Chapter 30: Diary of a Fast

Some of you know I was planning to do a 7-day fast, and for others of you, this will be news. Here, with no further ado, is my report. The long and short of it? I never thought I would be able to go a day without food, let alone 7 of them in a row. But I'm here to tell you that fasting was much, much easier than I had expected, and now I feel so energized and clean - more alive, somehow. I can't recommend it highly enough.

In writing this email, I have debated how much to tell you about the fasting process itself, especially the famous colonic irrigation. Everyone here at Spa Samui quickly becomes rather obsessed with their bowel movements, and there is much discussion and comparison of notes. I'll try to strike a middle balance, and apologies to those of you who feel I've gone too far with the detail. Anyway, here is my tale.

Day 0
I arrive at Spa Samui feeling a little down. Max and I had to get up at 3:30 am to catch our flight from Bangkok to Koh Samui, and I feel tired, and a little stressed. My room seems bleak to me - it is only $25 per night - and the yoga class I attend as soon as I arrive is for beginners, whereas I am looking for something more advanced. There are strange looking people walking around carrying buckets partially filled with what seems to be coffee. I think, what the hell am I going to do to fill my time here? I send out various text message SOS's. I can hear the guy in the cabin next to me straining with his enema - so charming - and it suddenly occurs to me what the buckets are for.

Still, I chill out in my hammock for a bit, and as the day unfolds the slow charm of the place begins to settle in on me. I am in beautiful surroundings, high in the jungly hills of Koh Samui, and there are flowers and plants and hundreds of different kinds of butterflies everywhere. There are also huge bees, with jet black bodies as big as my thumb and irridescent blue wings fertilizing the rampant flowers. Liquid whoop-whoop bird calls fill the air.

We are instructed in the use of the colema board, which is a necessary part of the twice daily colemas, basically washing the intestinal tract twice daily with 16 litres (yes, 16 litres) of a diluted coffee and apple vinegar solution; this delight begins tomorrow. There is even a sieve to put into the toilet bowl, should one have an inclination to closely inspect what's coming out.

Later the chiropractor clicks my spasmed neck. As part of my precleansing day I eat only vegan food, my last solids for 7 days. But who knew vegetarian food, specifically a ginger cashew nut vegetable stirfry and Thai vegetarian spring rolls, could be so delicious? The restaurant at this spa has been voted one of the 50 best restaurants in the world, which is highly ironic, given that most of the people staying here are not eating.

So the day passes and in the evening I am treated to something special; an absolutely enormous lightening storm across the water, but very far off, so that where I am sitting there is no rain or wind or thunder, only a huge ever-shifting Halloween display of black and orange and electric blue taking up the whole sky at the horizon. When I go to bed at night I can hear the cute feet scampering on my roof. I have no idea what the owner of these is. I find a tiny white pellet in my bed, the size of my finger nail. As I hold it between my thumb and forefinger, and it snaps and spatters weird yolk on me.

Day 1
I arise early at 6:30, waking to the rooster. I go for my first 7 am detox drink of juice, water, psyllium husk and clay. And then to morning meditation. To my great surprise, the meditation master, San Bao, reads a poem by Mary Oliver, When Death Comes. I am astonished. Of the millions of poems in the world to choose from, he chooses one that I've been obsessing about for weeks. So I'm inclined to view his choice as a serendipitous signal. I enjoy the guided meditation, but during the quiet solo meditation time, my mind erupts with anxieties and thoughts, and I cannot settle. I have so far to go. I also do Chi Gung, which is like Tai Chi, but I'm not sure that I get it, though just before Chi Gung the master reads the following Taoist poem by Li Po: "We sit, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains". And all day I keep turning this beautiful idea over in my mind.

As the day wears on, I find not eating is surprisingly easy. We are allowed one carrot juice, two coconut waters, 2 wheatgrass shots, and two bowls of vegetable consomme per day. Also, the psyllium husk in the 4-times-a-day detox drinks keep you feeling pretty full. I quickly develop an addiction for coconut water, with it's cool sweet taste and ever so slightly viscous texture. All throughout the day I have a slight headache but I'm told that's a natural reaction as the body starts to detox, especially as the herbal supplements that we also take break down the toxic mucoid plaque in the gut. (For those of you interested in this delightful topic, you can read the more later.) My friend Chip calls to see how I'm doing, and I feel further encouraged.

