How I gave up fine dining

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/03/how-i-gave-up-fine-dining

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“You have the best job in the world,” is what almost everyone says to me on the rare occasions I tell them what I do for a living. (Closely followed by “I could do that”, but let’s not go there.)

I’d agree with them: I’m ridiculously lucky to be able to indulge my love for restaurants on an almost daily basis – way more when I’m abroad – and my job frequently fills me with joy. It also fills me with a lot of other stuff.

Recent studies tell us that eating in restaurants is even more unhealthy than a fast food habit. I could have told you that without the study: I don’t know many McDonald’s fans who preface their Big Mac with a nice frosty martini and mull over which bordeaux will go with the fries. But mostly I could have told you by looking at my legs, latterly dead ringers for a pair of sausage skins stuffed with porridge.

My life is sedentary: plonked in front of menus or the computer screen. I loathe gyms or classes or any kind of organised activity; Pilates bores me to distraction. I can’t stand ploughing up and down the lanes of a swimming pool. So, day after day, I sit on my ever-expanding, distinctly non-Kardashian arse. Something needed to be done.

Prompted by a recent David Sedaris article, I buy a Fitbit, a pimped-up pedometer. It gives me 10,000 steps to do as a target and I’m rapidly addicted. I know! Turns out that walking I can do. It’s such a wake-up call, making me realise how the computer screen can very quickly turn into a wormhole, sucking me in for hours while my body gently spreads around me. If I find that I can’t do the steps outdoors, I take to stoating around the island in my kitchen or stomping up and down in front of the TV. My family moves out, husband to shed, daughter to room: I’m not much fun to be around. But I feel so much better and the porridge is starting to dissipate.

Eventually this plateaus out – there are only so many hours in the day for stoating – and I wonder, what next? The appeal of a short, sharp weightloss plan is obvious: I research endless residential detoxes, from the spa in France where you’re fed by Gallic superchef Michel Guérard to the glamorous one in Thailand where you spend days examining your own poo. But my guilt demands something way more hairshirted, and eventually I find a place in the middle of nowhere, where the ethos is rigid and the sybaritism low. It offers, through a raw food diet and holistic practices, to rebalance my mind, body and soul. Testimonials from previous residents gush about changing lives for the better in one week and giving up wheat, dairy, coffee, tea, red wine. Oh, really? But it promises a quick fix kickstart for healthy weight loss.

The pal recruited to chum along and take the bare look off my antisocial tendencies sends me a link to a Victoria Wood playlet, Mens Sana In Thingummy Doodah, in which the spa is led by Julie Walters and the bedspreads are candlewick. Our destination immediately becomes Candlewick, and so it remains for the duration.

Day 1

The train leaves from St Pancras in London, so obviously the pal and I breakfast on Fortnum’s bacon sandwiches and mushrooms on toast (lovely dark shrooms, fried, licked with a bit of cream and tarragon, and piled on to buttery toast) in anticipation of starvation. We’re not sure whether we feel excited or doomed. We have no idea where we’re going on the map, but it turns out to be beautiful: quintessentially English landscape, grey churches, rolling fields, village pub and fields scattered with animals.

Candlewick is pretty, too: honey-coloured stone buildings around a central courtyard occasionally crossed by serious-looking women in grey tunics. The interior is like an explosion in a wallpaper factory, the temperature menopausal. My room is nice in a Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen way – faux-French furniture and a lot of lilac and purple – and the bathrooms are sleek and well-appointed with a lot of loo roll.

Our introductory talk is “COMPULSORY” and enlightening. A whole blah blah about their ethos and the health benefits, weight loss and energy gains about to be bestowed upon us through eating hardly anything, all of it vegetal, most of it juiced, all of it raw. “There are hairdryers and robes and water bottles in your rooms,” we’re told. “We do count them, so if they find their way into your suitcases, they find their way on to your bills.” Our directrice delivers, in sombre tones, a depressing list of millennial toxins, in the air and on our plates. “You must also avoid cosmetic oils, hair dye and fake tan.” Crikey! More poisons to worry about? “Because,” she continues, “they stain our sheets.”

It transpires that we’re not allowed to use our phones anywhere in the communal parts. Wait – what? Starve me if you like, but don’t take away my phone.

I have my introductory health check, which involves measurements. I can’t remember the last time I measured myself and I gasp in horror: I’m basically a Weeble. My blood pressure is very high. No wonder.

We’re to live on juices, mixed vegetables and fruit, served from a hotel-breakfast style dispenser that usually features a weirdly alive-looking scum. Then soup in the evenings: basically pulped veg with added boiling water. Routinely, there are also bullet-sized fibre pills, a mucousy fibre drink, shots of lemon juice and violently green superfoods that taste as though something has been recently exhumed. There’s no cooking at all. I feel fear for the first time. We’re given our “weeksheets”: days composed of various exercises and treatments punctuated by juices. My world has suddenly shrunk.

Our talk tonight is about digestion, the mucoid plaque and bowel movements, plus a certain procedure we’re to undergo. Of a terrifying-looking colonic machine, we’re told, “Sometimes, in the viewing panel, you can see the likes of mushrooms and jacket potato.” I snort like a teenager.

“Meals” are communal, the embodiment of all my dinner party phobias. We are all female. An American woman with oddly grey teeth who otherwise sleeps in her room all day asks me if I’ve ever fasted before. Does going without sausage rolls for a week count?

R&R is the evening film. Tonight’s is called Food Matters: various rather unhealthy-looking men chunter on about raw food to a bad clubby soundtrack. But at the end of it, I want to mainline vitamin C and niacin.

