Does Fasting Actually Work? The Strange Results of Living on Soup and Water for a Week
The doctor looked at the results from my blood test, considered them for a moment, and then turned to me. “These should be lower,” she said definitively. “Much lower.” The rows of numbers blurred together but painted a clear picture. My liver was not in good shape. With the easygoing reassurance of a Spanish doctor, she explained how this vital organ was connected to other things of importance. What was bad for one was bad for the others. I had known this, of course, but needed to hear it directly. The red-wine diet might work in moderation in the French countryside but not for me.
Only a few days earlier, I had entered—voluntarily but with a mild sense of unease—the Buchinger Wilhelmi clinic in Marbella, Spain, for a weeklong fast. On the first day, I met the doctor, who looked over a questionnaire I had filled out about my eating and drinking habits. She struggled not to raise an eyebrow when she arrived at the amount of wine I consume each week, which I had to estimate in liters. Then she measured the circumference of my stomach in centimeters, which I chose not to convert to inches. “We’d like to get that number...down,” she said diplomatically.
I don’t occupy the wellness space or anything adjacent to the wellness space. My exercise regimen, such as it is, consists of losing at squash to friends when they invite me to their clubs. About the best that can be said is that I give up drinking one month each year and plan accordingly—no fishing trips or travel to dining destinations. Examined as a whole, this can be considered childish behavior. And like all childish things, at some point it must end.
When I told friends of my fasting ambitions, there were no neutral reactions. Some were intrigued, others aghast that I thought I could handle it. A few were infuriated. “Why would you want to do that?” they asked. I kept the reasons to myself: a sense of clarity, losing weight, certainly, and a desire for some reset away from New York where discipline can be hard to come by.
A friend had been to this clinic, lost weight, and swore by the process. Would I be so lucky? I braced myself for broth, for juice, for tea. I wondered if I could endure the experience. Would I try to escape from the clinic in the middle of the night? Lose my mind? Or, conversely, would I succeed and become one of those evangelists who can’t stop talking about some diet that changed their life? Would I infuriate Parisian waiters when asking if the sole meunière could be prepared sans beurre?
How are you feeling? We’ve just entered the New Year, a time of resolutions after weeks of festive eating and drinking. This is the year we swear we’ll get in shape—but isn’t that always the case? We hear about caveman diets, Ozempic, and Greek grandmothers who live long and prosper without ever unrolling a Pilates mat. Sometimes it feels like we’ve heard the word wellness so much it’s lost its meaning.
However it’s defined, wellness is big business. In 2024, the U.S. health-and-wellness industry was valued at more than $1.8 trillion, according to the Global Wellness Institute. I was not one of those contributing to this sector, other than by buying an oversized bottle of Advil. But I know plenty of wellness people, many of whom swear by fasting. The same way that people who read books about manners already have good manners, those committed to fasting generally don’t need to. The ones like me who need to fast are reluctant. Everybody could lose some weight, but I really could. If I wanted to be Jackson Lamb for Halloween, it wouldn’t be a stretch. Plus, my liver—it needed a break.
So in late November, I arrived at Buchinger Wilhelmi, where I would spend eleven nights (and eat nearly nothing on Thanksgiving). For seven of those days, I would consume only liquids that made up less than 250 calories a day. That’s a staggering decrease from the average American diet, which is north of 3,800.
Every day, I ate two bowls of broth, which I could adorn with cumin, which was nice, but not salt, which was what I craved. There were also two glasses of juice, which were served in wineglasses and were terrific but lacked the thing that makes wine great. Five bottles of the best mineral water I’ve ever had. And, mercifully, a very small dish of honey. The experience took me to some strange places. I didn’t flee the clinic, but my mind certainly did, and I fantasized about food I couldn’t eat (including, for some reason, dim sum) and the beer I couldn’t taste until—halfway through—I achieved my own version of enlightenment.
If I was going to force myself to fast, I was at least going out with a bang. My final dinner was at the Marbella Club. It felt like I was going off to war. The Marbella Club was built in 1954 by Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a swashbuckling figure who enjoyed fast cars, glamorous friends, and the good life on Spain’s Costa del Sol. Slim Aarons photographed decadent beautiful people living well at the club. Now it’s a tremendous hotel and the last place I ate a solid meal. I was a mere five-minute drive down the hill from the clinic, but it felt like a world away.
