So it’s come to this.
*
Around me, life happens. I have a book coming out. It’s my first novel. It only took eight years to write. My publisher rings me, very excited: the director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Jemma Birrell, is interested in putting my novel in the festival program. She wants to meet me first – just to see, I suppose, that I am normal, that she can put me on a panel without incident. I don’t tell my publisher that I haven’t eaten for a week now, and haven’t been near a cafe for fear of breaking the fast.
‘Refeeding syndrome’ is an anxiety in the fasting community and can prove more dangerous than the fast itself. Be cavalier with your first meal, and it could be your last.
An Associated Press report from 28 August 1929 told of the death of forty-year-old Chris Solbert following a month-long fast, which he broke by consuming several beef sandwiches. I find other anecdotes on the wellness sites – people who broke their fasts with chocolate biscuits and got incredibly ill, a guy who ate a meal of beefsteak, potatoes, bread and butter and coffee after twenty-seven days of fasting. He was seized with violent vomiting spells.
The body goes through biological changes when it is fasting, including a slowing-down of the production of enzymes used to break down food. Introducing food slowly allows the body time to re-establish this enzyme production, as well as build up the lining of mucus in the gut.
With this in mind – and aware that I am about to enter a cafe that will be cooking bacon – I get a taxi to Jeds in North Bondi. Jemma orders breakfast and three lattes (not at once, she staggers her order). I’m trying to be normal, talking about my book. I cannot make eye contact with her while she is eating; it’s sure to send me over the edge. I’m telling her about my novel – a group of murderous teens at an elite university college – ‘wotevs, blah, blah, blah, some shit like that,’ I’m saying, but I’m looking over at the door. I can smell her food. I can smell her coffee. I wonder if she can smell me detoxing. Hopefully she has a cold or blocked nose. I wonder how everyone in this cafe can eat so much food. People who are largely sedentary are tucking into enormous plates of bacon and eggs, toast and avocado. It’s like they’re nineteenth-century farm workers who have to use scythes and ploughs over large tracts of land. But what are these people really doing? Maybe a yoga class, maybe a short stroll around the farmers’ market, but not actual farming.
Jemma turns to order her third coffee. As she does, a reptilian aspect of my brain takes over. This is pure biology, basic and urgent – the need to hunt, kill and eat. I simply must eat. Jemma’s saying, ‘Latte, extra hot, soy, in a takeaway cup,’ and I’m reaching over, my hand taking on the shape of an eagle’s claw. My fist lands on her plate and I scoop up a handful of tomato, some eggs, a crust, and jam it into my mouth. She turns back and sees it all in a horrified instant – her half-eaten food in my hand, almost missing my mouth in the haste, bits smeared on my chin, some of it dropping into my collar and the moan of pleasure, when at last, after a week, I swallow.
*
I’ve always been a social animal. I’m an extrovert who gets my energy from being around people. I love going out, I love gatherings and conversation and parties – just being with other people. During my fast it is apparent how much socialising (probably 90 per cent, in my case) takes place over food and drink. The isolation of the fast is hard going. In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell said the worst aspect of hunger was boredom. That and the sense that when you take food away, you take some essential human dignity away. ‘You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.’
By the end of week one, I’m going out of my mind. It has been boring, but also incredibly self-absorbed. The clinic staff and I attend to my body as if it is some fragile holy relic to be studied and turned over, applying mysterious treatments to restore it to some glorious past. (Did my body ever have a glorious past? Maybe when I was a child?) To quote writer David Rakoff, who fasted to find enlightenment: ‘My days are taken up in this narcissistic rumination about intake and output … This is one of the most self-obsessed things I have ever done in my life. And I say this as a first-person journalist.’
When I feel strong enough to go out and not eat (not steal food, or lick food, or spit chewed-up food into public bins), I make arrangements to meet a friend for dinner. Chris is coming to Sydney and wants to go out in Kings Cross. It would be ridiculous not to see him. Chris used to meet me for lunch in Melbourne; lunches that would roll into cocktails then supper, glasses of wine into bottles, bottles into more bottles. We hopped from rooftop bar to rooftop bar, the ones where you could smoke. There were nights when the city blazed and things sped up like in a time-lapse video: there’s the Princess Bridge at dusk, the Yarra at night, all inky and black, the small bar above Degraves Street and the restaurant with the door under the stairs, credit cards thrown down, change not collected. We talk and talk and talk and talk, and never have to go home if we don’t want to.
