Weight loss retreat: How to shed pounds in Spain
Sometimes willpower alone won’t do when it comes to slimming down. Dan Gledhill called in the big guns at SHA Wellness Clinic
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Your support makes all the difference.Land at Alicante-Elche airport, take the Autopista AP-7 up Spain’s Costa Blanca: chances are you’re heading for a hedonistic week in Benidorm. But take a left turn along the way and a rather different holiday awaits.
Looking from a distance like a shipwrecked ocean liner on a hill overlooking the seaside town of Albir is SHA Wellness Clinic. Not much alcohol here. Coffee is off the menu. No meat, no dairy, no sugar. But lots and lots of tea. And about the healthiest place on the planet.
You can go to SHA for all manner of reasons: to detox, ease stress, give up smoking or, in my case, lose weight. After a relatively gluttonous dinner on arrival (and I mean only relative to what follows), and a comfortable night in the luxurious rooms – each commanding views of the coast and nearby mountains – the tone is set the next morning (at 7am sharp) with an initial weight measurement and blood pressure check, plus a needle in the arm to ascertain the scale of my ill-health. Trying to stick to a healthy diet and fitness regime at home had, to the consternation of my doctor, proved beyond my powers of self-control. But put me somewhere out of reach of temptation, but luxurious enough to make up for the absence of treats, and maybe that would do the trick.
The clinical area is like something out of Gattaca, pristine decor populated by an army of beautiful staff in spotless uniforms catering apparently to every complaint known to man.
Then breakfast. The highlight of SHA is a vast terrace comprising a pool, ample space for sunbathing and Shamadi restaurant, where you can eat inside or out and absorb the view while your dietary habits are turned on their head.
After the previous night’s indulgence (to break me in gently my dinner was from the 1,500-calorie-a-day menu), I now begin a week on the Biolight Menu (1,000 calories a day). Breakfast begins with a bowl of miso soup, which is followed by three small pots: one of porridge, one of fruit salad and another of yoghurt. Plus a small piece of crisp bread, and prunes (no effort is spared to keep those bowels moving). Not my idea of how to start the day – that would be egg on toast washed down with coffee galore – but it seemed to hit the spot.
Then there’s the tea. Two cups with the morning meal (a rather unpleasant diuretic and then a digestive, kukicha, for calcium content and alkalinity), another with lunch (agar, helpful – like much of the menu – for number twos), two more with the afternoon snack (shiitake mushroom, which is said to helps detoxify the liver, and dried daikon radish, which assists in dissolving fat). Finally, mint tea with dinner.
As for the rest of the diet, lunch usually starts with a soup followed by various vegetarian dishes (quinoa, tofu and tempeh featuring regularly) and the occasional morsel of fish (but strictly no salmon, it being one of the fattiest fish). There was, to my surprise, a dessert at lunch, but the crucial point is the servings: they’re small. Delicious. But small (imagine a typical dinner plate, divide it by three, and you’ll get the idea).
If I’d known in advance that this would be my regime, I’d have imagined passing the time there in some sort of famished stupor, unable to do anything except lie back, enjoy the heat (a comfortable 20-something degrees that barely wavers throughout the year) and fantasise about home, burgers, pizzas, etc. But there’s too much to do, and remarkably, given the paucity of the portions that I may already have mentioned, enough energy to do it. The weight-loss programme also encompasses a series of eccentric-sounding treatments.
There’s pressotherapy (a comically large pair of trousers that inflate to squeeze the body and apparently assist in lymphatic drainage, which is crucial to losing weight), moxibustion (localised heat applied to acupuncture points), Indiba (a radio frequency device that promises to reshape my silhouette), the “shrinking violet wrap” (which claims it can take 2cm off my waist measurement in an hour – and succeeds) and much more besides (notably colonic irrigation, a recommended three sessions thereof).
Most extreme is cryotherapy – three minutes in a box chilled to -150C, which burns fat by forcing the body to go into overdrive to keep warm. Plus there are sessions with a personal trainer, underwater massage. No let-up, in other words.
So far so good. But after a week my personal nutritionist decides it’s time to get serious – with the Kushi diet. And this is where the story of SHA begins.
Alfredo Bataller Parietti was an émigré from Argentina who had built up a successful real estate business. Diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002, he scoured the globe looking for a treatment and his travels eventually took him to Michio Kushi, a Japanese dietitian who pioneered the macrobiotic culinary regime. The new diet worked for Alfredo and he wanted to spread the word, so he established SHA on his Costa Blanca estate (and some neighbouring houses he had to acquire). The clinic is still run by Alfredo, along with his wife and two sons, Alejandro and Alfredo.
So the Kushi diet became my regime for the rest of the stay. Gone was the bread roll that filled out my biolight breakfast. No more dessert with lunch. This was 700 calories a day – a terrifying prospect. But it seemed to provide more than enough energy for my exercise programme. And the pounds started to shift rapidly.
If SHA sounds more boot-camp than boutique hotel, then think again. There’s enough to keep the mind and body occupied to forget about a rumbling tummy. The daily cookery courses are fun and a great way of indoctrinating the macrobiotic way into your diet when you’re back home. There’s yoga, meditation, pilates, tai chi and many more activities besides. Daily walks either to the beach or around the mountain to the lighthouse with its spectacular views along the coast.
SHA is nothing if not holistic. Try the ozone therapy – a test tube full of blood removed from the vein and then reinjected with a dose of vitamin-rich serum. Or the bioresonance treatment, which uses electromagnetic waves to identify and treat weaknesses in the body. You could spend months at SHA and part with tens of thousands of pounds just to sample the full range of treatments. Certainly money seems to be no object for many of the guests, among them many well-to-do Russians and Arabs. The private helipad gives you an idea how wealthy some of them are. But there’s no feeling of social heirarchy (colonic irrigation is a great leveller like that). And in any case, beyond the core programme you can spend as much or as little as you like.
And the results? Well, you get a running commentary with weigh-ins every other day using a machine that gives you the most detailed fat distribution read-out imaginable. Plus a blood test at the start and finish of your stay to see how much your condition has improved. At the end of the fortnight I’ve lost 10kg and can’t wait to see my GP back home to show off the transformation. Just make sure you don’t stop off in Benidrom on the way home.
Travel essentials
Getting there
The closest airport is Alicante, served from the UK by airlines including British Airways, easyJet, Ryanair and Norwegian.
Staying there
SHA Wellness Clinic (00 34 966 811 199; shawellnessclinic.com) offers the seven-day Weight-Loss Programme for €2,950 (€4,290 for 14 days) on a full board basis. The Mountain View Deluxe Suite starts from €340, room only.
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