I began with seasonal fall mushrooms and a poached egg and moved on to a steak cooked over the lovely wood fire that sits in the center of the restaurant. I assessed various glasses of Rioja like I was writing a treatise. I justified this as a dramatic final hurrah, but really I was like a bear packing on pounds before hibernation.
Fasting, like many significant endeavors—say, fighting an Atlantic salmon—exists in abstraction until you go through it. And you don’t know what it means to survive a week on broth until you’re cut off from culinary civilization. One bit of advice echoed in my head: It gets easier on the fifth day. I think that was meant to reassure me, but I had visions of sneaking down into the Marbella Club for a surreptitious meal, which is, apparently, not unheard of.
The Buchinger Wilhelmi clinic occupies a series of handsome buildings on a lovely, leafy campus set between the Sierra Blanca mountains and the Mediterranean. The climate is sympathetic all year—jasmine blooms even in winter. It could pass as an attractive resort; there’s a large saltwater pool, an herb garden, and paths through manicured lawns and orange trees. It has a full-time staff of doctors and nurses, as well as treatment rooms. During the day, you’re allowed to leave this paradise if you think you can handle restaurants and cafés that are calling your name.
At Buchinger Wilhelmi, if the fast is business, a sense of pleasure remains. Yes, you can meditate or work on your breathing, but you can also get a massage or a facial and see live music every night (a wonderful performance of Philip Glass compositions). There are stations of bottles of water everywhere, a plate of lemons from the property to make that water taste better. People walk around in terry-cloth bathrobes. There’s a grass tennis court with a pro, a hair salon, and an attractive staff who seem to have fasted themselves. There is no bar.
You don’t just stop eating; you have a day of adaptation to ease into the affair. A small amount of wild rice with good tomato puree that is sweet and agreeable. From the water selection, I settled on Bezoya. The menu helpfully described Bezoya as “a very diuretic kind of water, lightly mineralized, it helps to eliminate impurities from the organism.” I was the organism, I presumed, whose impurities needed eliminating.
When you’re finally ready to fast, you get the salts, which is as ominous as it sounds. Two glasses of the most vile, acrid concoction—you receive grape juice to relieve the taste. The salts get right to work, and you spend the next four hours next to the bathroom. Rest assured: When you think you’re ready to head outside and enjoy the day, you’re not. To put it another way: I lost more than three pounds the first day. Then I was putting away Bezoya like I had been lost at sea.
To my surprise, I quickly adapted to the routine: Wake up and have tea, say, a fresh apple-and-cinnamon mixture that, the menu explains, “improves sensitivity to insulin, useful for arthritis and gout.” Gout-free tea! At noon you have your meal. A bowl, a small bowl, of soup, though closer to broth. You know the miso soup that starts a meal at your local Japanese spot? Well, that was the whole meal. Whatever they put in soup to make it taste good in France they don’t put in here. But it does taste quite nice—fennel and kale, or a faintly spiced cauliflower with cardamom, nutmeg, and caraway. Then a small wineglass of juice, usually a mix of apple and greens. All the food is from nearby farms and arrives on a tidy bamboo tray with a white linen napkin and a petite spoon. (Don’t eat too quickly!) This is repeated at dinner, with different soup and different juice. There’s a line as soon as we’re allowed to eat.
Fasters are banished from the dining room. Instead we take our liquid meals in the lounge, a cheerful salon with a terrace that looks over the lawn. This segregation is no accident. We fasters are not trusted to handle exposure to the temptation of food. This is definitely the case, because any deviation from our plan was of great interest to us. If somebody had, say, a roll with salted butter, we might have jumped him like a school of piranhas.
It’s true that you might want to try some bread while you’re enjoying your soup. You might think, Now what’s the main course? But there is no bread and there is no main course. Soup and juice are the entire equation. Like all forms of minimalism, the details take on outsized importance. And nothing was more important than honey—a small dish, the size of a silver dollar, of dark honey that we were granted every day. We could parcel this out when we needed energy. This honey was like a beloved, sweet life preserver. The day it didn’t arrive as scheduled caused me tremendous distress.
You want to know if I suffered? You want to know if I felt pangs of doubt? Well, I definitely felt low energy early on. (This is not uncommon.) Once, and I can’t explain this, while walking in the garden, I felt certain I smelled basmati rice and refused to move until it evaporated. You take all the sensory pleasures you can.
