Could living like a wellness guru change my life?
From extreme diets and silent retreats to juice fasts and mindfulness, BRIGID DELANEY tells what happened when she decided to test the latest wellbeing crazes
AS Brigid Delaney sipped a cup of foul-smelling herbal tea she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d made a huge mistake. She was embarking on an extreme fasting plan which consisted of drinking only herbal tea for two weeks and then surviving on half a cucumber and a poached chicken breast every day for the next 12 weeks.
“Before I started the fast I’d never even been on a proper diet or missed a meal. I didn’t have any discipline around food so I knew it was going to be a big challenge,” says Brigid, 42.
But she wasn’t just looking for a new way to lose weight. Instead she was using herself as a human guinea pig to try out a host of wellness and fitness trends, from fasting and yoga retreats to cutting sugar out of her diet.
“I wanted to know whether these things actually work or if they’re just a fad,” says Brigid, a writer who lives in Melbourne. “Wellness has become a multitrillion pound industry and I wanted to know why.”
Indeed wellness – the current trend for eating organic, unprocessed food, exercising and looking after your mental health – has become enormously popular over the past five years.
In 2016 more than five million fitness trackers were sold in the UK alone, meaning sales figures had almost doubled since the previous year.
And the amount of Britons following a vegan diet has risen by 360 per cent over the last decade because of the perceived health benefits of cutting out meat and dairy.
Brigid believes the reason wellness kicks are more popular than ever is because we are facing a global health crisis.
“In some Western countries, for the first time there’s a generation that has a lower life expectancy than their parents.
“There is an obesity crisis and there are more people than ever with chronic low level, long-term conditions such as diabetes.
“A lot of these conditions could be prevented by living a healthier lifestyle so people are looking for ways to do that.”
When she looked at her own lifestyle Brigid felt there was definitely room for improvement.
“I spent a lot of evenings out in the pub, eating kebabs and fast food and not exercising enough. I felt really blobby and unhealthy so I knew I needed to do something to redress the balance in my life.”
Brigid began her investigation by trying Wellbeing 101, a fasting programme that promised weight loss, clearer skin and better organ function. For two weeks she drank tea made from Chinese herbs, which contained only enough calories to survive.
“It tasted like when somebody puts a cigarette in a beer can at a party and it smelled really bad too,” she says. “I did wonder what on earth I’d let myself in for. For the first week I had absolutely no energy and I slept for about 17 hours a day. And when I wasn’t sleeping I was thinking about food and gazing longingly at the photos in cookbooks.”
She quickly began to notice some unpleasant side effects.
“My mouth felt quite weird not chewing. I didn’t think that would be something I would miss but your mouth gets used to chewing on something three or four times a day. So when you don’t it feels sore because that action of chewing is a form of exercise, I suppose.”
And she felt cut off from friends as well.
“I really missed my friends and being invited out to dinner. I began to realise just how much my social life revolved around eating and drinking.”
But although the first week was tough, by the second week Brigid suddenly felt better.
“In the second week I felt amazing. It’s funny how I just switched overnight from feeling terrible to feeling great. I had a lot more energy and my skin started glowing. My wrinkles seemed to disappear and I looked about five years younger. My hair was shiny, my nails were hard. It was a very strange experience.”
In the third week Brigid began introducing small amounts of food back into her diet. At first all she was allowed to eat was half a cucumber, then after a week she could add a poached chicken breast or a boiled egg.
THEN after surviving on cucumber and poached chicken breasts for 10 weeks she finally gave in and started eating normal meals again.
“I looked so different that people wouldn’t recognise me – I lost nearly 2st so I was slimmer and looked much healthier too. But it wasn’t sustainable.”
Within weeks of stopping the diet Brigid looked and felt exactly the same as she had before. “Not surprisingly it didn’t last.” She also tried yoga retreats, cutting out sugar and even went to a clinic in the Philippines for a colonic irrigation. “I definitely wouldn’t recommend getting a colonic. It didn’t seem to do much and a lot of experts say if you have gut issues, changing your diet is much better and less invasive.”
She tried silent retreats, group psychotherapy, cold-pressed juice plans and following the paleo diet by eating only meat and vegetables. But Brigid simply became frustrated by how expensive they all were.
“Many of the things I tried cost a lot but they’re not easily integrated into your life. So if you go to Bali for a yoga retreat it’s £3,000 or £4,000 and you feel great while you’re there but once you get home things are the same and you go back to the same old patterns which were causing stress.”
She began to look for ways to feel well that were cheaper and easier to incorporate into her day-to-day life.
“One of the main things that worked for me was mindfulness meditation. It makes me feel much less stressed and it’s easy to find 10 minutes a day. Another was getting more sleep and staying connected with friends and family.
“Some of the things I tried such as the fasting diet made me feel cut off from friends and family because I couldn’t meet them for drinks or go out for a meal with them. So while socialising might not be great for your diet it makes me feel much better than fasting.”
Now Brigid has a much more commonsense approach to wellness. “A lot of these trends encourage people not just to look a certain way but to live a certain way and have a very virtuous organic life. But it’s very hard to live like that all the time.
“If wellness helps people to look after themselves that’s great but some of the trends need to be taken with a pinch of salt.” Reduced sodium variety, of course.
To order a copy of Wellmania: Misadventures In The Search For Wellness (£14.99, Nero) call the Express Bookshop on 01872 562 310 or visit expressbookshop.co.uk