Healing Holidays can arrange a 7-night Detox programme
from £4,999 per person sharing, including British Airways
flights, transfers, full board accommodation and inclusions
of the Detox programme. For more details, visit:
healingholidays.com/gq Tel: 020-7529 8549.lead to any number of further adven-
tures. Osteopathy was added to adjust
a hip problem and colon-hydro therapy
was included to, well, you know.
With the spa treatments, gym ses-
sions with a personal trainer and power
walks among the pungent orchards
that blanket the lower hills of the
mountains, is the strict detox diet. The
hardcore option (the easy option is for
oligarchs’ wives and softies) is the only
way to get the full benefit of your hard
work. The detox diet leaves you with an
egg cup of fruit and nuts for breakfast,
a soup and miniscule vegetable dish for
lunch and a “three-course” meal for
dinner, which in truth wouldn’t fill a
shot glass. The important thing is that
you forgo carbs, fat, salt, caffeine and
sugar. The reward for almost three days
of fasting was to break my abstinence
with a piece of grilled fish, which by
that point tasted like some kind of alien
food from the remote Planet Flavour.
By the end of the week, the charts
that once showed a deficiency in some
areas (zinc, Vitamin D) and the alarming
stresses imposed by my lifestyle (sorry
liver), revealed a startling new picture,
with the workrate and health of my
organs in balance for, I assume, the first
time in years. When I walked through
my front door – 4.5kg lighter, radiating
pure light from my skin and eyes – my
wife said “Wow, I barely recognise you”.
Which means everybody wins.mental health are linked and all need
to be treated together, though it was a
little disconcerting to be told by several
practitioners looking worryingly over
one chart or another that I was proba-
bly depressed or just a bit sad.
The treatments evolve through-
out the week to meet the findings of
your doctor, who is assigned when you
arrive. As well as daily massage, mud
hydrotherapy, intravenous vitamin
infusions and activity treatments, your
initial check-ups (blood and urine tests,
full-body composition scan), could thenyour lunch, if only you had had any.
The hotel itself is a 114-year-old grand
Palladian affair, looking down on the
town like it had been dropped from the
sky via Cannes.
On the first day my physical state was
analysed using an electronic energising
treatment based on the ancient Chinese
principle of meridians, the pathways
through which energy flows around
the body. The charts revealed that my
kidneys, liver, stomach and intestines
were under abnormal stress. After that
I had the first of three electrical acu-
puncture treatments designed to rebal-
ance these anomalies.
I was lucky enough to meet Monsieur
Chenot for a private consultation and he
confirmed the rather predictable analy-
sis of my overworked biology. He did,
however, declare that my bone struc-
ture was the densest he had ever seen,
which, in my mind, made me Wolverine
from the X-Men, so not all bad news.
Chenot has developed what he calls
Biotology, which is the perfectly sen-
sible idea that physical, emotional andThe indoor/outdoor
swimming pool at
Palace Merano;
(above) a suite
with some
old-school luxury
and the elegant, if
insubstantial, detox
fare seved amid the
opulence of the
main reception and
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