Green soup that helped me lose half a stone
(And I even took my personal trainer on the family holiday!)
Time was when holidays were hedonistic affairs: a lot of r&r (rest and rosé), perhaps a post-prandial spot of shopping, maybe a gentle snooze under a sun umbrella before waking, half hungover, to sunburnt toes.
Sadly, those days are gone. Such is our modern obsession with the pursuit of perfection that almost no one above the age of 35 goes on holiday anymore without some form of mental, spiritual or physical self-improvement in mind.
Vodka shots? Vitamin shots, more like. Stumbling blindly through the streets at 4am? That’s because you’re up early for your pre-dawn hike. Forget sun, sea and sangria. Starve, sweat and suffer is the name of the game now. Welcome to the era of wellness tourism.
From juice fasts in Germany to sun salutations in the Swiss Alps, 2018 has been the year of the health holiday.
According to The Lonely Planet Guide, it is the travel industry’s fastest growing sector, having seen a 10 per cent hike this year alone to become a market worth over $500billion (£387 billion) worldwide.
retreats are springing up everywhere, from milan to malaga — many of which are proper medical clinics, rigorously run by professionals in white coats, where blood tests are all part of the package, and where everything is meticulously monitored down to the last linseed.
Of course, there are those who have always enjoyed sporting holidays — surfing, skiing, cycling, walking and the like. But this is different. We’re not talking the Karrimor crowd here, all Bear Grylls and mildewy base layers.
We’re talking luxurious destinations and five-star service. even if dinner consists of little more than a boiled potato sprinkled with a few herbs (standard fare at the Viva mayr clinic in Austria), it’s an artfully arranged boiled potato beautifully presented in elegant surroundings.
it doesn’t take a genius to work out the origins of this new trend. it’s not just that we all live frenetic, heart-attackinducing lifestyles with little or no downtime, drowning in a sea
of never-ending email. It’s also that, in the age of social media, we’ve never been more conscious of the way we look and feel — and of how that falls short of the ideal.
The pressure is immense, and it’s not just born out of a desire to look good. It’s also a response to dire health warnings about Type 2 diabetes and lifestyle-induced dementia, and how being overweight, stressed and worn out can lead to a host of unpleasant side-effects, from depression to cancer.
The wellness holiday offers a neat solution to all that, by combining time off from work with a healthy diet and exercise, not to mention any number of extra-curricular therapies.
It’s a particularly attractive concept for older women like me, who, as well as having to cope with the demands of a job, children and ageing parents, are all too prone to collapsing at the end of the day into a bottle of plonk and a takeaway — with disastrous consequences for health, girth and sanity.
Thus it’s less of a luxury and more of a question of self preservation to, once or even twice a year, haul oneself off the sofa and into a spa. You don’t even have to go far, try Grayshott in Hampshire (currently £550pp for three nights), or The Lanesborough in London (lanesborough
clubandspa.com), or the Zest Life yoga retreat in Wales (from £490, thezestlife.co.uk).
Think of it as a kind of annual physical and mental MOT. It’s not only a way of taking weary minds and bodies back to factory settings, it also acts as a kind of atonement for the excesses of day-to-day life.
That said, it doesn’t all have to be purdah. I’ve done a fair few of these retreats and, let me assure you, they aren’t much fun. I was so grumpy with tiredness and hunger on the last one, they almost asked me to leave. So this year, in an attempt to find a middle way, I took a personal trainer with us on our week’s villa holiday in Greece.
Every morning I, my husband and the kids would do an hour and a half’s boxing training under his watchful eye. My 15-year-old daughter loved it, especially the bit where she got to hit her younger brother (closely supervised, of course); and I think I observed my ordinarily placid husband working off a fair amount of pent-up frustration.
The evenings were for stretching and strength training — followed by an exquisitely agonising massage. In between we would do the usual holiday things — swimming, reading, drinking.
But having someone there to motivate and guide us (he was also pretty hot on all the nutritional stuff too) meant we returned home in noticeably better shape. (In fact in typical annoying man fashion my husband has since lost more weight.)
The children, meanwhile, were interacting with each other rather than their screens — nothing short of a miracle. We also had a lot of fun. Which, when you stop to think about it, are what holidays are supposed to be about.
Of course, for most people part of the joy of a wellness holiday is indulging in a bit of ‘me’ time away from the family. But whether you opt for a strict regime or, like me, decide to create your own little bespoke package, one thing’s for certain: it beats returning to work more exhausted than you were in the first place. I’vE SPEnT a lifetime trying not to be fat. I made my first visit to a health farm aged 16. My mother, very much of the Harvey nichols tendency, thought it might be an excellent way for me to recover from the trauma of taking my O-levels. (We were new money).
nowadays, Champneys at Tring, Hertfordshire, is a glitzy retreat. In the Sixties, it was mostly a popular choice for the sick and dying. To a lively teenager it seemed like a care home.
Patients were put on a punishing three-week fast of lemon and hot water. The treatments included osteopathy, cold and hot baths and massage. It was the brainchild of the Champneys’ founder Stanley Lief who, as an impoverished young man in Russia with a heart condition, had been promised a short life. Yet with a self-imposed regime of diet and exercise he had completely recovered.
My mother, never one for half measures, went to Champneys four times a year. Unsurprisingly, I worked out that being in my bleak boarding school was preferable to starving. On no account would I fast again.
Since then, however, I’ve tested the temperature at an embarrassing variety of wellness retreats and tried just about every fad diet. All have failed.
It was my oldest friend Pam who came up with