Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  I’ve contacted Heather every couple of days since I started the fast with a variety of fake-casual messages: ‘Yo, what’s up, bro, I’m just starvin’ – I mean CHILLIN’ – in da house …’

  Now my messages are a lot less casual – it’s like the narrative arc of Eminem’s song ‘Stan’.

  ‘Hey, ring me back. Right now. Please. I think I am having a heart attack.’

  ‘Hey, where are you? It’s me, again. You said I could call you day and night. Well, I am calling you and you are, you are …’

  You are, where?

  I never get a reply from Heather. During this detox, it becomes clear that there’s one thing I need that I don’t have – a friend. This is rough stuff to do on your own. Later, after my article comes out, people find me – people who are in days five or more of the detox. They are suffering and reaching out. They want to know – does it work? Will I be okay? I answer quickly and soothe them like I wanted to be soothed: Everything will be all right. It will all be okay.

  My editor keeps emailing and asking if I am eating again, telling me that everyone in the office is worried about my wellbeing. When I went to see her at Fairfax HQ a few days ago, everyone was shocked at how different I looked. One editor even thought that I’d shrunk in terms of height. The fast had made me shorter! (Amanda Salis later tells me that a detox this extreme can result in the body eating bone in order to stay alive, leading to osteoporotic fractures of the vertebrae that can shorten you by several centimetres – so maybe I was actually getting shorter.)

  My friend Viv, who used to be a nurse, comes with me to get my chest pain test results. I am shaking in the passenger seat of her car. She opens the envelopes and reads the X-rays. The cancer tests come back negative. The ECG is normal – and the weight keeps dropping off.

  I continue to see Dr Liu, who tells me ‘progress will be slow’ but he will get me down to my ‘natural body shape’. Even though I only see him a few times during the course of my treatment, I know he is monitoring my daily weigh-ins and I obscurely want to please him. I’m not doing it for me; I’m doing it for Dr Liu. Months after the fast proper finishes my diary is full of things like ‘I went out and had some chicken pho. Cannot believe it. What would Dr Liu think?’ What would Dr Liu think – I wondered this all through the first six months of that year, whenever anything pleasurable passed my lips. But perhaps we need an authority figure when we do something as grave, risky and difficult as not eating. In order to actually persevere we must create either a bogeyman or a father figure – someone stern, whom we fear if we go off course, someone we want to please, whose approval we crave.

  *

  I leave Sydney and go stay with my parents in the coastal hamlet of Port Fairy. Each night they cook amazing food, which they don’t serve me. I am sulky and depressed and heat up the packets of herbs, which I drink away from everyone like the special case I’ve become.

  It’s a warm summer and they are entertaining a lot – eggs and bacon in the morning, long, bracing walks along the beach followed by lattes in sidewalk cafes, a drinks cabinet on wheels on the porch and jugs of Pimm’s in the afternoon, cheese and biscuits, the smell of barbecue and the beads of sweat running down the neck of a beer.

  Why is it that you only recognise paradise once it’s been lost?

  But in high cupboards are my old clothes, and there is an amazing satisfaction to slipping on a pair of pants last worn twenty years ago and having them zip right up to the top instead of giving up halfway there. People stop me in the street, to exclaim over not my weight loss but the weird anti-ageing thing I have going on. It’s nothing like the look of people who’ve had surgery and emerge – suddenly, somewhat horrifically – looking ‘refreshed’, but rather a strange face that belongs to someone ten, twenty years younger than me.

  So is fasting a bad or a good thing?

  It depends who you ask. There is an enormous gap between what the wellness ‘experts’ say and what mainstream medicine says about fasting. The former say it’s the cure; the latter – crudely speaking – says it’s the disease. Moderate forms of fasting such as the 5:2 diet have been approved by many in the medical profession, but a long and extreme fast, such as the one I undertook, is pre-modern, frontier medicine, left over from a time of leeches, blood-letting and purging. Now and then, though, studies emerge on the effects of fasting on hypertension, or the immune cell response in certain cancers, or on epilepsy. And the results (remember this is no drugs, no treatment, just the patient not eating) can seem to verge on miraculous. But we’re a long way away from consensus within the scientific community, and as for consensus between medical and wellness experts – they’re not even speaking the same language.

