Would you spend £1,000 a week to lose a stone with Slim the Reaper?
She’s the whip-cracking Russian who’s TV’s toughest ever weight-loss guru. So...
Are we feeling like cabbage today? No? Well, tough. It’s cabbage for lunch. It may also be cabbage for dinner. Is there anything with the cabbage? Perhaps a dollop of mayo? Some salad dressing? A little gravy and mash, with a plump sausage on the side?
‘We have cabbage, for Chrissake,’ barks Galia Grainger, the hostess with the mostest. ‘Cabbage. That’s the price we pay to be slim.’
Galia is eastern european, whippet-thin, and terrifying. She is also Britain’s latest TV diet guru, star of a Channel 4 programme called The extreme Diet Hotel, which features fatties (yes, it’s OK to use that sort of language here; indeed Galia insists on it) who want to be skinnies.
Those with long diet histories might remember the last TV weight-loss guru who tried to turn us all svelte. Gillian McKeith was Scottish, scary and obsessed with examining everyone’s poo. Well, Galia is scarier still. In fact, she makes Gillian look like Mary Poppins.
Galia, 60, calls herself a ‘diet dominatrix’, drives a scarlet sportscar with the numberplate AM I 2 FAT (‘It’s a question I ask myself every day,’ she says, sternly) and when she isn’t berating her clients over their sugar intake (‘it’s like cocaine’), she’s whipping them with birch leaves — which apparently aids the weight-falling-off process.
There’s a moment in the first episode of her new TV show, where guests check in to her Sussex detox retreat and surrender to her brutal regime, where you wonder if it’s all a spoof. Is Dawn French going to make an appearance and actually eat Galia?
One of the hapless guests — a woman called Kirsty who bought her wedding dress two sizes too small and is now panic-dieting as the big day approaches — has had a violent reaction to Galia’s all-vegetable, no-sugar, detox ‘shock’ regime. Kirsty, who comes from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, is shaking and has been throwing up.
Kirsty objects to eating more lettuce, and (weakly) says she will be sick. ‘Be sick!’ demands Galia. ‘Then eat your lettuce.’ She stands over the poor soul with a bell. ‘Chew! NOW!’
The reason Kirsty needs to eat her lettuce is because Galia has decided she should complete a 5k run by the end of the week, despite not having exercised for years. Isn’t this a tad dangerous? ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you thin,’ says Galia.
TODAy, she admits that having her overweight guests — who pay between £800 and £1,200 a week for the pleasure of being subjected to her brutal regime — dissolve in tears is not only acceptable, but desirable.
‘We want them to cry,’ she says briskly. Galia does everything briskly. ‘It is part of the process, breaking them down. The detox is an emotional detox, too. Mostly they cry by Wednesday.’
To help them cry, Galia likes to say things like, ‘I will break you’, ‘resistance is futile’ and, ‘It’s my way or no way’. What do her guests say in return? Most of it is unprintable, but halfway through her stay Kirsty suggests: ‘I’ll maybe punch her.’ Alas, she doesn’t have the energy.
An audience with the Slim reaper (as Galia also likes to be known) is certainly an experience. She comes across as more prison jailer than hotelier — although if she were running an actual prison she’d have been hauled before the european Court of Human rights by now, given the measly 450 calorie-aday diet she serves up.
‘My guests hate me,’ she laughs, in the manner of Cruella de Vil, ‘but I tell them that I don’t care if they hate me. When they get on the scales at the end of the week, they will love me.’
She has an equally strident approach to international diplomacy. Britain might be her adopted country (she moved here in 1989) but she openly despairs of how we Brits eat. And eat. And eat.
‘Britain has such a proud tradition. This is the country that brought the world Shakespeare and Chaucer. Now, it is famous for being the obesity capital of europe,’ she sighs. British people have no backbone, it seems, and no will power.
‘They come to me with excuses. excuses, excuses. I have heard thousands. “Oh it’s my metabolism. Oh I can’t eat this. Oh I can’t walk because. . .” yes, I accept there are people with genuine medical conditions, but there are also people who go on about their metabolism problems — then I find food wrappers in their rooms. What has happened to us?
‘When did we become so weak and so lacking in self-discipline?’
Of course Galia, who has a grown-up son, has built up a business helping flabby frumps to find their inner steel. The way she sells it, she is also helping them become fitter, more confident, even more marriage-able.
She has to be ‘part psychologist’ she points out, telling me of one client who came to her crying because none of the clothes in her wardrobe fitted. ‘She was unhappy. She was single, and all her friends were married. I said, “Are they slim?” She said: “yes.” I said: “I rest my case.”
