The regimen is not for the faint-hearted. It starts with no food for fourteen days, before moving on to small amounts of solids: half a cucumber on the first day, 50 grams of poached chicken the next (think the size of three fingers), then an egg on the third day, then back to the cucumber. Repeat the cycle for the next sixty days. Black tea and water were permitted. The Chinese medicine - a mixture of herbs - was to be taken orally, three times daily. The herbs give you around 250 calories a day.
I returned to Australia and signed up to the program. The night before I started detoxing, I had one final splurge. Holding a detox party with a group of friends, I had five or six glasses or wine, some champagne, cigarettes and around 2am, a burger.
In my initial appointment I was weighed and had a procedure called cupping. Staff at the fasting clinic told me that the discolouration around my back after the cupping showed that oxygen was not reaching my vital organs because the internal fat inside my body was crushing them. The detox, I was told, would shrink the internal fat, restoring my organs to optimum working condition.
Days one to three without food were tough. The liquids kept me feeling full, but without meals to prepare, plan and enjoy - I was left a bit unmoored. I was tired, crabby and lacked energy. I hid in my room while my flatmate cooked delicious smelling food and once, when I went out to buy tea bags, I ended up trailing a man who was carrying a box of pizza - the smell driving me crazy.
In the first week, I was plagued by headaches, low level aches and pains, deep fatigue and boredom. When I slept (sometime for 14 or more hours) my dreams were vivid and strange. I thought about food constantly.
So what was going on in my body in the early stages of the detox?
On the first day, six to twenty-four hours after beginning the detox (known as the post-absorptive phase) insulin levels start to fall. Glycogen breaks down and releases glucose for energy and these glycogen stores last for roughly twenty-four hours. Then gluconeogenesis (literally meaning 'making new glucose') occurs in the next twenty-four hours to two days. This is when the liver manufactures new glucose from amino acids. Glucose levels fall but stay within the normal range - providing you are not diabetic. This is the body using the last of its sugar supplies up before it switches into ketosis - the fat-burning mode beloved by body builders, anorexics and paleo devotees.
Amanda Salis is the Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, who leads research and multidisciplinary clinical trials at the Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition, Exercise & Eating Disorders. Her research focuses on understanding and circumventing the body's adaptive responses to continued energy restriction, a phenomenon she terms the 'famine reaction'. She says the reason I am sleeping so much is that "your body goes into conservation mode when you are fasting. There is not enough fuel to enable your muscles to move. Neurochemical changes are occurring in your brain, also making you feel lethargic. It's like being hit by train."
On day two I discover I had lost a kilogram already - an even, satisfying one kilogram.
On day three I lose almost two kilograms - so that is almost three kilograms in three days.
The rest of the first week was torture. It felt like having a really bad flu. On the fifth night I was woken by chest pains that made me fear I was having a heart attack. (Associate Professor Salis later tells me, that when starving the body will feed off muscle, even bone. The heart muscle is not immune from being catabolised.)
By day five without food, there is no hiding from the truth: I smell bad. Really bad. Not sweaty, but like something that's been left in the bin too long and is rotting. When I cry, even my tears smell bad.
By week two I am still losing around a kilogram a day, but miraculously my energy is returning - even though I'm still not eating. My skin and eyes are sparkling, my hair shiny and my clothes were loose. My brain feels like it has switched from dial up to super fast broadband. I feel sharper.
Yet, there is still the hunger. Most nights I wake up around 4am, starving.
Such a regimen is, obviously not sustainable. I did a modified version of the detox for another 87 days and lost 14 kilograms.
Unfortunately, when I went back to eating and drinking normally (not excessively, just normally) - all the weight came back on.'
Would I do the detox again? Probably not - they were two of the toughest weeks of my life.
