This doesn’t sound good. ‘You are the most stressed person I have ever met. Say “Aaaah” and poke out your tongue.’ I do it. She reels.
‘That is the reddest tongue I have ever seen, plus you have a great big groove running down the centre. A red tongue means extreme stress. How are you even alive, let alone coping?’
This is Amanda Griggs, beauty and detox guru to the stars, who hasn’t even laid a finger on me yet. I have merely walked into her clinic, and she says she has come over all hot and her eyelids are twitching.
Departure from her usual style: Liz Jones has to wear a foil suit for the treatment
I seem to be having this effect on people more and more: they back away from my powerful aura of over-anxious super-busyness (I like to call it dynamism). I bring my horrible life into her serene white room: my email alert bleeps constantly, and my BlackBerry doesn’t stop ringing. ‘Sorry, I have to answer this,’ I say at last.
It is the NatWest bank on the King’s Road in London, just round the corner from Amanda’s spa. Apparently, I left my debit card in the bank.
Having undressed, I then have to dress and hare round to the bank to collect it. I run back again. Amanda is by now a nervous wreck.
She tells me what she thinks is wrong with me: ‘You are very thin, but you have a stress fat tummy.’ I know this. When I was younger, people gave up their seats on the Tube, thinking I was pregnant. Now, they just think I have one of those swollen stomachs you see on the starving.
I tell Amanda, who numbers designer Tom Ford as one of her clients (his office is above our heads), that I have been eating soya probiotic yogurts, brain-washed by the likes of Martine McCutcheon.
‘They are rubbish,’ she says, laying her calm hands on me. ‘I can see you hold all your stress and worries in your stomach, your breathing is too shallow and you are surviving on adrenaline only. What you need,’ she says, brandishing a long, clear and alarmingly fat pipe sealed in an aseptic bag, ‘is a colonic.’
The colonic, so big in the Nineties, endorsed by the likes of Princess Diana, is suddenly back in vogue thanks partly to the patronage of the new young crop of Hollywood stars, but — more importantly, according to Amanda — also because modern life has become even more stressful over the past years.
'I have lost five pounds and my tummy is flat for the first time since I was 12 years old'
But this is probably the strangest assignment I’ve ever undertaken, which is saying something, given that recently I gave a wizard a lock of my hair, believing he could heal my constant shoulder pain remotely, using energetic vibrations.
(He told me he works with the MoD, helping members of the Armed Forces returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. By Friday, he said, I would be pain-free. By Friday, my shoulders were worse.)
But I have come to Amanda’s clinic because my stress and rage at the world have reached boiling point. Take when I swirled back into the bank for my forgotten card.
‘You phoned to say I’d left my card,’ I barked at the hapless clerk. ‘But you didn’t leave your number.’
‘We don’t have a direct phone number,’ he said. ‘It was a courtesy call.’ I almost throttled him.
‘This can’t go on,’ I tell Amanda. ‘Help!’
First, I have a very gentle lymphatic drainage massage, designed to soften my tummy before the colonic, which I’m dreading. Amanda gives me a glass of disgusting green juice to drink before she inserts the tube.
‘Do you drink lots of water?’ she asks. I don’t.
I hate women who carry bottles of water everywhere. My mum has only ever drunk tea and she’s 91!
‘Yes,’ I lie. Amanda tells me I’m very dehydrated.
Calming: Liz gets ready for her de-stressing treatment with beauty guru Amanda Griggs
Then, she performs reflexology on my feet which, she says, tells her I have a weakness in my kidneys, adrenal gland and spleen. Because I hold all my stress in my gut, my digestion is not just sluggish, it is not absorbing nutrients properly.
She tells me I don’t have enough fat in my diet, or protein, or variety. (This is true. I survive on pasta, muesli and vegetables, but hardly any fruit). She then says I am very resilient and tough, otherwise I would be very, very ill indeed.
Next, having removed my knickers — something I don’t do lightly — I lie on my side, knees to my chest.
Amanda inserts the small nozzle of the tubing. This is strange, but not painful.
Amanda sits next to the tube, massaging my abdomen as warm water is gently pumped into my body. She sits watching the contents being whooshed back out down the tube.
