I've changed the way I will eat forever

And it's already freed me from pain and given me back my wardrobe. Here's how...

The Mayr Life Clinic has its own private jetty on Lake Altaussee. It does not suck.

My friends will tell you I am the last person you would expect to be wanging on about wellness. I’m very much from the ‘life is too short so eat the cake and drink the wine’ school of thought. But my trip earlier this year to the Mayr Life Clinic in Austria has reset not just my gut, but my entire attitude. It was a week of calorie and nutrient control under a team of doctors whose speciality is gut health. I was  calling it ‘posh prison’ on my nightly phone calls with my husband: It’s a very expensive medical spa set in a beautiful mountain range, yes. But there’s also not much to do except relax and walk and somehow make it to the next tiny-portioned meal - the nightly regime of watery vegetable broth with linseed crackers was a particular lowlight for me. No alcohol, no sugar, no caffeine, no wheat. I was so dispirited when a doctor told me that this major gut health reset would only work if I kept up this spartan regime for another two weeks after my one week with them. 

I have to tell you: Now I really can see myself happily keeping this up for the rest of my life. Since late August, my health has changed so much.

I haven’t been having my daily cramping pain and bloating after every bloody meal.  I am fitting into clothes that I was about to sell because I couldn’t button them up. I have more energy.

But the thing that has really been a game changer for me is that I’m not having the pain that was becoming a serious problem. I haven’t had it diagnosed, but I do have the visible signs of arthritis in my fingers. I’ve had it mildly in one of my knees (that was diagnosed) for a few years now, but so far I’ve been able to manage the pain of that. What works for me is regular exercise and sensible footwear. (In fact I’ll do another substack this week on new season shoes.)

But my fingers were a new, much more annoying issue. The sharp shooting pains in my right index finger were waking me up at night. Sometimes it’s been painful to the touch. And for someone who needs to write most days, I was getting worried about how often I was now finding the pain was bad enough to force me to stop typing for longer and longer breaks.  

I’m no expert on arthritis. In fact, I’m very much in denial about it and so far just muddle along doing what I can, while I still can, to manage it myself as best I can.  For a few weeks I wondered if I was just imagining that my new diet was helping my sore fingers. But I now have the proof. 

A month after returning from Mayr Life, and (mostly) keeping up with their preferred way of eating, I was invited for a health screening at Neko Health in Marylebone, London. This revolutionary new screening service combines medicine and tech to deliver a comprehensive look at the state of you. Bonus: If you’re a secret Trekkie nerd like me, you can have a second or two fantasising that you’re about to be beamed aboard the Starship Enterprise.

Wish I could pull off yellow.

I got a full-body scan that took more than 2000 pictures of my epidermis, an indepth look at my heart function, blood pressure, artery health, cholesterol levels, inflammation levels and more. The whole process takes about two hours, and includes an hour one-to-one with a doctor to talk through all your results and any further recommendations. The whole thing costs £300. This level of detail and attention would cost thousands  - and visits to multiple consultants -  just a couple of streets away in Harley Street.

Anyway: I learned during my Neko consultation that my BMI, cholesterol levels and  liver and kidney function all had much-improved numbers since their analysis just a few weeks earlier at Mayr LIfe. I told the doctor I’d been largely following their regimen for about five weeks and he said, ‘Well, that’s definitely enough time to see some improvements.’ What really stunned me though is that my body’s inflammation levels were basically at zero - ‘barely detectable’, which again, was markedly different from the story in Austria a month earlier. So I mentioned to the doctor at Neko that my fingers had stopped hurting. Arthritis is a general term for the condition of ‘joint inflammation’ and now my scans were showing I had none. So he agreed that these things were linked.  

Wow. This was the last piece of motivation I needed to keep up with a way of eating that is working out so well for me. Here’s what I’ve been doing since Mayr Life. First though, some unsurprising caveats: 

1. I was given a full medical assessment before following any of this dietary advice and I would urge you to see a doctor before embarking on any new health regime.

2. This has been working for me, but my body is not yours. I can’t see any harm coming from following the way I’m currently eating, but like me you may have food intolerances and special conditions that you don’t even know about. So please refer to point 1.

3. This place is not the same as the Viva Mayr Clinic. A friend of mine went there recently and was so miserable on their strict 500 calories a day eating plan that she tried to cut her week-long stay short. The Mayr Life Clinic definitely controlled portion sizes but I was never hungry. They want you to eat. 

4. I have not given up anything. I still have tea and coffee and alcohol. I’ve been largely avoiding sugar but I’m not a robot, it’s still in there. I just try to follow some basic principles, but I think that’s made more doable precisely because I’m not ‘banning’ myself from anything whatsoever.

5. While the Mayr Life method can come off as sounding a bit fanatical, I found them to be the perfect combination of strict and chilled. While they said to me, it would be best for you to avoid gluten, they also said, ‘But if you’re out at a restaurant and you want to have a pasta dish, it’s really not a big deal once in a while if you want to have the pasta.’ They know that humans will human, and no one can live their entire lives without the occasional burger.  I have found that if I usually stick to these disciplines, going out for gins with my friends is not a disaster for my gut health.