Day 2
I wake feeling heavy and tired; I didn't sleep well, what with scampering feet on my roof, and some pretty breathtaking intestinal cramps every two hours through the night. This too is normal, apparently. Peristalsis of the gut as it tries to shed the accreted mucoid plaque, apparently. I sun tan by the pool, and meet some other fasters, including two who become fast friends. The first is Lior, an Israeli woman living in Hong Kong with her children and husband, whom she says looks gay. She shows me a picture of him, and I concur. Lior has a quiet peace and competence about her. I also meet DB, a social worker from London with a massive laugh and fabulous waist-long dreads who deals with gun-toting 12 year olds and crack addicts, but is terrified of frogs, geckos, bats, insects - basically anything that moves but is not human.

When I tell her I'm a banker she stops dead-in-her tracks in disbelief, says "Fuck, you don't look like a banker. I thought you were a writer". When I tell her that my dream to be a writer, she begins to push me in every conversation to do something about it, and asks everyone in the resort whether they have any connections in the publishing world who can help me. She even finds some, Jez and Fiona, who are doing travel filming in Asia, who promise to forward my travel writings to some contacts of theirs in publishing and TV for their advice. I emailed my stuff to them, and now I give it up to the universe.

I have an aqua detox, basically a footbath in water with certain unspecified mineral salts through which an electromagnetic current is run. I am highly dubious that the machine actually does what it purports; i.e. draws toxins from the bloodstream and lymph system through the 4000 odd pores of my feet. The blood in the body circulates every twenty minutes, so in theory the 30 minute session should give the blood a once over. However, I'm a bit sceptical since the guy giving the sessions doesn't really seem to have a clear grasp of the difference between the lymph system and the blood system, claiming that the crud floating on top of the footbath water after 15 minutes of treatment is "lymph drawn from the microcapiliaries near the pores in the feet." However, I'm prepared to suspend my disbelief, since interestingly everyone's discharge is different. Some people end up with a footbath full of floating black-green cottage cheese curds, while others end up with a red-orange scum that clings like long-life milk in coffee, while others look like they are bathing their feet in a small frog-friendly pond. I am thrilled; my water turns greenish, but there is no floating crud, and John declares my discharge to be the least toxic he's seen in "months". And afterwards my feet do feel really springy.

Day 3
I am feeling pretty strong. I still had cramps last night, but every one was followed by a truly massive BM. I am not sleeping much, but apparently that is common. The chickens strutting everywhere keep me amused; they are handsome, with glossy black and caramel feathers. Every so often the rooster takes it into his head to show the world who's boss of the harem and he goes after a hen - but I mean really goes after her, with murderous intent it seems - and she hares around everywhere in a panic, running at top speed clucking and squawking, neck stretched out, bug-eyed. These chicken chases can last for 15 minutes and range over the whole resort. Feathers are shed.

Later, I have ampuku, a Japanese stomach massage designed to help elimination. I hop up from the massage and by necessity run down the steep hill from the massage sala to my cabin, hoping not to wipe out on my flip flops in my desperate hurry. I relax that evening with a steam bath in a room constructed out of a confluence of boulders. Some 32 Thai herbs are infused into the steam, and it's very nice, though blinking hot. There is much laughter amongst the various fasters around the dinner table as we make a meal out of our thin vegetable consomme.

Day 4
Not sleeping but I feel amazingly energetic and strong. No more cramps. The routine has settled on me. I feel little inclination to leave the beautiful resort. I do meditation and yoga or Chi Gung in the morning, read and sun tan, do the colemas and enjoy some fanstastic massage therapy, including a two hour classic Thai massage for £7. I feel slimmer. I am not hungry, though a girl named Amanda and I fantasize about the food taste we'd enjoy most. I want scrambled eggs with goat cheese and spring onion on hot buttered brown toast. She is from Arizona, and so wants a chicken enchilada, with guacamole and sour creme, and I realize that I want that too. Then she thinks, perhaps, instead she'd like risotto with porcini mushrooms and truffle oil, and I realize that I also want to eat that. We realize we are salivating buckets, and quickly agree to stop playing this masochistic game.

