I wonder how many other people out there are starving themselves. I suspect my fellow fasters are everywhere – I see them on the magazines on all the newsagent shelves. How else would someone lose five kilograms in a week to get a bikini-ready body?
But pick up the magazine a few months later, and they’re back to what they were – body-shamed with a red circle on their thighs. It’s the new scarlet letter.
*
The wellness industry and the diet industry are distinct but overlapping beasts. To diet is to follow a regime, in the relative short term, in order to achieve a weight-loss goal. The wellness industry talks about nutrition as something that you internalise and just do. It has no end; in fact, weight loss is rarely mentioned. Overall health is the marker of success. The word ‘clean’ is used instead of ‘thin’. You are judged not just on weight but also on tone and glow. There is a moral component too: is the food locally grown and sourced? Is it organic? Is it cruelty free? Is it grain- or grass-fed? Has it been processed using industrial farming methods? Did its planting displace indigenous crops?
Wellness – on Instagram at least – is all about signalling. Consumption is conspicuous. How you eat is a dog whistle of sorts, a sign that you are a certain sort of person, with particular values, level of intelligence and spending power. The cleaner you eat, the higher you are up the hierarchy. As Hayley Phelan writes in Vogue, wellness is ‘the new luxury status symbol … If five years ago it was a Céline bag, today’s ultimate status symbol might just be a SoulCycle hoodie and a green juice’. And Hadley Freeman in the Guardian: ‘Ostentatiously ascetic good health is now a major fashion trend … The pursuit of “wellness” hits that crucial point on the Venn diagram between aspiration, self-love and slimness.’
There is also a class aspect at play. If you are poor, you won’t be paying forty dollars for that Himalayan pink salt.
It reminds me of being at a supermarket in Sydney with a friend’s children. This friend eats really well, and is into organic produce. We were walking down the aisles behind a family that you could describe as obese. The mum was putting chips, chocolate and frozen foods in their trolley. The children I was with laughed and pointed, but didn’t call the family ‘fat’, they called them ‘fat and poor’.
*
N+1 editor Mark Greif writes, ‘Having our food supply made simple, we devote ourselves to looking for ways to make it difficult.’ Dieting, he says, with its ‘weight-loss imperative, with its shadows of attractiveness and social distinction, and other fantasies of rarity, difficulty and expense, complicates the fairly mundane research consensus on improving health: eat moderately, move more.’ He goes on:
Frankly, I suspect that an ethics of living in a rich nation at the dawn of the 21st century involves not caring so much about your health, your diet, your exercise and your thrills. The meaningful time is now. We should be prepared to enjoy our good luck, and drop dead after a sufficient length of time – but ask, along the way, what we actually wish to do with our time.
Wellness is a treadmill, and sucks up so much time and money – isn’t it worth pondering how much of it really helpful? At the Global Wellness Summit held in Austria in 2016, ten major wellness trends were identified. Among them was the optimistically titled ‘From Superfood and Diet Trend Hysteria to Sane Eating’. According to materials released by the summit, ‘The last few years have been marked by a near-hysterical obsession with the next superfood or diet trend. So much so that experts are suggesting that this age of diet-hopping and food puritanism may be a collective, global eating disorder.’
There is no better example of complication and food puritanism than ‘clean eating’, which is based on a fear on ingesting toxins and a fixation on the providence and ‘purity’ of foods. Clean eating has become the sort of gold standard of the eating world – and requires rigorous discipline and policing. You also need to have a fair amount of time and money to constantly eat clean. It’s the sort of diet that you organise your life around. The madness of this is never remarked upon; indeed, this way of living is prized. Maybe it’s our collective, global eating disorder.
In its extreme form, clean eating can tip over into ‘orthorexia nervosa’, a term coined in 1997 when Dr Steven Bratman detailed his eating regime: he wouldn’t eat vegetables picked more than fifteen minutes earlier and chewed every mouthful fifty times. Bratman defined his condition as ‘a pathological fixation on eating proper food’ or a fixation on righteous eating.
