What happens when you deprive a restaurant critic of food? Fay Maschler checks into a German detox clinic

The (dramatic) weight loss was just the start of it...
Fay Maschler2 February 2016

If you eat for a living — as arguably I do — even when not working you must eat. Otherwise the career would be cut tragically short. Despite going to restaurants these days being a commonplace experience, I still get concerned looks when it is discovered that I am a reviewer. ‘How do you manage your weight?’ Only too comfortably is an answer.

However, recent reports of the therapeutic, curative and even redemptive powers of fasting begin to interest me — naturally I try, and let lapse, the 5:2 diet. I then read an article written by the novelist Jeanette Winterson about going on an 11-day fast at the Buchinger Wilhelmi Clinic near Lake Constance (Bodensee) in Germany and decide to give it a try. Winterson is a skinny little thing so it is not weight loss but the more esoteric, profound changes that can be achieved she describes. Rebooting your immune system is an engaging image. Dr Otto Buchinger was a military physician who in the early 20th century cured himself through fasting of chronic rheumatism of the joints caused by septicaemia, a condition that was sentencing him to a painful life in a wheelchair. Thereafter he was determined to spread the word and his clinic, established permanently in Überlingen in 1953, remains a family-run concern into the third and fourth generation. In the halls of the Moderne building that is the main house, within now quite a sprawling complex, hang sepia photographs of the Buchinger family looking like nothing so much as the von Trapps of fasting.

I am undertaking the programme with my older sister Beth. Over the years she and I have been to various spas together, and deep sibling knowledge and affection means that moods and rattiness are forgiven. We arrive for our ten-night stay — the minimum advised, at the core of which is six days’ true fasting — and are shown to rooms in the block called Villa Larix (named after the nearby larch trees). The furnishings are competent rather than luxurious but the bed and bedding notably cosseting, a detail that will prove increasingly relevant. From the balcony is an uplifting view of Lake Constance and the Swiss Alps.

There is paperwork to deal with and we are each given a book and an iPad, which explain in great detail what to expect day to day. Then it is off to the restaurant in the main house for raw spinach salad with curls of carrot and five pine kernels followed by root vegetables in a creamy potato sauce plus tomatoes, onions and aubergine. Sparkling mineral water is allowed. This comes as great consolation. Bottles of water and trolleys of herb tea are everywhere. I take a sleeping pill, as does Beth — no doubt against the rules and certainly the ethos but how else do you settle down at 9.35pm (8.35pm GMT)? We have hired a TV and DVD player and there is effective wi-fi in the bedrooms.

Every morning you see a nurse to be weighed and have blood pressure measured (it mustn’t go too low). Our nurse is warm and motherly but speaks English the way I speak Greek, ie, she can say some things quite fluently but doesn’t necessarily understand the answers. On the first day you also see the doctor you have been assigned. I feel fortunate to have landed Dr Henning Wittrock, who seems to me about 16 but has a knowledge, curiosity and persistence that puts most London GPs in the shade. My BMI and waist measurement (‘Can you even find a waist?’ I ask) are alarming but a spur to embracing the coming days.

A blood test reveals the usual biochemical, molecular and cellular analyses, indicates supplements — vitamin D and magnesium in my case — to be given and influences the choice of therapies and treatments from a thick book of possibilities. Meeting at meals fellow fasters from the UK, we have the predictable discussion about the morality of paying not to eat — ‘I don’t suppose people in refugee camps feel the euphoria we are being promised,’ says one woman, tartly — but there is abundance, generosity of spirit and palpable benevolence in what else is included in the price.

Guided two-hour walks in the surrounding countryside, which are a high point in both meanings of the phrase, concerts, painting classes, singing groups — ‘Sing your life with healing and powerful songs’ — lectures, gymnastics, meditation, yoga, stretching, cooking demos, films, autogenic training and more crowd the daily-changing programmes leaving barely enough time, it seems to me, for the wholesome luxury of napping and sleeping. Qualified medical staff are on hand around the clock. Of the few treatments I do fit in, a shiatsu massage from Mrs Binzenhöfer is the best I have experienced — and I have tried a lot.

The clientele at our stay are about half German and Swiss, with the other half made up from French, British, Russian and Middle Eastern. There is a preponderance of men, which comes as a surprise, and we discover at the welcome ‘cocktail’ — hosted by the inspiring, multilingual Dr Françoise Wilhelmi de Toledo, who literally glows with health — that many are enthusiastic repeat customers. One Frenchman is back for his 16th visit.

You are warned that the first few days are the hardest and having not, needless to say, prudently wound down my eating and drinking before embarking on the regime

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I feel at the outset what can succinctly be described as absolutely dreadful. A pounding headache on the cleansing day when Glauber’s salts empty your gut lingers, but in response to pleas with the nurse, along with the welcome hotties at bedtime comes a 1,000mg paracetamol tablet. It does the trick.

I doze or sleep at every available opportunity and often choose the half-hour walk rather than the 5km variety. The bushy-tailed surge of energy mentioned by journalists who have reviewed Buchinger eludes me, but what I do experience is the absence of hunger that an empty system provides and the serenity this in turn bestows.

Walking into the lakeside resort town of Überlingen, we come across a winter fair with an ice rink surrounded by stalls selling grilled bratwurst and fried chips.

I am impervious even to the cooking scents.

I realise that food and its impact is a kind of subliminal continuous nag and chatter that has simply disappeared. I feel clear-minded as well as clear-headed. Others say I look better as cheekbones sharpen and neck tightens. A weight loss of nearly 10lb in ten days has nice little bonuses like rings spinning on my fingers. I don’t even once think about wine, which accounts for many of my calories in normal life. It is just not appropriate here — and I manage to remain abstemious for a while after my return.

The holistic approach has penetrated. I think about the meaning of life quite as much as weight loss. My creaky knees are still creaky (the lessening of joint pain is one of the proclaimed benefits of fasting) but they will carry me back to Buchinger Wilhelmi again and for a longer stay as is recommended in the literature. I felt on the good days that I could fast until I became a saint. A thin saint.

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