Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  As well as running on very low energy, I have developed another gross side effect (turn away now if you are delicate): horrendous diarrhoea. Where is this coming from? I wonder, since I haven’t had any food for ten days. Is this the food I’ve been storing in my gut for twenty years? Are these the burgers and fries of my misspent youth? I’m scared about what is coming out of me. It resembles river silt. I google ‘fasting excrement’ gingerly, then shut my browser, grossed out. There are pages and pages of poo selfies, an endless gallery of filth.

  So many questions, so few answers. It’s difficult not to be sceptical, not to be anxious. The fasting blogs with their talk of a healing crisis say the problem is actually the solution. My body is cleaning itself out from the inside. It’s dumping loads of rubbish and toxins into my bloodstream, and until I can expel them, they are making me sick. Oh, how I ache! I should be celebrating how sick I am feeling – it’s the detox working. But … really? Is it? Is it really? What if it’s my body getting really sick because I’ve stopped feeding it? Maybe the sickness is my body being poisoned by the mysterious herbs. Dr Liu is my poisoner, the nameless workers his court. The organ pain I’m experiencing is occurring because there is something terribly wrong going on in my body. The rivers of silt coming out of me are also not a good, normal look. And what about those mysterious chest pains on the fifth night? I shiver at the memory of them, and those sweat-drenched, breath-holding hours until dawn. Every day I don’t eat is a day where I am hurting myself. Don’t all the wellness people say ‘listen to your body’? My body is emitting a fortnight-long primal scream.

  I swim at Bondi, my jaw aching – triggered again by the salt water, it seems. Nausea comes in waves. Waves come in waves. This is like the world’s worst, most lingering hangover. I go to the fasting clinic at 5pm. Stretched out on the table I’m a mess, covered in sand and bruises, parts of me too sore to touch. My stomach is now one mass of bruises. My hips are black and blue. It looks ugly, like I have been punched repeatedly but on different days. Some bruises are vivid, strong and new; others are fading – they’re more the colour of potatoes, a floury browny-white. Today I do not, cannot, make small talk with the staff. The man treating me is kind. He’s one of the old-timers, and now he is being particularly careful with me, resting his hand very lightly on my knee in between placing the needles on my stomach and hips (where to place the needles? There is no square of skin not already livid and hurt). The staff must be able to read it – in our faces, on our bodies – when things get really bad. All I crave right now, apart from food, is a little bit of tenderness.

  At the clinic, as usual, I get weighed. I’ve put on 100 grams overnight. Was it the two grains of rice I had? The two grains wouldn’t have added up to 100 grams. Maybe a single gram – not 100. The next day, day ten, I put on another 100 grams. This frightens me. I am not eating – how can I be gaining weight?

  I get home from the weigh-in and go straight to bed, where I fall into a really deep sleep. It’s 6.30pm. Whatever is going on inside me is so intense that everything needs to shut down for the work to be done.

  On day eleven I wake up, expecting the usual inertia – the bored, crusty feeling of spending too long in bed, being too weak to do anything else. But my concentration and energy levels are through the roof! I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sharp. My brain is a Rolls Royce, purring and preening, just out of the factory, in mint condition.

  The hunger has gone and the mental fog has cleared as if a stiff breeze has come along. Think of a massive mountain range entirely obscured by mist, and then the weather lifts. The mountain is revealed in all its crisp, complex detail.

  Most of my new-found energy is of the mental kind. When I attempt to walk fifteen minutes down a hill from Bondi Junction to Bondi, I have to keep stopping to rest on park benches, like an old woman pushing one of those wheelie carts. But, oh, my brain! My brain can do anything – and at such speed, like superfast internet broadband. Just as you realise how unfit you used to be when you start exercising, I am having the same revelation with my brain. I don’t believe the guff that we only use 10 per cent but now it’s like my mind has been thoroughly rinsed, tuned and given extra component parts. Feeling this sharp is wonderful. Hangovers, fatigue, the foggy feeling you get after a big meal don’t just affect your body, I’m coming to realise, they also affect your mind and how it functions. I’m pretty certain that a lot of this weight I’m losing will come back after my fast but I want to keep this brain – this lovely, clean, clear, superfast brain.