  But I am interested in the hunger cure for illnesses. Twain talked of starving out a cold or flu, of starvation being the best medicine. And sometimes this has proven to be the case, despite a long fast being seen more as alternative as opposed to mainstream medicine. US studies in the 1930s showed that fasting followed by a high-fat diet were successful in reducing epileptic seizures, and prior to the manufacture of insulin, fasting was showing signs in early trials of success in reducing symptoms for childhood diabetes.

  In a more recent trial, Valter Longo, Professor of Gerontology and the Biological Sciences at the USC Davis School of Gerontology and director of the USC Longevity Institute, is studying how fasting benefits the immune system – with a particular focus on people with cancer who are undergoing chemotherapy treatment. His studies with mice found a couple of things: the efficacy of chemo was improved with periods of long fasting. Twenty per cent of mice in which the cancer had fully spread, and 40 per cent with a more limited spread, were completely cured after fasting in conjunction with chemotherapy. All the mice who just had chemotherapy died.

  In 2014 Longo told the Daily Telegraph that when you starve, ‘The system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged … Everything [is getting] a little younger and it goes back to working much better.’

  A long fast means the body uses its stores of glucose, fat and ketones and also breaks down a significant portion of white blood cells, which trigger stem cell–based regeneration of new immune system cells, according to Longo’s research, published in the journal Cell.

  Longo’s research is ongoing; human trials are underway.

  *

  As for my own experience, I can say this: there was a terrible feeling in my body in America. It was the feeling of excess – too much drinking, smoking, drugs, bad food, not doing enough exercise and not sleeping properly. I remember a cab speeding to the airport in Las Vegas, and me saying, ‘Step on it, step on it’ – another doomed attempt to catch a plane after a night on the Strip that ended in a desert dawn. The cab driver looked at me in the rear-view mirror and said softly, not unkindly, ‘You know, honey, this wouldn’t happen if you took better care of yourself.’

  Fast-forward to December and it’s cold. I am in New York. I could feel myself getting sick, and as I tried to coax the feral cat I was minding in the windowless 20-square-foot apartment in Manhattan, to play with her toy made out of an empty tissue box, I felt about ninety years old. Everything ached. It felt like the opposite of vitality. Fasting – in the end – brought that vitality back.

  *

  Around the time I start my fast, food Instagrammers are in the ascendancy. The ones I follow, mostly young women on the hashtag #cleaneating, are very thin, white and wealthy. They holiday in places like St Barthélemy and Ibiza. They don’t eat sugar, gluten or dairy, yet despite their asceticism they somehow manage to style a chia-seed pudding into something moreish and desirable. In some shots the Instagrammers are doing yoga headstands, and in others they are on yachts. Sometimes they post memes that in my weakened state I find encouraging. ‘Do not reward yourself with food, you are not a dog,’ says one that I stare at for a long time, the screen glowing in my da
rk bedroom.

  But a counter-trend is emerging. All over the country, the hippest new restaurants are selling dude food – burgers, fried chicken, ribs, mac and cheese, schnitzels and fries. It’s suddenly cool (and expensive) to dine at an indie version of KFC. The reviews talk lovingly of fryers imported from Tennessee and different types of lard, recommending the best beers to wash it all down with. This is dirty food – my sort of food. There are also monster milkshakes in mason jars filled with sugary milk, syrup and chocolate bars and jammed with doughnuts. People are queuing up to get in. If you want to eat out you have a choice of some expensive pressed juice and salad bar or some place that sells expensive, high-calorie, deep-South Americana fare. Where are all the normal cafes? It’s as if society itself has a form of disordered eating.