How different this night is. He orders beer and I order water. He orders dinner and I order nothing. It’s weird. The vibe is off. I have underestimated how uncomfortable people feel when they are eating and drinking and you are not. If you don’t eat together it unbalances the dynamic profoundly. I wonder if there is something deep in our DNA that makes us distrust someone who will not break bread with us. Perhaps there’s an ancient, primal fear of being poisoned that means we only relax if everyone is eating the same food – lest there be an assassin in our midst.
The fast has also been the longest I have ever gone without alcohol since I was a teenager – and one of the things I will have to learn as I emerge from my stinky-bedroom day-sleeper solitude is how to socialise without booze.
But my night with Chris turns out all right. We talk. He eats and has a couple of beers. I cave and have a small teaspoon of rice. Our friendship doesn’t fall apart because we aren’t drinking together. It turns out something great built on nights of a thousand cocktails is still pretty great if you take away the cocktails. Which gets me thinking: is relying on alcohol for connections and closeness a bit like using a crutch when there’s nothing wrong with your legs?
*
My whole way of living has been thrown into stark relief by the drama and extremity of the fast. The revelations are a mixture of the banal and profound: life is short, but even shorter if you don’t look after your health. I notice that when something upsets me I have an immediate craving for something hot and salty – like a dim sim! – and that I and most people I know eat double the amount of calories we actually need. And that 70 per cent of what we eat is just habit. And that the reason people on a diet are mean and short-tempered is that it’s miserable being hungry all the time. And this: the hedonism jag I’ve been on is fun but exhausting, and maybe it’s time to pull up stumps. My health, with high blood pressure and cholesterol, is not going to be robust forever. But how to regulate? My modus operandi before the fast was to go out a lot – five or six nights a week – then enjoy a day or two of solitude to balance the socialising. Now it’s all solitude. I am beginning to hate it. Some balance is needed. I’m tired of being on such an extreme treadmill.
In the long, long empty hours of the fast, I pass the time by fantasising about how I’m going to live when I can go back on solids. I imagine myself as someone others might find inspiring: serene, clean, lean, able to make one glass of wine (good wine, expensive wine) last all night. I’m the sort of person who has small portions of good food, who doesn’t emotionally eat or buy dim sims when she is stressed. ‘How do you do it?’ my dining companions would ask, awed. ‘Well,’ I would answer, waving away the bread basket, ‘many years ago, I did an extreme fast, I didn’t eat for weeks. But I learnt a lot – about myself, my body and society.’ I would smile with gleaming teeth, my hands folded over my flat stomach, and take a teeny-tiny sip of wine.
It isn’t that I want to be thin. If I turn thi
s fantasy over in my hands, what I really want is self-control, and to be admired for that self-control. What I am now is the opposite – I have no control, I’m a can’t-say-no hedonist. And I don’t know whether I am admired for that, or pitied. But I know I think about myself in contradictory terms: this is fun, keep partying – and – oh God, this shit is getting old. When are you going to stop?
By day eight I have lost six kilograms and loads of inches. Gone are five inches from my stomach and one to three inches from my arms, thighs, waist and hips. Dr Liu is happy with my progress. He says I’m on track, and if I keep going with the program, following it to the letter, my organs will be able to breathe again and return to their optimum function. I will achieve my goal of being clean.
As well as losing weight, I’m starting to look different. Gone is the swollen and bloated look of my face, the boozy pallor, the cloudy eyes. I am beginning to look – there is no other term for it – obscenely healthy. That summer, sorting out boxes in my parents’ garage, I find photos of me in my twenties. Fifteen years later I look better. I look younger.
