DETOX LIKE THE 1%

Nestled in an idyllic Alpine spa town, Palace Merano is where the wealthy and beautiful go to atone for their excesses. But with its unorthodox philosophies and purging practices bordering on the bizarre, are there any lessons to be learned for the common

MH books into an exclusive body-reboot to find out how the other half revives

It’s late afternoon on the third day of my residency at Palace Merano, Espace Henri Chenot. Precisely 22 hours since food last passed my lips, six hours after a diminutive Italian slathered me in mud, entombed me in plastic then jet-hosed me with freezing water, and four hours after a man called Boris electrocuted my spine, something remarkable begins to happen. I start to feel… well, if not good, then better.

Which is a relief. Because, frankly, up until this point, detoxing has been something of a downer. Admittedly, punters don’t book into Palace Merano – named for the town in which ‘ biontology’ guru Henri Chenot’s wellness mecca nestles – expecting a high old time. They either come here to offset their overindulgences (alcoholic, calorific, narcotic) or to be healed of more rarefied maladies relating to mind, heart and soul. What they do expect, however, is results. And they’re willing to pay for them.

While Chenot may attract the young, old, beautiful (women) and brutish (men), all have at least one thing in common: money. As Palace Merano’s director, Maximilian Newiger, explains, this isn’t the kind of place that takes spontaneous walk-ins. “There’s no airport nearby, so a lot of people arrive by private jet,” he tells me over one of many cups of green tea. “The only trouble is, many visitors’ jets are too big for the private runway.”

Among those in the know, Chenot’s retreat has a peerless reputation for rejuvenating the burned out, the bloated and the broken, albeit through occasionally dubitable methods. A decade or so ago, superannuated Italian detoxers made up its core clientele, forced to share the palace with shot-slamming, buffet-demolishing good-timers. But today the bar serves only tisanes. Meanwhile, the ageing locals have been joined by white-robed oligarchs, sheikhs, models, CEOS – and me. Together we congregate daily in the marble expanse of Palace Merano’s vaulted halls with the hope, no, the expectancy, of supercharging our chakras and catapulting back to younger, shinier, revivified versions of ourselves.

This, I tell myself, as the first hints of wellness start to kick in, is how the other half purges. Precisely what they are hoping to cleanse themselves of, however, remains to be seen. I want to know whether the kind of healing being practised at Palace Merano can be applied to the many and not just the few. I have just a week to find out.

Faith In Medicine

Named after its founder, the Chenot Method combines ancient Chinese medicine with cutting-edge Western science. The goals, outlined in the Palace Merano literature, are to “achieve balance between body, mind and soul”, to “slow the ageing process”, and to “eliminate toxins and tiredness at all levels: physical, sensory, emotional, mental and physiological”. It’s quite the metaphysical shopping list.

I have signed up for the six-day Energy Programme: six gym sessions with a personal trainer; six hour-long massages; six hydrotherapy baths followed by phyto-mud therapy and hydro-jet massage; plus four cellular resonance treatments with energy control (no, me neither). There will also be a handful of assorted medical consultations, scans, pokes and prods. First up, though, is my bioenergetic check-up.

The test involves holding two metal rods attached to a Mattech technology box, which is itself hooked up to a monitor. If you’ve ever seen a Scientologist ‘auditing’ someone for membership, it’s a bit like that, only without the needling interrogator. It works, I’m told, by sending tiny electronic signals through your body, which measure the resonance of different organs, glands and systems. Thirty-seven different readings are taken to discover which parts of you are stressed, which are weak and which, if any, are actually just fine and dandy.

Marie Pierre Grenier, Henri Chenot’s sister-in-law (and, somewhat disconcertingly, Luciano Pavarotti’s former nutritionist), comes to discuss my results. Grenier is a 62-year- old force of nature. If being pummelled, drenched and starved for a week will help me ‘Be More Marie’ for a month or two, all the sacrifice will have been worth it. Fond of elaborate analogies – “Your body is a castle; you have two guards outside; each one has a Kalashnikov” – her diagnoses are a heavily accented patchwork of metaphor, Oriental and Western sciences and personal anecdote.

In short, my neck and shoulders are a bit clobbered, but otherwise I’m resonating correctly. She is, however, worried about my stress levels. After stripping me to my swimming trunks and casting a critical eye over my physique, it is concluded that of the five elements by which the Chenot Method categorises people, I am a mix of ‘end of summer’ and ‘autumn’. This, among other things, means I need to be careful of the women around me, as they can cause stress to my heart. Mother, take note.

Next up is the cornerstone of my programme: hydrotherapy baths with phyto-mud therapy and hydro-jet massage. Or in layman’s terms: jacuzzi; mud sarcophagus; prison-style jet-

“We congregate daily with the hope of supercharging our chakras”

wash. As with most spa treatments, the enjoyment it’s possible to derive is inversely proportional to the shame one feels wearing a paper thong in front of a more attractive member of the opposite sex. I’m English, so my cringe threshold is fairly low, but in spite of the indignity I find the bath and mud parts pleasant enough. The hosing – not so much. When your every expression is taken as proof of some inner ailment, it’s difficult to know which face to pull as a violent burst of water is aimed at the upper thigh. I choose ‘steely resolve’, though this only draws further questions.

Later, while I’m shrouded in plastic sheets and caked in beige liquid mud, an a-cappella version of Stevie Wonder’s Superstition is piped into the room, spliced with spa-standard muzak. “When you believe in things that you don’t understand / Then you suffer / Superstition ain’t the way.”

Toxic Relationships

For the duration of my stay at the Palace, Henri Chenot himself is unfortunately away, presumably recuperating from helping the rich and famous recuperate. It’s a shame because the reputation he’s built over 40 years as a high priest of detoxification is remarkable. It’s especially impressive considering the fact that he holds no medical qualifications. (Chenot has doctorates in psychology and philosophy.) But to clients ranging from Silvio Berlusconi to Zinedine Zidane to Azerbaijani President Ilham, the 74-year-old Frenchman