  This is the result of ketones in action. My body has switched over to a different fuel system – potentially a more efficient fuel system than the carbohydrates it was relying on for all these years. Writes Steve Hendricks in Harper’s: ‘There is evidence that the brain may even run more efficiently on ketones … this may account for the heightened sense of well-being and even euphoria that some fasters describe.’

  Halfway into week two, I have gone from being barely able to lift a teaspoon to super-productive. I throw myself into job-hunting (I need to make some money to buy the food I will be eventually eating again), I write stories, I answer emails. I even feel strong enough to make plans to meet a friend in a restaurant. I can join in and have black tea! I can have water!

  I’m as giddy as a gelding, arriving an hour early because I’m so excited to be out of the house. ‘I was an hour early,’ I tell my friend Lee at the sushi restaurant where I will watch her eat. ‘I was so excited to see you, I got here an hour early – also I had nothing else to do!’ Lee looks slightly worried, but compliments me on my weird wrinkle-free skin.

  I am reminded of all those new mums I would meet who’d drink the house sparkling too fast or talk a million miles a minute – or just be way too excited to be in a fairly middling Thai restaurant. It’s just Thai, dude, I would think. Anyone would think you’d never been out, that you just spend all your time sitting indoors, at home … Yeah, that. Now I am just like them, like a can of Coke that has been shaken up and opened, exploding everywhere. Out in the world, I am all nerves and excitement, clutching my friends with joy, like we’ve been separated for years. It is just a normal week for them, but I feel as if a death had occurred, and that death had been my own.

  *

  It’s now day twelve and I’ve lost 8.3 kilograms. The mental alertness is still there and I proofread my novel. I am also writing again, covering everything from the abolition of the death penalty in South-East Asia to good places to eat in New Orleans. Smells and sights of food are fine. I sit at a cafe and drink a green tea and read the paper, without so much as a second glance (well, maybe a quick second glance) at the tray of pastries cooling nearby. That vicious hunger has gone. Maybe I could go on not eating forever … like a Breatharian! (At this point of the fast I feel a kinship with the much-maligned Breatharians.)

  Then things shift again, as I’m learning they always do. By day thirteen I am starving. At night, I weep from hunger.

  On the fourteenth day, I fall asleep in the afternoon – this sleep long, deep and peaceful – heavy with the sensation of swimming underwater without needing oxygen. It’s like something from The Tempest:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  I too am suffering a sea change, into something rich and strange. It’s all going on inside and I can only guess at what is happening at this subterranean level. As my symptoms morph, yet again, I wonder what level of the detox this is, what wave of cleaning is going on inside me.

  By this time the cleaning guys must be wearing the hazard suits. It must be like Fukushima down there, where the nuclear stuff lies buried. The deep clean. But it’s almost over. Almost. Soon I will be able to eat half a cucumber.

  Half a cucumber! Half a cucumber! I’m so excited I sh
ake off a lively, cinematic dream and get up early on the morning of day fifteen. My excitement levels are matching those of a six-year-old believer on Christmas morning. Today is the day! Today is the day! Breakfast. Break fast. Break. Fast. I take my monk’s brew – black tea with a dollop of honey, then the foul herbs, heated up in a pan of water. Then I will (slowly) walk to the shops – a walk I have already done so many times in my head. I’m going to the fruit shop on Bondi Road, the expensive one I always complain about. Well, not any more! I’m going there, and I’m going to bury my head in a box of cucumbers, inhale deeply, with my extra-sensitive, heightened powers of smell, and select the cucumber that has the freshest, lightest, brightest smell. And then I’ll eat it!

