My wife shed pounds on our week’s health spa ‘fast’ – so how did I put ON weight?

OPPOSITES attract, apparently. This must explain why a woman who exercises every day and who is happy to skip a meal when there is ‘something better to do’, chose to marry a man who regards physical exercise as insufferable and who has never believed that anything is better than food. I am that man.

At various points in our marriage, my wife has declared that my self-indulgence has gone too far for my own good, and that I must be taken in hand.

Thus, almost a decade ago, I was made to spend a week at an Austrian health farm noted for its rigorous and austere methods in putting its clients back on the digestive straight and narrow.

While I was suffering the anguish of a diet consisting of nothing more than stale Spelt bread, Rosa took the children off to what I can only describe as a real holiday. I think she was making a point.

After a week, we spoke on the phone. When I told her I had lost only a couple of kilos, and therefore the cure was hardly worth the trouble, she drew the opposite conclusion: I needed to stay longer.

Enforced

After two more days of my incarceration diet, I had the good idea of telling my wife how many beautiful and unattached Russian women were staying at the health farm and that one in particular seemed to love my English sense of humour. That did the trick: I was released to come home.

Since then, everything had returned to normal — until a few weeks ago, when I had some tests done at our local GP surgery and the results gave rise to frowning and tut-tutting.

This time my wife declared that not only would I have to endure a bout of enforced healthiness and detoxification: this time, she was going to come with me.

So it was that last week we headed off to a health spa high above Lake Garda in the Italian region of Lombardy.

Fortunately, this resort was much less austere in its regimen. It described its cuisine as ‘a tasty, light, detoxifying and healthy way of eating that uses simple ingredients and short cooking times so that the organoleptic qualities of the foods remain unchanged’.

After consulting a dictionary I was still not quite sure what ‘organoleptic’ meant: but it certainly sounded healthy. So, for lunch after we arrived, I ordered the spa’s best organoleptic Caesar Salad — the most recognisable dish on the menu.

It was exquisitely presented — but there seemed almost none of the usual cheesy dressing. When I pointed this out to Rosa, she explained that I should make the most of it, as this was the last lunch we would be having during our stay.

Hereafter, she declared, it would just be breakfast and an early evening meal for us.

Well, I managed to keep to this. But in a way which enabled both of us to remain contented.

Aperitif

I explained that while she spent the time normally used for lunch undergoing one of the countless invigorating treatments offered by the spa, I would be by the pool reading: and as it was pretty hot outside, I should need a drink or two while benefiting from ‘the way that the sun’s rays enable the skin’s cells to produce more vitamin D’.

(It’s amazing what you can dredge up when trying to find an argument for doing nothing.)

I think I might have allowed her to think that the drink I had in mind was water. What I actually planned was one or two of the cocktails miraculously available at the poolside bar. Besides, who would travel to Italy without serious investigation of that nation’s favourite aperitif, the Aperol spritz? (Three parts Prosecco to two parts Aperol and a dash of soda, since you ask.) The trick, for the lunch- excluded, was this: the bar served every cocktail with a spread of crisps, nuts and olives. So, you see, ‘a drink or two’ went some way to bridging the otherwise terrifying prospect of a calorie-less chasm between breakfast and supper.

After a while, however, even this diet of Aperol spritz and crisps began to leave me feeling that something was missing from my life (a square meal).

So, while Rosa continued to enjoy what the resort described as its ‘exclusive temple to wellness, where mind and body are regenerated through the discovery of genuine emotions’, I went in search of lunch — about which I was feeling genuine emotions of my own.

‘Just going off for a walk,’ I said, knowing, from a cursory online inspection of the area’s Tripadvisor entry that there was a pizzeria less than a quarter of an hour’s stroll away from the apparently isolated spa. Very good it was, too — and a plate-filling pizza was about half the price of a cocktail at the resort bar, so I was coming out ahead both on dosh and nosh.

Sausages

Then, one of the spa’s ever-helpful staff let slip to me that there was nearby a very small family-run cafe, not in any of the guidebooks, but ‘serving wonderful food you might get at the best trattorias’.

She was right. And, being on a camp-site, it had a wood-fuelled barbecue at which any quantity of meat could be grilled to order. Thus it was, while Rosa perspired away what little she had to eat in the spa’s multitude of saunas, I ordered a dish consisting of chicken, sausages, pork ribs and steak. With chips. And mayonnaise.

On our last night, I told Rosa I had heard tell of a very fine little cafe near the resort, where we should have a proper dinner — and which she of course deserved after all her heroic healthiness. I feared she knew for certain what had been happening when I was greeted warmly by the proprietor, who, indicating that I was a good customer, offered us at the end of the meal his homemade Grappa chocolate liqueur.

Afterwards, back in our room at the spa, Rosa insisted I got on the scales (the instrument upon which I imagine most of the residents measured their happiness inversely). ‘Would you believe it?’ I said, as I looked down. ‘I’ve actually put on two kilos since we got here.’ Judging from Rosa’s response, she probably knew all along what I had been up to. Wives do.