Experts such as dietitian Tania Ferraretto say a modern obsession with clean eating is fuelling more cases of orthorexia nervosa. She told the ABC, ‘People are getting their [dietary] information from lots of different sources, and most of these sources are actually very un-credible, and providing potentially dangerous information.’ She says orthorexia often falls under the radar, because people who have it look healthy, when really they aren’t.
On Instagram, the hashtag #cleaneating has more than 28 million posts.
Londoner Carrie Armstrong, thirty-five, became obsessed with ‘clean’ eating after she was struck down by a virus eight years ago. According to the Guardian, she was bed-bound and unable to lift her head off the pillow. Doctors said there was little more that medicine could do, so to speed up her natural recovery, she began researching alternative remedies and diets online.
‘My first thought was no wonder I had got so sick because I’d been eating badly for years,’ she says. ‘But then I started reading about the transformative effects of giving up meat and sugar, then carbohydrates, and it went from there.’ Armstrong went vegan then switched to raw veganism, renouncing all animal-based food products and anything that had been cooked. Over eighteen months she dropped from 70 to 40 kilograms, stopped menstruating, and became ‘completely obsessed’ with ‘detoxing and cleansing’.
In August 2016 a Sydney woman was sentenced to fourteen months’ jail, suspended, after she fasted while breastfeeding her child. She had been treating her son for severe eczema, first via a restrictive diet and then a fast, on recommendation by a naturopath. When the woman took her eight-month-old son to hospital in 2015, he was emaciated and severely dehydrated, had sunken eyes, dangerously low sodium levels and ‘flexed hands and feet’. ‘Had he not presented at hospital at that time, he would have died within days,’ the magistrate Ian Guy said. The woman’s family noticed the child’s and her own weight loss and told her to stop the diet, but she did not. At one point, she modified the water-only rule by eating only watermelon for three days. (This is what I would call ‘cheating’ if I had done this on my fast.)
An evidence-based medicine specialist with Bond University, Professor Chris Del Mar, told the Guardian that the naturopathic industry was almost ‘impossible’ to regulate, given there were no restrictions on who could call themselves a naturopath.
He said the parents of a sick child seeing a naturopath might not realise illness was the effect of the treatment rather than a cause, and therefore might end up seeking further naturopathic treatment. This is the so-called healing crisis paradox.
So how did I go off the detox? To paraphrase the character Mike in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: gradually then suddenly.
For around the first thirty days I followed the fast (almost) to the letter, but it was too restrictive to continue much longer than that. I did a fairly consistent but modified version until day eighty-three. By the end I felt and looked great – possibly the best I’ve ever looked. Plus I was full of energy and vigour. I lost about 12 kilograms, normalised my cholesterol and blood pressure levels and went off medication for these conditions.
But the discipline was not to last. I was the girl with the self-control and the delicate portions for around three months. I was the girl with the waistline she’d had when she was eighteen. I was the girl with the new, small clothes. Then things – well, they roared back to life. What pushed me back into my bad old pre-fast ways was the thing I had been really craving in all those summer months in Bondi – a job.
It’s all right lolling around in your disgusting bed all day, losing weight through your stinking breath, if you have nowhere else to be, nowhere to go, no job or boyfriend or family nearby. You can exist in a state of funky ketosis until you’ve burnt through your bones, the bedclothes and all that lies beneath.
But sooner or later you need to rejoin the world. My new job would take me back to Melbourne. All nerves and adrenalin, I rehearsed my lines at the airport on the way to the interview. Maybe I’ll be better able to focus if I have a coffee, I thought. Then I realised I didn’t need an excuse. There was no omniscient fasting god staring down at me; Dr Liu needn’t know. If I wanted a coffee then I should have a coffee. I went to MoVida and ordered a flat white. When it came I dipped my head to it, like I was praying to a milky deity.
One coffee begets another. In Melbourne I had meetings, during which it’s customary to take coffee. To drink herbal tea or water is to mark you out as a stranger in the city, a non-native – like not having a football team to barrack for.