‘I talked to her about all the other beautiful women out there. I said: “These b ***** s are skinny. Are you going to let them steal your future husband?” ’
Blimey. Safe to say, Galia has no truck with the ‘feel-good’ approach to body confidence.
‘Pah!’ she says. ‘I won’t patronise people by saying: “Oh, but you are beautiful inside.” If they are truly happy when they are overweight, fine, but the people who come to me are not happy. And I have to be honest with them, brutally honest, because often their health is at stake.’
Who on earth is this woman, and are we nuts by letting her loose on our TV screens?
Well, Galia was born in the former USSr and lived in Latvia, before moving to Britain where she worked in administration for a while, then moved into property development doing up neglected crumbling wrecks.
‘It’s not unlike what I do now!’ she says breezily, and given that her clients are mostly middleaged souls who have, as she puts it ‘let themselves go’, maybe she has a point.
As unlikely as it seems, given her own slimline frame, she once had a weight problem herself — one she blames firmly on Western eating habits.
‘I do understand how tempting it is,’ she says, of our junk-food culture.
‘I fell into the trap of snacking, of failing to think about portion control. I let myself go. When I was 50, I was a size 18, and miserable with it. But I decided to do something about it.’
She came up with her own regime, based on her grandmother’s fasting one. ‘She fasted for religious reasons, but she lived well into her hundreds,’ she says.
‘I found myself thinking about that generation, and the way they ate — lots of vegetables, no processed food. It was cleaneating, but before the phrase was thought of. I experimented myself — and the weight fell off. I lost four stones, went down to a size 8 and I’ve been that size ever since.’
Overnight, Galia became evangelical about her new discovery, and ten years ago — spying a
‘What doesn’t kill you makes you thin’ ‘Resistance is futile... I will break you’
lucrative gap in the market — she opened up one of her restored houses, which she was already running as a B&B with her late husband, to wannabe skinnies.
The ‘tough love’ approach might be a winning gimmick for the TV career (she’s already had a taste of that as a consultant on Channel 4’s The Fat Fighters), but she also deems it necessary.
The diet industry, she claims, is way too gently, gently. ‘You aren’t allowed to say people are “fat” any more, but why not? I call a broom a broom,’ she says. ‘People need me to be honest.’
Her actual regime does sound like it could come straight from the gulag. It’s not just cabbage on the menu — not that there is a menu. ‘There isn’t a menu. They eat what we tell them,’ she says. All manner of vegetables are either presented raw or slightly cooked.
‘It’s not a diet that should be followed long-term,’ she insists. ‘It’s a short, sharp shock, a kickstart. The intention is to shock the metabolism. It’s not just to do with weight loss but also to do with cleansing.’
Hence in her Slimmeria ‘hotel’, alcohol, caffeine and carbohydrates are forbidden. Treats include a few slices of apple (in the programme she is filmed telling kitchen staff to cut the slices thinner), although if your energy levels are really depleted she will allow a ‘magic raisin’. Yes, a single raisin.
She also advocates something she calls ‘window eating’ which, she explains, is about leaving a gap between meals. But when she says ‘gap’ she means ‘chasm’, given that guests stop eating at 6.30pm, and don’t have their next meal until 1pm the following day. Bedtime is a stringent 9pm and the wake-up call comes at 7.15. Exercise is a must. All guests are expected to do a two-hour walk every day.
To help them along, Galia strides along beside them, berating them for talking when their energy should be going into walking faster.
‘Where is your sweat?’ she shrieks. ‘I don’t see sweat. You should be sweating lots.’
Does it work? Well, of course it works. Her fans (who include the actress Lisa Riley, who used Galia’s retreat to kick start her 12st weight loss) say that it works at miraclelevel. Galia claims that most clients who check in leave after a week having lost something in the region of a stone.
WE HAVE agreed not to reveal what the three guests who feature in the first episode of her new show lose, but suffice to say, it is astonishing. ‘Our record is 26lb in one week,’ she says. ‘That was a man who was quite overweight to start with.’
She shudders. ‘It does make you ask: “What sort of diet did he have before?”’
Is it healthy, though? Here’s where it gets trickier to assess. There are proven benefits to a diet that incorporates short periods of fasting — in that, Galia is correct. And there are trained staff on site at her retreat to make sure clients are safe.
What of Galia’s own qualifications? Galia is happy to admit she is qualification-free — and insists the regime is right for starting fatties down the road the slimness.
For the masochistic, maybe. And the monied. After all, who knew cabbages could cost so much?
Galia is unrepentant. ‘It’s a system that works.’
‘I want them to cry. They cry by Wednesday’ ‘When did the British become so weak?’