  *

  Breaking the fast correctly – and avoiding refeeding syndrome – is one of the most important ways to prevent any negative consequences. As well as slowing down enzyme production – because you’re not digesting – when you eat again, you risk flooding your body with insulin as you shift suddenly from ketosis (fat-adapted metabolism) to carbohydrate-based foods. This process relies on nutrients that have been severely depleted during a fast: phosphate, potassium, magnesium and several vitamins, especially thiamine (vitamin B1). According to Harper’s, ‘Suddenly needing a lot of them leads to serious acute deficiencies, causing heart failure, hypotension, and sudden death.’

  Sudden death.

  So I eat the cucumber. First I wash it and peel it and cut it into long slices like fat, pale ribbons, then I lay the ribbons on a plate and go into the sunroom. The sun streams in, making the cucumber look jewelled, the pearl-coloured tiny beads or seeds – whatever they are – a miracle of design. The seeds (those jewels) rest in the whitish, firm flesh of the cucumber. If I wasn’t so hungry, I could stare at it all day.

  The cucumber was chosen to break the fast because it is – of all the things I could be sticking in my clean-as-a-whistle gut – the least likely to cause sudden death. No strong taste, smell, flavour – it is mostly water and fibre. Yet it is snappy and crunchy enough to provide some work for my teeth, to get them chewing again.

  It is, I admit, not the stuff my food dreams are made of. I want something hot, deep-fried and oozing cheese. But, for now, it will do.

  I have lasted the full fourteen days, which I am proud of – but I’m not out of the woods. I’m now entering phase two of the detox – in many ways more perilous than the first fourteen days. I have to stick to a very rigid eating plan of half a cucumber (all I am allowed for the day) plus the dreaded herbs, before moving on to 50 grams of poached chicken the next day, and one egg the day after.

  Part of the appeal – if you can call it that – of fasting or restrictive diets is the notion that you can reset your tastebuds. It’s like a hard restart or a system upgrade on your computer. You switch it off and the buggy bits – the bits that crave salt and grease and sugar – can be expelled, and in their place your body will crave salads, vegetables and gallons of water. Willpower isn’t necessary when this happens. You just follow your cravings, and they will lead you to the organic vegetable aisle. The marketing person for the fasting clinic told me via email that the detox would reboot my system, that I would crave healthy food. It happened to her. But for me, it does not come to pass.

  I crave all sorts of rubbish – mostly deep-fried, salty fast food like chicken wings. Yet my sense of portion size is radically reset, as is my attitude to alcohol. In the later stages of the fast I attend parties where I neither eat nor drink, and observe, not without some horror (did I used to be like that?), the way people would deteriorate over the course of a night. They would start off okay, then after an hour or two of drinking would stand too close to me, repeating the same story and spitting (did I used to spit?). Early in the night, I am so careful around the hors d’oeuvres (‘Oh, none for me, thanks’), while they prowl like provo gangs around the perimeter of the party, looking for something – anything – to eat.

  I don’t walk around feeling superior to people when I’m on the fast, but I am full of wonder that people can eat so much. As my body is using its own fat (and muscle and bone) for fuel, and I am living off liquid herbs, anything more than a couple of small meals a day, with teeny-tiny portions of protein, carbs and vegetables, seems lavish – gluttonous, even. When I begin eating again, my portion sizes are so small and delicate that friends start Instagramming them – incredulous that anyone would eat so little. ‘Normal’ meals are placed beside them for scale. But when you’ve been subsisting on liquid herbs then cucumber for weeks, what a feast it is to have one green bean (a longish one) and piece of fish that’s roughly half the size of a credit card. My stomach has shrunk. I savour each flake.

  As for alcohol, when I reintroduce it, I am shocked at how only one or two drinks gives me the world’s worst hangover the following day. Two glasses of wine are debilitating. My clean body freaks the fuck out when it has to process the sugar, the alcohol and the chemicals. I ponder the nature of tolerance. My toxic body could cope so much better with lashings of alcohol and dirty foods. It soldiered on regardless. But after the fast I’m as sensitive as a poet. Is this what happens when you get clean? You become delicate?