Food came soon after the job. Then booze. I moved to a flat in St Kilda and started work in the city at 6am. Winter came early and there was comfort in the things that warmed you up: the tram coming on time in Bourke Street, a heated train carriage, a steaming plate of scrambled eggs from Self Preservation, the trays and trays and trays of coffees – the paper cups piling up on the news desk, people’s names misspelt on the side. Leaves crunchy underfoot, the way your breath would cling to the air, and the sound, far away as you fast-walked down Grey Street, of the trams turning and gliding up Fitzroy Street. The soundtrack of that winter was Beck’s Morning Phase – melancholy, melodious, a paean to endings.
It was the winter of the Negroni – the solid blocks of ice and the wedge of orange, the tart, sweet, spicy tang, like an older man’s aftershave. It was also a good year for truffles. They came on everything – eggs, pizza, pasta, soups. I ate them all.
I’d forgotten the subtle differences between the two cities. I associated Sydney with wellness, and Melbourne with a more interior life. Even the yoga studios seemed darker – fewer pot plants and arch windows, and more womb-like, where the shavasana and the reverberations of a gong felt like they could go on forever.
Back in Melbourne, I became, again, thankful for food and booze. I was aware – and this was not a bad thing – how comforting it could be. Sometimes on a bad day, the thought of a tasty, hot meal was what got me through. And there’s nothing, really, wrong with that.
Days toiling at the digital coalface of the news cycle (and what a cycle it was – ISIS and desert beheadings, the spread of Ebola, girls kidnapped by Boko Haram and Malaysia Airlines planes going missing and being shot down), relentless and without a sense of completion, it was coffee that kept me up and alcohol that brought me down. It was drinks in the laneway bars near the office where I got to know my colleagues. The meaningful time is now.
Luckily I didn’t throw out my old ‘fat’ clothes; I eventually ended up at the weight I started. What goes down must come up. Several months after I stopped fasting and the weight returned, my blood pressure levels went back to a high reading and I returned to taking blood pressure medication. But something in me had shifted. I think it was the knowledge that if I really wanted to lose a lot of weight, I could do it. But I was making a choice – and that choice was one of drinking and eating what took my fancy. Of enjoying food, and making it central. Of not saying no to anything (within reason). At other times of my life I might not see food in this way, but at this time I did.
Dr Liu suggested I go on the full fast again – stop eating, and just start drinking the foul herbs, but my heart wasn’t in it. I had been clean – achieved that almost miraculous, hard-fought place where it felt like every toxin harboured had exited my body. Getting to this level of clean was the wellness equivalent of Scientology’s ‘going clear’ – the highest state of enlightenment you can achieve, a special place only a few can enter. But I didn’t think I could do it again. The detox was a journey alone to a place where nothing grew, somewhere austere, with hard soil, and a beating, pitiless sky. I now understood why, in allegory, mystics and saints are always fasting in a desert. It’s a hard, lonely place without the solace of distraction. But I had just been passing through. I did not want to go back.
I’m sitting in a hotel suite with expansive views of Sydney Harbour. In the room are two yoga instructors so vital and glowing that they seem burnished. They are literally sitting at the feet of Bikram Choudhury, founder of the yoga that bears his name.
I am there to interview Bikram because he is about to open his first yoga studio in Australia. In the 1970s he developed a new form of yoga that takes place in a room heated to almost 41 degrees with 40 per cent humidity. The heat is said to allow for deeper stretching and injury prevention. Classes run for ninety minutes and consist of a set series of twenty-six postures and two breathing exercises. They have become wildly successful – particularly with celebrities – and Bikram is earning a tonne of money from copyrighting and franchising this type of hot yoga all over the world. He is a fierce guardian of his brand and very litigious if he suspects you of ripping off any of his ‘moves’.