My hair is super shiny and my nails are strong. They used to peel, break off and bend but now they seem built from different, tougher material. I could open tins with these bad boys. But the weirdest is my skin. I didn’t have a lot of wrinkles (I was starting to believe that all the alcohol and processed foods had had a sort of pickling effect on my face – preserving it in a creepily youthful way) but there were definitely some. But now my face – my thinner face – is taut, shiny and very, very smooth. The lines around my eyes, my mouth and my forehead have just disappeared, pretty much overnight. This freaks me out a lot. Where have they gone? How can wrinkles just disappear? Don’t laboratories around the world spend billions of dollars trying to do this? I had thought wrinkles were irreversible without surgery. Is it all the sleep I’m getting? My eyes are strangely bright, and my sense of smell has sharpened. Down on level one of Bondi Junction, I can smell the dead-animal woodland odour of Dr Liu’s on level four.
With this new face and body, I rejoin the Sydney hoi polloi. I meet Patrick at the opening night of the Sydney Festival. He hasn’t seen me since I was blotchy-faced and red-eyed, a high risk of pedestrian death on Bondi Road. There is free booze but I’m not tempted. When you give up food, trust me – booze is the last thing you crave. I want chips, pizza, oranges, spinach, steak, potato gratin, tortilla chips, mashed potato – not fizzy wine in a plastic cup.
I am looking thin(ish) for the first time since I was a child. I am wearing a pretty red low-cut dress that nips in at my new, shrinking waist and my hair is blow-dried. I have a flower tucked behind my ear. Patrick looks me up and down. ‘You look … hmmmm. Like, what is it? A skinny eastern-suburbs PR chick. Just like everyone else.’
I feel deflated in more ways than one. In getting thinner am I just going to look like everyone else in this part of Sydney?
Patrick sits down with a litre of beer and a foot-long German sausage with hot chips. When he goes to get mustard I grab a handful of his chips, put them in my mouth, lick them and put them back on his plate. They taste amazing but I haven’t swallowed them – so I am still, officially, fasting. I tell Patrick not to eat the soggy chips on the side of his plate as they have been in my mouth. He shrugs, as if to say, ‘girls and their diets’, and pushes them off to one side.
How do other men react to the newer, thinner me? Thin is attractive, right? Yes? I look better – maybe the best I’ve ever looked. But it doesn’t net me any additional male admirers. And the men I know already don’t say much beyond a vague acknowledgement that I look ‘different’ or offering the non-compliment for elderly people: I look ‘well’.
Instead it is mainly my female friends who are admiring of my weight loss. In me they see that if you bite down on your cheeks hard enough to stop the hunger, if you white-knuckle it, if you take your Chinese medicine thrice daily, if you lock up your pantry and don’t leave your room, transformation is possible. Not just any old transformation, but radical, rapid transformation.
When I meet my friend Ellen in Hyde Park, she does a double take. She has been living in New York and the last time she saw me, I was lining up for a Shake Shack bacon burger in Madison Square Gardens. She can’t stop staring. ‘OMG, you look amazing – right now, just now – amazing. Your hair, your eyes, your skin! You need to stay looking like this. Just keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.’
‘But I’m really hungry. I miss going out for dinner. I miss socialising. I miss eating. I’m going to go back on solids soon, I can’t wait to eat …’ I reel off all the foods I can’t wait to eat including pasta, burgers, pho, salads, apples, granola, falafel, roast chicken. But she is shaking her head. ‘No, Brig, you don’t understand – you can’t go back to eating, you are at peak hotness now.’
My friend Zoe, an actress, tells me that when losing weight for a role, ‘my female friends thought I looked amazing and I got so many compliments from women, but my husband thought I was looking too much like a child. He was very relieved when I put the weight back on and my boobs came back.’
In Lolita, Humbert Humbert says peak hotness for females is between ages nine and fourteen. For me, the peak is a smaller, more specific window – in the months from December to March when I am fasting. But it is unsustainable to keep this almost sprite-like glow, like one of the girls from Hanging Rock come back years later, having made some sort of connection with the spirit world – the whites of my eyes luminous like polished opals, skin glowing, complexion smooth like a child’s. This is Nature at her most spooky and supernatural. Is this what happens when you get clean? No one seems to understand how it works at all.