Later, around 4pm, the skies turn grey and a sudden wind arises. The trees begin to toss, and seem restless, eager. The shaking leaves give a hiss of expectation. A rumble of tremendous thunder vibrates through my body. When the rain comes, it first sounds like white noise, but then comes down so hard that it seems like the trees are applauding. Afterwards the smell of wet earth and flowers is everywhere, and as dusk descends the frogs all start belling, ecstatic and amorous thanks to the rains. There must be four or five different kinds of frogs; one sounds like a groaning door, while another has a high thrumming trill. The air is also filled with the chuck-chuck sounds of geckoes and the chirring of cicadaes and God knows what else. All of them, all the animals out there in the perfumed dark, are calling for love. I am entranced by the idea of this and by the symphony of sound. The next morning DB tells me that she couldn't sleep because of all the noise.

Day 5
In the morning, I fish two frogs out of the swimming pool; one smaller one clasped tightly to the back of the larger. It looks like the bigger one has been helping the smaller one, though they could also have been having nookie, when they fell into the pool. I also have a private yoga session at the tiny house of Ute, a mad lovely German woman who's been on Koh Samui 5 years. She's got two tiny kittens, which are all stomach, and two big stray jungle dogs, which gently lick and nuzzle the kittens, as if the kittens were their own offspring. The kittens both want to lie on my discarded sweat-soaked T-shirt as Ute puts me through my paces.

Ute follows Iyanga yoga, which focuses on the absolutely correct alignment in the different postures, rather than Ashtanga, which focuses more on a continuous flow through the various postures, or asanas, and it's a real pleasure to work on them with her guidance. I am totally into it, developing a real passion for yoga. Later Ute asks me if I've ever thought about teaching yoga, and a zillion fantasies about different lives, i.e. teaching yoga on Koh Samui, Vancouver, Costa Rica, South Africa, etc fly through my mind.

At night in the restaurant, a giant praying mantis flies onto me. Thank god DB is not here. The mantis is gorgeous; with his apple-green body and heart-shaped face and large golden eyes. He runs up and down my shoulders, back and forth. As he cocks his head to look at me, I have the feeling I am being observed by an alien intelligence. I recall that the Bushmen of Africa thought the mantis was the first creature of this earth, the father of all the other animals.

Day 6.
I feel so energetic and alive I can hardly believe it. I feel like going running, though the fasting experts at the resort advise taking it easy. The Thais working at the resort are so lovely, soft and friendly. When the young girls working in the restaurant say "Excuse me" it sounds like "Kiss meeeee".

Still, not everyone here is divine. I meet a German guy who's been fasting for 34 days. When I ask him, "Why?" he screamed at me "To get all that FILTH out of me", and then discloses, with no prompting from me, that he has documented every bowel movement during his 34 day fast with a digital colour photograph. However, he also announces that he is planning to move "back to the Fatherland", so I think I can safely dismiss him has a total wacko-weirdo.

However, when I mention to Ute (my German yoga instructor) that I'd bumped into this totally weird German guy and that I thought he was insane for fasting for 34 days, and she tells me, in all seriousness, about the Prana Diet, which is basically that you don't eat. At All. Ever. Practitioners of the Prana Diet believe that with proper meditation and breathing, eating becomes entirely unnecessary, that one can absorb Chi or prana or life energy directly from the universe, bypassing entirely the medium of food. Ute tells me she once met someone who went 9 months without food, and that he had the most wonderful eyes. She tells me that an Australian couple have written a book on the Prana Diet, which they apparently have followed for years. I say NOTHING, but you all can imagine what I'm thinking. Later, a lovely British-Indian doctor named Sonya, who is also doing the fast, confirms my scepticism by informing me that the Australian couple have been subsequently exposed as secret eaters. Well,
duhhhhh.

Day 7
Even so, prana diets notwithstanding, we've learned some amazing things about food and nutrition while here. Did you know that pasteurized cows' milk is catastrophic for the human body? The human body cannot digest even raw cows milk very well, but the process of pasteurization changes entirely many of the protein complexes in the milk, leaving them virtually undigestible. Indeed, even a calf that is fed pasteurized milk will die within 3-6 months, a secret that the dairy industry tries hard to supress. When you drink pasteurized cows' milk, the body cannot digest it completely, and in order to deal with the unnatural proteins left behind, the intestinal tract secrets a mucus, that binds to the protein particle, but also to the wall of the intestine.