A photographer and I had visited the studio earlier in the day. The room was boiling hot. It smelt like a mixture of ammonia and wet school uniform. It was wall-to-wall flesh, with most people wearing just inches of material – short shorts or bikini bottoms, tank tops or, for the men, nothing on top. Participants glistened, turned and baked like rotisserie chooks. The mirrors were steamed and sweating too, and made it look like there were hundreds of people in there – duplicates, triplicates – disciples in the tropics, performing an intricate choreography. The photographer moved around the edges, taking pictures and sweating heavily. I took notes, red-faced and uncomfortable. The atmosphere in the room was too close, too intense. Once we got the shots we needed, we left. And now in the hotel room, Bikram Choudhury, who is discussing plans to further franchise his yoga, looks me up and down.
‘You,’ he says. ‘You need to do some Bikram. You are overweight.’
I am lost for words. He then goes on to describe some enormous woman – some morbidly obese giantess! – who had done his brand of yoga and ended up resembling the pair of lithe yoga instructors seated at his feet. They seem neither young nor old, but look very tanned, taut, serene and slightly vacant – like you’d imagine anyone would look after spending a lot of time exercising in a very hot room.
‘Do my yoga,’ he says, ‘and you could look like them.’
But … but … What if I don’t want to look like them? What if I want to look like me?
I leave the interview fuming and begin a determined sanction against all things Bikram.
‘Fuck you, Bikram,’ I mutter under my breath as I pass his studio, with its steamed-up windows and vile stench.
After my gentle, non-heated, mantra-chanting, omm-omming, stretchy, non-Bikram yoga I go to a cafe and drink chai with people from my class and we pay out on Bikram.
‘It’s, like, totally commercial. Yoga fast food. He’s trademarked it. You need to, like, train in LA or something before you can teach it. Celebrities do it.’
The yoga people screw up their noses at the mention of LA and the celebrities.
‘I’ve met Bikram, you know, the guy who invented the yoga. He was staying in a five-star hotel on the harbour.’
The yoga people screw up their noses at the mention of the five-star hotel and the harbour views. I don’t tell them that Bikram called me fat.
The trade sanctions go on for years. I get a personal trainer. I do Pilates. I decide to learn how to run, but – like an elderly person – I am plagued by a dodgy hip. I swim. I start Zumba. I do S
tep. I get injured again and have long periods of inactivity followed by short bursts of frantic exercise. I gym-hop. I negotiate direct debits. I negotiate to rescind my direct debits. Occasionally I meet someone who does Bikram and I recall my meeting with its founder with the waning ferocity of a crotchety veteran of some long-ago war.
I start to wonder, Bikram and me – what was it that we were fighting about? Maybe in his brutal way, he was trying to help me. Maybe he really cared about my health. And anyway, hadn’t I interviewed him with a hangover? Maybe he was trying to be kind. Maybe he had my best interests at heart. Maybe it’s time to lay down my weapons.
So, six years after my first encounter with Bikram, I walk into one of his studios, a place up some stairs on Johnston Street in Fitzroy, Melbourne, and take my first class.
I imagine this is what being born feels like. My skin is a livid pink, I am covered in a fluid that has a primal, vaguely amniotic quality and I am lying on my back in an upturned fetal position. The urge to cry out for my mother is strong.
As often happens when you try something new and strange, time takes on a non-linear quality. It lengthens. There’s an excess of it, like a ball of wool that unravels and spools from your hands. Is it an hour into my first Bikram class or has it been ten? When will it end? I wonder with a sort of detached desperation. I have been told no matter what happens in this first class, I must stay in the room. The room is heated to almost 41 degrees. I hate the heat but I must take the heat.
There are maybe thirty people in the studio, all staring fixedly at themselves in the front mirror. They are mostly nearly naked. Almost all are tattooed. All – at the one-hour mark – are covered in the slime-like sweat.
I watch it bead and drip from parts of my body that I never thought could produce sweat, let alone in such vast quantities. Out it comes from my calves, the soles of my feet, the inside of my arms, my hair, my earlobes. When I do an inverted pose, the sweat runs into my mouth and I accidentally swallow it. It has the consistency of olive oil and tastes – unsurprisingly – of sweat.
Wellmania Page 9