Day 2

After “breakfast”, the first thing on the agenda is Nordic walking. It turns out to be that thing I’ve laughed at for ages: people marching about with the help of what look like ski poles. Off we set through lovely, frost-kissed countryside, and within seconds I’m miles behind everyone else in their impressive sports kit. I can’t do it – it’s like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. “I can’t just leave you in a field,” the instructor frets. She then leaves me in a field and I trudge back to the mothership to watch Frasier in my room.

Conversation, whether at the table or in the infrared sauna or kitchen, displays an Olympic level of self-obsession – and not just from me. People will happily talk about their sinuses for hours, or the various sadnesses that led them to detoxing as a solution. One beautiful creature is less navel-gazing: “I just need to lose a couple of inches because I take me kit off for a living.”

We all have treatments, Hoover-like machines galumphing over our bodies, or things like electric toothbrushes furnished with tiny needles skittering over our faces. The house tone of voice is sing-song, for addressing idiots (“Just pop yourself on here. Just pop off your undies”). I ask one of the therapists what was the most unusual reason she’d heard for detoxing: “Well, there was one guy whose bowels stopped working after he gave up the marijuana.”

Tonight’s talk from the directrice is on detoxification: briefly, acid foods bad, alkaline foods good. And you should never reuse plastic water bottles, because it makes you grow breasts or something. Apparently emotions, too, can be acid or alkaline. “I’m feeling some acid emotions towards her,” the pal says.

I wander into the kitchen and the smell is intoxicating: the raw food chef is preparing kale chips in the dehydrator. My heart soars: are these for tonight? They’re not. I’m devastated. And I can’t believe my heart soared over kale chips.

Is it only Day 2?

Day 3

Let us never talk of what happened today. Never.

Day 4

I’m hallucinating food, and not yer fancy-schmancy restaurant food, but mature cheddar bubbling over sourdough toast, macaroni cheese, homemade sausage rolls. The hallucinations extend to my sense of smell: the whole compound seems to be fragranced with bacon.

You’re supposed to fill out a form to say what food you’d like the following day. I haven’t done so; I didn’t know I was supposed to. “You were told at the induction,” the directrice admonishes, “but you were too busy nattering.” It has come to this: I’ve been told off for nattering.

The soups are called fanciful and toe-curling things like Bright Eyed And Bushy Tailed, but all seem to consist of the same things: carrot, celery, onion and parsnips, in varying ratios. An earth-shattering occurrence: actual men have arrived.

Day 5

I make the mistake of asking one of the new men why he’s here and get a 15-minute disquisition on himself. And I thought us gals were self-obsessed. His hair is dyed an unconvincing aubergine, his jokes are painful and he likes to tell us what we laydeez are thinking; he’s like an old, northern, David Brent. He comes accessorised with a meek, whiskery chum, the Madge Allsop to his Dame Edna.

We are, by now, institutionalised, mechanically padding in our gowns from yoga to gym class to treatment to juice. Both the pal and I come laden with books, but hardly open a page – our brains seem to have turned to butternut squash. I stare at the TV, but there’s so much eating going on. Oh god no, not Jamie’s Comfort Food. I end up locked on to something called ITVBe, where nobody much seems to eat. I may be tackling my dependence on carbs, but I’m now addicted to Millionaire Matchmaker. There’s basically bugger all else to do. Even the village contains nothing but a church and a pub. Oh, wait a moment… No, no. In every sense of the phrase: not going there.

The pal and I jump ship and go to the pub. But once there, we nurse a pair of (forbidden) sparkling waters. What have we become?

There’s a raw food demonstration by the in-house “gourmet chef” who has the most preternaturally hairy arms. Everyone has turned up for this because – food. She teaches us how to make cucumber and avocado soup (put cucumber and avocado in a blender) and nut milk (put nuts and water in a blender). As a special treat, there are minuscule shot glasses filled with a dessert made from raw cacao and avocado; their effect on my co-detoxers makes the words ravening hyenas spring to mind.

Tonight’s film – to which we’ve been looking forward all week – is Fat, Sick And Nearly Dead.

Day 6

More of the bloody same. I can’t get out of bed. I lie under the duvet, watching ITVBe while everyone else Nordic walks and yogas. Oh no: Dinner Date.

I don’t even make it to the evening movie, Forks Over Knives. I feel I’ve got the constantly drummed-home message: what I’m eating is killing me, yada yada. And even the constant scenic shots of piles of vegetables now cause me to salivate like Old Faithful.

Day 7

The sun is shining and I feel grrrrreat. Clear of eye and bouncy of step. I’m not even starving. My face has lost its puffiness and I’ve slept like a baby all week, not having to touch the armoury of sleeping aids I always travel with. I’ve hardly been near social media and have deleted all the stupid app games I use the way I used to use cigarettes. Dear Lord, is this a new me? While getting dressed, ITVBe shows a programme where Olly Murs – someone I’m normally entirely immune to – surprise visits a couple of teenage fans. Their reaction makes me burst out crying.

We have our leaving analyses: I’ve lost 5lb and several inches – more in a week than I managed doing the 5:2 diet for six months. But most importantly, my porridgey limbs are looking vastly improved: Candlewick has come up with the goods. The pal has lost 8lb, despite not even once drinking the Kool-Aid – she didn’t even drink the bloody juices, having actual breakfast (albeit a thin layer of millety stuff garnished with three blueberries and a quarter of a strawberry) and salads. She’s still not buying it: “When you eat and drink as much as we do, any kind of break is bound to have results.” I’m inclined to agree: I didn’t need to be force-fed kale juice, I just needed to be locked away from bars and restaurants for a week. And to move more. Quite bluntly, to get off my backside.

God, it feels good to be free.

What a week it’s been: I’ve never ingested so much cucumber, drunk so much herbal tea or showed my naked arse to so many strangers. And a considerably peachier arse it now is.

Back home

Well, it was a Ginger Pig sausage roll…