*
The kilograms keep falling off: 850 grams one day, 1.2 kilograms the next, one kilogram the next. It’s so rapid and strange that I feel disassociated from it. In the pantry I pick up a one-kilogram packet of rice. It’s really heavy. I can barely believe that I am losing the equivalent of one of these from my body every day. Where does it go?
In the first week I had lost weight equivalent to an airline’s carry-on baggage allowance, one of those bags on wheels that has some clothes, a couple of books, some toiletries – enough for a weekend away. I was carrying carry-on, distributed around my body – my arms, my stomach, my thighs, my arse, my face. No wonder moving is now easier.
This is the first time I actually turn my mind to the sheer effort my body was going through just to carry those extra kilograms. Now I feel – well, lighter. Being more streamlined, I glide along rather than heave myself from place to place. I’d become used to heaving – I didn’t even think about it. I have less stiffness in my joints. Activities such as yoga are much easier. I can twist into certain positions with greater ease than before, and I’m more agile, particularly when transitioning from one pose to another.
But it feels so weird to rapidly change body shape, like I’ve woken up in the wrong body. On a deep level, you get used to carrying yourself around as you are. You become accustomed to your dimensions. Your body learns the chair it will fit best in, the clothes that won’t cling and the cut of a jacket that flatters, and that if you run too fast your tits will swing wildly around like soap in a sock. Until one day they don’t – because there are less of them to swing.
My mind hasn’t caught up to my new body so I’m not revelling in it; I’m more puzzled by it. It’s as if I’ve taken off my massive, heavy Burberry trench coat (ahh, that’s better, shaking my shoulders free). But is this new shape mine forever, or just something I’ve borrowed?
Other things are also shifting. I am a long-time sufferer of PMS – aches and pains, a day in bed curled around a hot water bottle. But when my period comes, these symptoms fail to appear. Amanda Salis says, ‘With an extreme lack of food there’s a dampening of active sex hormone levels and fertility is reduced. Historically, famines were very good at controlling population growth.’
So my period pain has eased up, but my reproductive capacity has
fallen.
*
Week two rolls on. I had thought by now the fast would get easier, but day nine is horrible. My personal vibe is plummeting. I am moving around in a cloud of neg; I hate everyone and everything. I’m trying to write a profile of Hollywood star Margot Robbie. I met her for a pot of tea and toast at a hotel in the Flatiron District in Manhattan a few weeks ago, which now feels like a different lifetime. I look at the picture I took of her on my phone (her PR pouncing on me as I did, assuming the unauthorised shot would pop up on some website or magazine): no make-up, dewy skin, clear eyes and shiny blonde hair. I’d heard of Hollywood people existing in a permanent state of semi-fasting – how else could someone appear so eternally lovely? I feel a wave of animus and envy. I’m emanating what’s commonly known as ‘bad vibes’.
The fasting blogs call this a mental detox. Just as your body is purging, moving through its layers of toxins, so is the mind becoming clean. I cannot find any science to back this up, other than putting myself through it.
According to the personal account of fasting by blogger Falon Blanco, ‘With extended fasts it is normal to also have strong emotional reactions that have been suppressed, as the body brings these to the surface also for healing … This can be a difficult period.’
Yes, it can be.
The mental detox is releasing stuff in the form of highly vivid nightmares. The nightmares are so real that when I am awake, I can’t shake them off. It really is like everyone in my family died, just like they did in my dream on the eighth night of the fast when their car exploded in a fireball, incinerating everything in and around it including them (and I ran and I ran and I ran towards them, trying to warn them, but the heat was radiant and alive and could not be breached).
The wellness blogs tell me that at this point the detox is getting deeper, burning layers (burning years and years and years and years) away. I’m cleaning myself out. For decades I’ve poured alcohol, chemicals and all manner of processed food down my throat; the cleanse – this deeper bit – was always going to be an extremely rough ride. This is the bit of the renovation that gets really serious. The builders have brought the jackhammers in, they are ripping up the foundation, they are fixing all the plumbing, they’ve lifted off the roof. I am both the building and the tenant – I am being destroyed and rebuilt and trying to live in the house that is being torn down around me. All I can do is hold on tight as all the work continues at speed.
Wellmania Page 6