  The thing that drove me to the fast in the first place was not a sensitivity (the sort of sensitivity that leads others to complain of gluten intolerance or bloating or eczema) but its opposite – a sort of coarsening. My body was not a temple, it was a stockyard, where dirty animals passed through, where there was some horsetrading; it was busy and noisy and full of action. Stockyards are dynamic places, and useful things happen there. But they’re far from the idea of the temple – and they’re certainly not clean.

  *

  By day seventeen the allure of the cucumber is starting to wear thin. And I’m over the samey-ness of the herbs and the daily visits and weigh-ins at the fasting clinic. But energy continues to return to my body. Today I go to the beach for a run. When I sweat, there is curiously no odour. My tears no longer smell bad. The thick coating of … something … is disappearing from my tongue and in its place is this healthy pink thing that just longs to taste something.

  I feel physically and mentally great. But the one thing that is missing is spiritual enlightenment. During the fast, there are no hallucinations or visions, no sense of oneness with the universe. If anything, the fast makes me feel separate and apart from the collective. I’m self-absorbed, and hyper-focused on my body and its processes. Such narcissism is surely the enemy of any sort of spiritual experience.

  In the second stage of the fast I’ll be attending a retreat where I’ll be required to meditate for many hours a day, and I’m hoping that the discipline instilled by the fast will carry over to meditation. But that is a matter of tools and technique – none of the big, roaring, awesome, get-close-to-your-god stuff has occurred during the period of my starvation, and I sense none will occur in the fast’s later stages.

  *

  On day twenty, I hit the closest point to giving up on the whole detox. It’s the chest pains again. They wake me at 4am and I stay up until dawn, like I am standing vigil over a patient but the patient is me. I ring my editor, the one who gave me the assignment in the first place, and tell her that I’m worried about the side effects, that it feels like I’m having a heart attack, and that I’m scared. She takes me off the story immediately and urges me to see my doctor.

  My doctor can’t find anything wrong with my heart but books me in for a mammogram and an ECG, which sends me into an anxious spiral: breast cancer? A heart attack? What? All I wanted was to detox my life. My GP is more sanguine. He says fasting has been around forever and human beings are quite good at it, due to long periods of not catching things in the wilderness.

  I do not feel so relaxed. I say sotto voce to my doctor, ‘I’ve cheated.’ I tell him about the hummus on New Year’s Eve and the two grains of rice with Chris, and some of Jemma’s breakfast. My doctor is very pleased. ‘I’m glad,’ he says. ‘I’d worry what sort of person you are if
you didn’t cheat.’

  Long after the fast, I speak to Amanda Salis about this second incident of alarming chest pains. She is blunt: ‘It sounds dangerous to me. You felt like you were having a heart attack. Is that related to getting rid of toxins? If you deprive yourself of sufficient food for long enough, it will kill you.’

  My body was eating its own muscle. Possibly the heart muscle. I was almost having a heart attack. Twice.

  *

  I am waiting for the results of my breast scan. What if I have cancer? I need to speak to someone who is not Dr Liu, my GP or my editor. At a barbecue in Melbourne before I commence the fast, a friend’s brother told me about his colleague. Heather had done Dr Liu’s detox and it changed her life. Heather had been a salt-of-the-earth broad of the old school, always getting drunk at the races, falling out of moving trams and getting into fights in the queue at McDonald’s at 3am. Now she was skinny and well behaved. She became a Dr Liu convert and, in a way, a model of how I wanted my new self to be.

  He put me on speaker and I chatted to Heather, who reassured me that even though it was the hardest thing she’d ever done, the fast was definitely worth it. Heather gave me her number and at least three email addresses. She told me the fast is so difficult that I’ll need a mentor. She would be that mentor for me. She said, ‘I’ll be there for you. Just call. Anytime.’