Throughout my life I’ve toggled between extremes: making a mess (regular overeating or binges) then a vigorous clean-up (ultra-hardcore diets). It’s not all grim compulsion – I also passionately love food, exploring cuisines, and good wine. But my relationship to nourishment, and my body, is unbalanced; the only healthy constant throughout my adult life has been exercise. So I was looking to Mayrlife (formerly VivaMayr) on the shores of Lake Altaussee in Austria, to do two things: help me lose weight fast after I’d put on more than a stone last Christmas and thus turbocharge my diet mojo, and change my habits for good so I could move towards a more healthy modus operandi as I get into middle age.
Mayrlife is an excellent and very interesting experience in lots of ways, but at around £3,000 per week, it’s expensive. The good thing is there’s plenty of wisdom to consider, and approaches to emulate without having to go anywhere. For anyone feeling that post-Christmas bloat but not wishing to shell out on the treatments it offers, here’s what I discovered.
1. Choose gut-friendly vegetables
It all starts with the gut. And ends with the gut. But what does this mean?
The clinic is based around the insights of Franz Xaver Mayr, an Austrian gastroenterologist who as early as the 1920s realised that by eating sugary foods and alcohol, people were poisoning themselves. His cure was a gut cleanse to reverse the damage caused by sweets, booze and grease.
Since old Dr Mayr’s day, the microbiome has become the talk of the town, and scientists keep finding startling discoveries about its importance for longevity, health and mental wellbeing. On the most basic level, if the gut is constantly thrown toxins and curveballs, from sugar and alcohol to poorly chewed vegetables, it can’t do its job: digestion. What goes down the gullet and eventually into a backed-up or sluggish colon sits around for far too long, the yeast from all that sugar yielding its own gas-emitting bacteria, the nutrients in one’s food don’t get properly absorbed and the gut itself becomes a toxic environment – scary when we consider the breakthrough finding that there are actually brain cells in the intestine.
I eat a lot of fruit and veg but wasn’t absorbing them: my blood test showed a pretty severe imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants. Panicked, I asked what all these free radicals could lead to and my splendid doctor, of the equally splendid name Maximilian Schubert, said: “Inflammation, which causes allergies, cancer…” Argh! The c-word, always flashing in the wings of any health environment. He was quick to say that he was in no way predicting I would get cancer, but… there is a connection.
I expressed consternation that, as someone who eats so many vegetables, I should have such impotent anti-oxidative powers. Dr Schubert said that eating lots of vegetables is no good if you don’t chew them properly; and a quick flashback offered a vision of me wolfing down whatever I was eating like it might run away if I couldn’t get it down the hatch in time.
I had also assumed it was best to throw difficult things at the digestive system. It turns out I’d somewhat misconstrued the old adage that eating things like celery makes you burn more calories than are contained in the food itself. In fact, celery is good – chewed properly, it’s packed with nutrients and perfectly possible to digest. But some veg, like onions, peppers, kale, cabbage and broccoli (the latter three are in the tricky brassica family), are harder to digest, though nowhere near as problematic as greasy or fried things. Mayr wisdom doesn’t warn people off cabbage and broccoli for good (though it does garlic and onion; the latter especially being a devil to break down – this was a devastating proscription which, due to my love of both and belief in the healthy effects of garlic, I have ignored) but during the delicate period of digestive overhaul, both at the clinic and afterwards, we are told to skip them.
2. No raw after four – and skip fruit entirely
Our digestive system is at its most nimble, powerful and energetic between the morning and about 4pm. After that it grows weaker and more sluggish, so chucking it difficult-to-digest food, which includes raw veg, will tax it and produce diminishing returns, resulting in clogging of the colon and bloating. At the clinic, we had some raw and only faintly cooked delicacies for breakfast and lunch, like veg garnish (watercress or dill sitting atop an avocado mousse) and only faintly cooked veg (beansprouts and edamame for one of my favourite lunchtime dishes). But come evening, there was nothing raw in sight – and even earlier in the day the uncooked was kept to small quantities.
One of the starkest messages I received in Austria was to give up fruit entirely – forever. As Dr Schubert pointed out, aware he was delivering harsh tidings, there are absolutely no nutrients in fruit that aren’t in veg – all fruit adds to the party is sugar and acid. For instance, the polyphenols found in blueberries are also in spinach and artichoke. It gets worse: Dr Schubert drew my attention to studies that suggest a link between the consumption of fructose and depression and impulsivity. I checked this out later online and lo and behold, explorations of this link have become a staple of nutritional-scientific literature. Wolfing down that punnet of grapes, or feeling virtuous as one nibbles strawberries and cherries? None of it is helping.
In the first month or so after my sojourn in Austria I avoided fruit entirely, which wasn’t too bad, but I have since given into the odd urge for cherries or pineapple – naughty, but hard to read negative effects, at least in the short term, on my mental or physical health (though now, three months on, my resumption of tropical fruit, and jazz apples, truth be told, also coincides with some weight gain).
3. Chew everything 40 times
Perhaps the easiest Mayr maxim to implement is the chewing. Sitting down to any meal at the clinic one is confronted with a card reminding one to keep one’s voice down so as not to disturb the peaceful focus of the other guests in their… chewing. You are meant to chew each bite 40 to 60 times. Because digestion begins in the mouth, courtesy of enzymes in saliva, most of us who wolf things down with a few chomps are depriving our guts of a crucial part of the digestive process, forcing them to take on bits of food that are too big and undigested to break down – and thus pointless. Chewing loads also slows down the pace of eating, and helps you realise you’re full sooner. This probably made the biggest difference in prompting me to eat less.
When I first tried the mega-chewing, on a nasty hunk of stale buckwheat, I thought I might be sick; the sludge in my mouth at the end of 60 chews was almost unbearable. But when applied rigorously to everything that came my way (rice cakes, mousse, small spirals of meat and triangles of cheese), it began to make sense, almost to provide reassurance. No matter what, if I chewed 40 to 60 times, I was giving my gut a chance, and converting the calories I was consuming into nutritional value.