  In the old, serious newspapers, pages three and five – and sometimes page one – are giving over, breathlessly, to a new food trend. These food trends often seem to be verging on parody, as if the chefs and the baristas and the editors have got together and tried to top each other in decadence or frivolity, collaborating to see how far we the readers can be pushed into buying it.

  We’re all foodies now, or aspire to be. The language of restaurants (what’s in, what’s good, what’s new, what’s opening and shutting), ingredients, chefs, new methods of food preparation, of recently discovered superfoods, has become a currency of sorts. In this world, it’s no surprise Australia’s fastest-growing media success story is Broadsheet, which each week publishes news of the hottest restaurant openings, lovingly detailing the ancestry of the coffee beans or the revival of the early-twentieth-century butter churn. When Broadsheet writes about a new restaurant opening in Melbourne or Sydney, the next day there are queues around the block. Restaurateurs talk about this effect. They call it being ‘broadshat’.

  In 2015 I reviewed restaurants for Guardian Australia – which was great, except I could never really shake the feeling that I was engaged in the promotion of a lifestyle that seemed overly lavish, wasteful and frivolous: a symptom of a society that has become too wealthy for its own good. I like good food. I love restaurants. But hitting all the hatted restaurants week in, week out – it was impossible to ignore the decadence. More than one person in the industry told me these years felt like Rome before the fall.

  There were the elaborate menus with ten or more tiny dishes, each containing dozens of ingredients – with some of these ingredients being so rare that in order to procure them, one must forage in a remote forest in central America. The rare ingredients are then flown halfway around the world to sit on top of your parfait, and consumed without a moment’s thought for the energy expended on getting them from ‘paddock to plate’.

  There were the juice sommeliers who ran through the ‘juice matching options’ at only $140 extra a head, if you weren’t drinking alcohol.

  And the no-cancellation policies.

  There were the amuses-bouche, always, and the little things that came ‘compliments of the chef’.

  There were the plates designed by a former investment banker turned potter in Northcote and fired in a kiln imported from Galway.

  There was the feeling, around three-quarters into the meal, that you weren’t going to last, that there was too much food, and you would have to – just like the Romans – go and purge your stomach in order to make room for dessert.

  There were priceless wine cellars and the months-long waitlist for a $600-a-head dinner at Noma, the ballot for a degustation at the Fat Duck.

  There was the waiter crouching at your table, telling you in loving detail about the farm in Gippsland where your lamb was raised.

  There were the people Instagramming their food at the next table. There were the restaurants that were no longer really restaurants – instead they were tourist destinations and forms of social media currency – and anyway getting a reservation was impossible.

  One night, after reviewing three restaurants in Melbourne – including the grim, multi-course Zumbo dessert degustation, I got into a taxi and my pants split.

  It was time to start writing about something else.

  *

  Australians throw out $8 billion of edible food every year – much of which is fruit and vegetables. Our good intentions take us through the supermarket check-out but much of the greenery dies on the fridge shelf, along with our healthful aspirations.

  It’s not packets of chips or chocolate bars that end up in the bin – Australians eat 32 kilograms of chocolate per person, per year. Corporations have spent billions on research and development to find our sweet spots when it comes to junk food – the perfect balance of sugar, fat and salt that goes into a corn chip, for example, or a chocolate bar.

  These processed foods are being marketed to us with billion-dollar budgets. And they are cheap – they don’t cost much, compared with, say, grain-fed beef or organic kale. The bind? We buy the processed foods that are sold so aggressively to us, but then we are made to feel shame when we eat them – or eat too much of them.

  I’m sure I’m not the only person to run on this particular treadmill (this is purely a metaphor; there are no literal treadmills here) – excess followed by guilt followed by self-imposed false deprivation. The weekend of pizza and beers, chips and pinot gris, followed by regret and the Monday-morning diet. The hedonism followed by the asceticism.