6. None of this is rocket science, by any stretch. ‘Don’t eat shit’ - we all know this. But this was a valuable lesson in just how often so many of us slide, mindlessly, into unhelpful habits.

I’ve gone gluten-free

The Mayr Life Clinic diagnosed me as being gluten intolerant. This has probably been the most significant shift that has helped me to feel so much healthier. As more people decide to adopt a gluten-free diet, I’ve arrived at this point when it’s much easier to do than it used to be. I have friends who are living with Celiac disease for years who virtually had to live on leaves for the years before wellness influencers would drag the food industry to being more creative and accommodating. These days I can pretend to live my previously glutinous life with pasta, porridge oats and rice that’s made for the growing gluten-free community. (I’m yet to find a gluten-free bread that doesn’t taste of misery, so let me know if you have recommendations.)

If you’re intolerant to a food, it’s going to aggravate your whole digestive system and if there’s one thing they drummed into me at the Clinic, it’s that your overall health really does begin and end with how happy or not your gut is. Knowing I need to avoid gluten means I do sometimes look longingly at the pizzas and doughnuts I used to gleefully treat myself to. But I don’t miss anything enough to go back to being regularly doubled over with cramps.

I never snack

Even before I went to the Mayr Clinic, I was of the belief that one day we will realise that snacking is the new smoking. Didn’t stop me doing it though. I was definitely mindlessly, incessantly grazing between meals and as such overloading my system with sugars and salts and glutens that it simply did not need. There’d be porridge for breakfast at home but then a croissant on my way to the office, and maybe some chocolates before lunch and probably a packet of crisps  - and maybe even some more chocolates - some time in the afternoon before dinner. I’ve always been slim so I could eat a lot without really gaining much weight. But I’d definitely gained weight in the last couple of years. It was evident in the clothes I had to get rid of. At first, the Mayr Clinic’s edict of nothing but three modest-sized meals a day brought on a mild panic in me. I was worried about the shaking weakness I’d often experience with a sudden hunger attack between meals. What would I do when that happened at this place and they wouldn’t give me anything to fill the hole? The surprising answer was: The shaking hangry attack never came. The portions were small, but well balanced between proteins and carbs.  

Carrying this on has been the single biggest reset I’ve put my body through in decades. I have not allowed myself to eat between meals since late August. And that means when I do eat I make sure I’m getting variety on my plate and that I eat until I’m full. Breakfast is normally scrambled eggs, or a loaded porridge of gluten-free oats, mixed with a teaspoon of peanut butter, a handful of blueberries, some chia seeds and linseeds and semi-skimmed milk. Other favourites I add to porridge include desiccated coconut, cinnamon and nuts.

Lunch will be a protein like grilled salmon with a cold potato salad and something green like broccoli. Dinner is often a vegetable soup made from scratch, or a vegetable-loaded one-pot. A current favourite is a chicken and butter bean stew I batch cooked and froze. 

As well as what you eat, the Mayr Life Clinic is very big on how you eat: Do it slowly, chew everything a lot and be mindful of it. Be distraction-free. This has stopped me racing through meals while staring at my phone or my laptop which I’m sure was also another big contributor to bad digestion. 

Hand in hand with this of this has been the revelation of not reaching blindly for food - any food - the very second I feel a hunger pang. Honestly I used to panic the second I felt the tiniest hungry twinge, probably because there have been times when hunger has triggered my migraines. And if, like me, you’ve experienced the awful shaking weakness that comes with a sudden blood sugar crash, you know how panicked you can feel at the prospect. But eating good-sized meals of unprocessed foods has meant that I haven’t felt that desperate need to eat outside of meal times. 

Crucially though, the Mayr Life method made me understand that developing hunger, that is then satisfied by a good meal at the right time is no bad thing. Your system takes around four hours to digest a meal. They feel strongly that cramming yourself with food between meals is just giving your system too much work to do, so it can’t do it efficiently. These days I give myself four to five hours between meals. Instead of thinking, ‘ooh, hunger twinge, fill it NOW’, I calmly let that hunger develop it and satisfy it, at the right time, with substance. With dinner, I try to be done eating by 8pm. In any case, I always now give my body 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. So I finish eating at 9pm, I don’t do breakfast til at least 9am.   

Other rules they swear by: 

• No raw food after 4pm. Apparently it’s harder work for your digestive system than cooked food and can just sit there, fermenting in your gut overnight, rather than being digested. 

• Drink a lot of water every day, but not 15 minutes before, or an hour after you eat. 

Back in August, as I sat down for my fifth night of watery vegetable broth for dinner, I remember thinking about how I would defiantly run straight to McDonald’s the second I was back at the airport and none of these waiters and doctors could do anything about it.

I’ll be happy to never see another bowl of that joyless brown water again, that’s for sure. But broth aside, I think the trip to Mayr Life is easily the best thing I’ve ever done. Yes, life is short so enjoy the things you enjoy. But life is also too short to live it feeling like shit if you can possibly avoid it.