Crucially, you see results. Every morning the nurse entered my weight and blood pressure in my assigned notebook; both fell every day. Then I would swim slow laps in the pool. I also spent a fair amount of time in the steam room, my preferred method of wellness, which is to say passive.
I was, however, reluctant to leave the grounds. I didn’t want to be confronted with the tempting world of coffee, wine, and beer. At the clinic, everything was designed for our success. I didn’t know if I could hold the line if I was at large. I recalled a draft San Miguel (137 calories) in a frosted glass straight from the freezer that they served at the Marbella Club, which came with those great almonds (500 calories), green olives (50 calories), and potato chips (152 calories), all of which would destroy the daily calorie allotment up here. I found myself examining menus of Hong Kong restaurants (the average Chinese dinner, 800 calories). I stared at photos of dumplings (240 calories). I read restaurant reviews in the Times. I considered the vegetarian tasting menu at Le Bernardin (2,000 calories).
After a few days, however, I stopped focusing on what was missing (say, a piece of dark chocolate). I looked forward to what I did have. And what I had was enough. The prescribed limits of eating, like the walls of the clinic, made sense, and I was happy within them. I was in a new cycle, one I had never experienced. I no longer felt deprived; I felt more aligned with myself.
I was preparing for a triumphant return to the dining scene in Madrid for my first night after the fast. I had a powerful desire to consume something with salt. A lot of salt. So it was unfortunate when the nutritionist told me I wasn’t supposed to have meat or alcohol for a full month after leaving the clinic.
What’s this? There were rules once I left? Would the wellness tyranny never end? I thought the whole point of fasting was to break it in spectacular fashion, like a gangster in those Scorsese films who’s released from jail and goes straight to a nightclub. “What do you mean?” I exclaimed. I had a reservation at Le Veau d’Or when I got back to New York. I was going fishing in the Bahamas and planning to put away a few cases of Kalik and a bottle of dark rum. There may have been tears in my eyes.
“Two weeks,” she conceded. I could have alcohol after two weeks. Alarmed, I wrote my friend who had been to the clinic. “You never told me about this month.”
“Oh, I don’t bother with that,” he assured me. “I eat a Florentine steak the day I leave.”
Now a steak seemed too much. “I wait a week,” his wife weighed in, and I calmed down.
There’s a hushed quality to Buchinger, and I regained my senses. When you reach the middle of your time, you fall into the rhythms of a healthful utopia that increasingly make sense. The idea, usually around day five, is that the body stops craving glucose and turns its attention to consuming your own fat. That doesn’t sound appetizing, but this ketosis is what we’re here for. Late in my stay I could focus more easily; I was eager to write. To my shock, I would have happily gone another week.
Finally it was time to break the fast, and at Buchinger that happens with an apple. First an apple puree, which was exciting just because it wasn’t a liquid—it was the most invigorating baby food I could imagine. It arrived with a piece of mango that was so profoundly sweet I started to laugh. There was more: a simple red apple sitting innocently on a plate, a trophy for your accomplishment.
Allowed back into the dining room (so long, fasters!), I had the curious sensation of holding a fork for the first time in a week. Thankfully I remembered how to use it. What was odd was that I didn’t want seared duck breast or a bottle of Burgundy. I was happy to eat, certainly, but I felt modest. I had never known myself to be shy at the dinner hour before.
Here’s the butcher’s bill: I dropped fourteen pounds and six centimeters off the old waist. Those are numbers, but the greater effect couldn’t be quantified. I felt closer to myself, to my decisions, and, not to get sentimental, to how I wanted to live. Many people I admire, A.J. Liebling, Jim Harrison, M.F.K. Fisher, were writers who loved to eat. I associate eating well with living large. I still do. But this time in Spain felt like a recalibration, pulling back from an appetite that doesn’t need to be speeding in the fast lane all the time.
Of course, that’s what I felt under the Buchinger spell. It’s true I might import Bezoya by the case. But these things vary. Progress isn’t a straight line, and I’m sure there will be highs and lows, though since the fast I’ve avoided more indulgences than usual and haven’t missed them. I can’t wait to return to Buchinger; after all, there’s always something left to lose. But the lesson was clear: There’s so much more to gain.
You Might Also Like