  It’s not a new thing, this all-then-nothing approach. Fasting occurred naturally in primitive man after feasting – a necessity due to uncertain food supply. Then it became incorporated into ritual (the Romans with their feasts and purging) and religion.

  Now in a post-religious, post-ritual age, many of us rely on a different sort of calendar. It’s the party calendar – the Christmas season that kicks off early in November around the time of the Melbourne Cup and ends with Australia Day. It’s the long, hot hedonistic time of year when we go out every night, drink and eat too much, and say, ‘What the hell,’ or simply just, ‘Hello,’ to the proffered profiterole or line of coke or cigarette or bottle of champagne. Hey, it’s summer. Next please, yes thanks and more, more, more. Maybe it’s greed, maybe it’s habit, maybe it’s because everyone else is doing it – but the brakes are off for three months.

  Then February, and the detox cycle begins. We crave to be clean. The market is ready – as the market always is. There are detox spas here and in South-East Asia, where they’ll not feed you for a hefty fee. There are all the gyms with their New Year, New You! advertising and the boot camps and the personal trainers and the protein shakes and pharmacy detox kits. There are diet books and eating plans and internet forums with programs by Michelle Bridges (mindset), Sarah Wilson (no sugar) and Pete Evans (Paleo). Some of these programs are a neat twelve weeks, unintended echoes perhaps of the Twelve-Step Alcoholics Anonymous program.

  They’re all here to help us, to wish us well – all the Petes and Sarahs and Michelles – waiting at the end of the party, to scoop us up and promise us that if we do as they say, follow their program and go without (for fuck’s sake, just this once!) then equilibrium and vitality will be restored.

  In all this there is the idea of reversal and redemption. Here we are again (and again and again), lashed to the pendulum of excess and starvation. Why are there so many of us who can’t live in the middle? What is it that we’re really looking for?

  Between the hedonism and the clean eating falls the shadow. The detox cycle has its own attendant emotions – mostly guilt, sometimes self-disgust, recriminations and reprisals, fear of change rooms, avoidance of mirrors and certain close-fitting clothes – yet there is also the promise and hope of a new year and new diet that some friend or other has tried that really worked. I experienced all those ugly emotions towards the end of my time in New York. I hated being in my skin and in my clothes (I also hated being out of my clothes) but there it was on the horizon – the thing that kept me from total self-loathing and despair. As regularly as February rolls around, there is this promise – I’m going to detox.
/>   *

  About fifteen years ago, before clean eating and online wellness programs and Instagram, I read a book called The Clothesline Diet that stayed with me. It wasn’t the diet itself that I cared about, but the stories of the women in it. They walked around their backyard clotheslines to lose weight. These were women in towns without gyms, or women with young children who couldn’t leave the house, or women without much money, or women too embarrassed about their size to exercise in public. It was a working-class book, earthy – not aspirational. The women were the carers of young children, of ageing parents, of everyone but themselves. (Caitlin Moran wrote memorably in her book How to Be a Woman, ‘Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It’s a way of screwing yourself up whilst still remaining fully functional, because you have to.’)

  The first-person accounts of how the women had put on weight were gripping: all the visits to the drive-thru on the way to school pick-up and the burgers crammed in the mouth, engine idling in the parking lot. The eating late at night. The secret eating. The two dinners – one with the kids and one with the husband. The bag of lollies or chips in front of the TV after the kids are in bed. The biscuits with the cup of tea – and before you know it the pack is gone. Such small sins, followed by self-loathing.

  The book sparked a sense that in the future (which has now well and truly arrived), the struggles, the tests and triumphs we would face would be with ourselves. Our own bodies would be the sites of battle. And so it came to pass in shows such as The Biggest Loser. Narrative was an important part of it – how we got here, how we let ourselves go and how we’re going to take charge again. How we were going to become clean.

  In this age of extreme narcissism, our victories are not against an outside force or an injustice, they are not public or social victories but small, private things: triumphs over our own bodies’ appetites and our own weak characters.