A similar phenomenon happens when you eat starches and proteins together; starches require an alkaline environment for digestion, and proteins a highly acid one. If they are eaten together, they do not digest properly; hence fermentation/rot, hence a feeling of bloating etc, but also a buildup of mucus. Over time this mucus can build up to quite astonishing proportions, with consequent health issues. I will spare you exact details, but just let me say that I have seen photos, and it's not pretty. Having said all that, I think the chances that I give up forever my occassional quatro formagi pizza, with an extra topping of pepperoni are about as close to zero as it's possible to get. Still, I may now make an extra effort to follow it with healthy cleansing food for the next several meals.

In meditation this morning, we do a humming meditation for half an hour - an ancient Tibetan technique. It seems to release a lot of internal energy; I feel very warm and perky. I suppose it also parallels a cat's purring, which not only has been shown to lower blood pressure in people, but also serves to accelerate the auto-healing process in cats themselves. We also focus on making imperceptibly slow circular movements of the hands, which also proves very good for concentrating the mind. In the quiet unguided period of meditation time, however, my mind erupts in a volcano of concerns, worries, anxieties. Arghghghghghg, why can't I meditate properly?

Amanda, Finn and I decide to break our fast half a day early so that tomorrow we can have a full day of eating the good quality food in the Spa restaurant before we have to take our chances outside in the restaurants of the wider world. We spend the whole day poring over the menu, deciding what we will order tonight. I settle on a small somtum salad of shredded papaya, cabbage, onions, tomato with a chilli lime dressing. Chewing was strange, abnormal. It took
forever to eat the salad, like maybe an hour. But I then quickly dispatched a mango softy (basically whipped frozen mango) with cinnamon sauce. Lior rings from Hong Kong to ask if I think it's too soon for her to eat a piece of chocolate pie. Amanda has eaten all of a large somtum salad, so much in fact that she says she thinks she can feel her heart beat pulsing against her stomach.

Still, she declares:"I'm just going to eat a little more, just the cinnamon sauce part of the mango softy". Each mouthful is painful to her, but she keeps going. She discloses that she won eating championships when she was a child. Finally she reels backward in exhaustion, and I proceed to finish off the remains of both her and Finn's mango softies. I am super hungry. My stomach does not seem to have shrunk at all. I am already planning what I'm going to eat tomorrow.

Eating day:
My eating day. Hurrah! First I meditate. Today it is a shaking meditation, followed by dancing - which us boys are well practiced in! - and then a quiet meditation session, again during which I have problems settling my mind. I realize that it's my anxiety over my battle with Inland Revenue which is disturbing me, and I envisage a universe in which my particular tax inspector, a certain Mr Bolton, suddenly has never existed and my accountant suddenly is competent. But soon meditation is over, and the fun begins! It is a delight to eat again. Breakfast is a delicious melee of papaya, mango, goat yoghurt and bee pollen. I feel bloated. For lunch I have a Greek salad and a small soup. I feel bloated again.

The Spa recommends 3 days of eating only raw foods when breaking the fast, but I decide to follow an accelerated program, since this dinner will be the last chance I have to eat in the Spa's restaurant. So I order vegetable spring rolls and a vegetable stir fry. Now I feel truly bloated. But henceforth, I will be better with my eating especially since I have rid myself of the ginormous creme caramel which girdled my waist, even if I haven't yet rediscovered a rippling six-pack of abdominal muscles. It's been a really great experience.

The next day addendum:
I set off on a tiny speedboat for the tiny island of Koh Tao, about 2 hours from Koh Samui. The wind is howling and it looks like we are headed straight for the center of a black cloud girdling the horizon. The waves are super high and I think it would be a terrible shame to lose all my newly ingested food through a bout of sea-sickness. The theme song from Gilligan's Island runs through my head. But I survive, though a fat girl very nearly got bounced overboard.

Very finally a word of caution for would-be fasters: do not be fooled into thinking you can move quickly on from a vegetable stir fly and spring rolls to a chocolate bon-bon and a spicy prawn curry. I am here to tell you that sea-sickness is NOTHING compared to this.