thinking that equates gazing to grazing. The body will find a way through one of its senses. If it can’t taste it will smell and if it can’t smell it will gaze – like the thirsty stare reserved for someone you desire but can never have. I have recently read David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. He was doing the hard sell on boredom in that novel, convinced it was the road to bliss. It was just like the icy mountain pass – you only reached nirvana once you moved through it. He wrote that ‘dullness is associated with psychic pain’ because it doesn’t provide enough stimulation to distract people from the deeper pain ‘that’s always there’.

  So here I am, just me and the dullness and its evil cousin, psychic pain. In those weeks when I am fasting, the spectre of meaninglessness lurks everywhere. I wonder if it has been there all along, covered up with food ’n’ stuff – or if it is making its first appearance. You see, once you take everything away – the shopping and the eating, the preparing and the cleaning up, the cooking and the cafes, the friends and the restaurants and the parties and the drinks (all the drinks!), the quiet morning coffee with the paper in the sun, the barista who knows your name and the barman who reads your mood, the celebrations and the dates, the routines and the rituals – once you throw all that away, a sort of hush descends. In it you can see and feel and know the emptiness that is in the room before the room where the meaninglessness resides. In its bland way, it’s quite terrifying.

  I start to have serious doubts about the fast towards the end of the first week, when I am woken at 1am by a sensation that feels like a heart attack. There are sharp, shooting pains in my chest on the left side that eventually settle to small but very alarming electrical pulsations. Is it bad enough to go to the hospital? I google ‘heart attack’. Yes, I can move my arm and count backwards from ten, but this feeling moving across my torso is unlike anything I have ever experienced. It’s very unpleasant, like something electronic has been implanted in my chest and is malfunctioning.

  Despite my concern, there is an overriding emotion: embarrassment. I picture rocking up to Emergency and telling them that I haven’t eaten for six days. No, it’s not a political act. And I’m not mentally ill. I don’t have an eating disorder. It’s for a magazine assignment – I’m a gonzo wellness journalist! I start to wonder if what I am doing is a form of self-harm. To reduce my anxie
ty I practise deep breathing and sit up until dawn, too scared to go to sleep in case I don’t wake up. In the morning I text Dr Liu. He replies straightaway that there’s no need to worry, that I should just come in for my usual one-hour treatment – which I do, ragged, anxious and wild-eyed, not sure whether to trust my instincts or him.

  Despite my scare with chest pains, I push on. I feel like I’ve come this far, and I may as well keep going. It’s New Year’s Eve and I am lying in a hot tub in a backyard in Newtown. The baby, Otis, is sleeping upstairs, his parents at a party on the harbour. In the backstreets all around me are the sounds of people ringing in the new year. There is a bloom of fireworks, then the sky is still, poised, like any moment it might tear open in a storm. I can smell the eucalyptus from the old gum trees in the heady, heavy, rain-scented air. Around midnight, I open the fridge and see the week-old, still-juicy Christmas ham wrapped in cloth and the mince pies and chocolates. Happy New Year. I close the fridge. I open the fridge. I close the fridge.

  Later, I’m pulled back there by hunger and boredom. I’ll just take a look, I tell myself. The light is on, and my hand and arm up to the elbow is in the fridge, deep in the middle cavity, like a surgeon operating inside a crowded abdomen. I see a tub of hummus, open the lid and run my index finger through it. It’s been six days without food. On my tongue the hummus is like none I’ve ever tasted. This simple, supermarket hummus is creamy and nutty, fluffy and unctuous. My mouth floods with saliva. As Seneca wrote to Lucilius in 65AD, ‘You will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food.’

  I keep my finger in my mouth a long time after the hummus has melted on my tongue, until all that’s left is the memory of the memory of the taste.