NATURAL REMEDY
Primitive tribes used river water and hollow reeds to perform the first enemas
I can’t see the tube, so I watch her face intently. Occasionally, she raises an eyebrow. She agrees my abdomen is very distended. ‘You have been holding on to a lot of anger, hurt and grief in your tummy,’ she says.
I’m a vegan, so there’s none of the mucus from dairy, or bits of old rotting meat, in my intestine (meat can lodge in the colon for years, which can contribute to cancers and other illnesses), but a hint of diverticulosis: this occurs as you get older, and means pockets of gas and food get lodged as your colon loses its elasticity.
I tell Amanda I always feel things in my stomach. I think my anorexia, which I suffered from acutely in my teens and 20s and have never quite been able to shake off completely, is because I feel fear and stress in my gut, and so I starve it.
Amanda gives me a coffee enema, pouring weak organic coffee into the big cylinder above me. This feels very strange, slightly sharp. She adds electrolytes and herbs, designed to help my liver to release bile.
At the same time, she massages around my liver (on the right hand side, just under my ribs), and the ileo caecal valve, where the small intestine meets the large intestine (the enema doesn’t reach beyond this point).
‘Wow!’ she says, looking pleased, and I feel like a child on a potty. ‘But aren’t our bodies designed to look after themselves?’ I say. ‘Haven’t we existed for millions of years without expensive treatments in spas that flush out our bodies?’
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Amanda agrees, but says our bodies were not designed to cope with modern life and diets. We were hunter-gatherers who exercised a lot and only ate meat when we could catch it.
I remind her I haven’t eaten meat since I was 11. ‘Yes, but it’s the stress that is making your body unable to do its job. It’s permanently in fight-or-flight mode, which means it isn’t working properly, nor is it absorbing nutrients efficiently. Basically, you are holding on to a lot of what you should be getting rid of.’
One by one, Amanda tells me my bad habits are catching up with me. I often go the whole day without eating, then will consume a huge plate of pasta at 10pm. I’m to eat little and often, and take a digestive enzyme and a probiotic tablet every day.
I’m also to eat miso soup, oat cakes, nuts, seeds and goji berry mixtures and sprinkle hemp powder (good for fibre, protein and omega 3 fatty acids) on everything: muesli, soup, salads.
And I’m to eat flaxseed oil, an important source of vegan omega 3, important for the nervous system, the endocrine system (i.e. my hormones, which are clearly off-kilter due to all the rage), my skin, hair and nails.
If I’m too busy to sit down and eat, I should drink vegetable juices and eat more fruit.
I’m to chew slowly and eat as much raw food as possible.
I tell Amanda that a make-up artist, doing my face for a photoshoot the other week, gasped: ‘Oh God, I had no idea you were asthmatic. Should I stop so you can use your inhaler?’
I’m not an asthmatic, I just sound like one when faced with stressful, intimate situations.
She tells me I’m to breathe using my abdomen, not just the top of my lungs, but not to overdo it, or I will hyperventilate and become light-headed. I get up, slowly, feeling woozy.
The final part of the treatment is to be wrapped in wet bandages soaked in sea clay which will help with my circulation, and placed in the worst shell suit I’ve ever seen, before lying prone on a vibrating table (this is called a Vibrotone massage, which supposedly helps with cellulite and droopy buttocks).
Half an hour later, I am unravelled and, lo and behold, my stomach is flat for the first time since I was about 12, despite many years of Pilates.
The effect is probably only temporary unless I change my ways, and I can see now why so many Hollywood stars use this treatment before a red-carpet event. Amanda says, rather gruesomely, that I probably lost about 5lb during the session.
A few words of warning. Lots of ‘spas’ (dingy rooms at the back of the local hairdresser) profess to offer colonics and general detoxes, but beware. Make sure the therapist is a member of the Association and Register of Colon Hydrotherapists (ARCH).
And it’s easy to become addicted to colonics, behaving badly and then thinking we can be magically cleansed. It’s far better to encourage the body to work efficiently on its own.
I leave feeling quite light, but I’ve been firmly disabused of the notion that because I’m thin, I’m healthy. Stress, fear and anxiety are far more damaging than a few extra pounds on a woman who feels happy and relaxed.
I resolve to squeeze my own cucumbers and celery, and look forward to being able to look at myself sideways in the mirror for the very first time.
Although my buttocks, unfortunately, are still on the droopy side. Amanda is good, but she is not a miracle worker.