I Survived a Wellness Retreat
For this O executive editor, healthy living meant diet soda and fat-free brownies. Until, feeling sluggish and "toxic," she flew to Texas for an extravaganza of juicing, spa treatments, and colonics.
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The lessons we are learning are based on an elaborate cosmology made up, as far as I can tell, of universal vibrations, quantum mechanics, and enzymes. Yet the takeaways are so simple: Eat leafy greens. Chew before you swallow. Stop beating yourself up. I visit a practitioner of iridology, in which the irises of one's eyes are used to diagnose health issues throughout the body. She tells me that I have circulation problems and a yeast overgrowth and should increase my cardio and cut back on refined carbs. I dutifully make notes and promise to take better care of myself—two things I have never done in a doctor's office, though I've gotten identical advice there. But this feels so radically different from having a stethoscoped guy pull out a BMI chart and tell me to lay off the dinner rolls. It feels like a quest that demands my curiosity and engagement; it makes me the hero of my own life.
On the fourth day, we break the fast with a raw "pasta" of zucchini and cucumber. It tastes fresh and tangy, sharp and alive. It also feels, well, healing. (Do I talk this way now?) Including my prefasting diet, I've been off alcohol, refined sugar, and fake diet food for a couple of weeks. I can't remember feeling healthier or more awake. This is galling, as I'd secretly hoped the nutrition rules wouldn't apply to me, the way everybody hopes she'll be the one to cheat death. I get, for the first time in 43 years, that I really am what I eat.
This lesson alone would be worth the cost of the trip, which is similar to a four-day package to Walt Disney World, that other Magic Kingdom. On the way home, I realize that even if my digestive system hasn't been reset, my palate has: I crave the crunch of vegetables, not the ooze of cheese or the buttery pillow of a baked good. In fact, I walk right past the cinnamon buns and find the least depressed prepackaged salad in George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Out here in the real world, it's harder to live deliberately. But I've never been more willing to try.
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