Bums and hoses – diary of a colonic fasting failure

by Martin Green

“I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one. And after it was over, I’d never want another.”
Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) in Apocalypse Now

It was so hot and humid it felt like the sky was sticking to me, but strangely I wasn’t sweating. And though I’d been lying on the bed for several hours I wasn’t sleeping either. I was far too anxious for that, because ahead of me lay several more days of virtual torture, and I wasn’t even half way through it yet.

Welcome to the holiday from hell.

In fact that’s a gross exaggeration. It was hellish, but this was never meant to be a holiday. This was colonic fasting, a programme designed to cleanse and purify the body - a kind of 12,000 mile service for the intestines if you like.

It’s all the rage, and for some reason it is a speciality of Thailand’s two southern holiday islands Ko Samui and Ko Phangan.

From what I’d read about it before signing up, the process seemed fairly straightforward – basically not eating coupled with a course of self-service colonic irrigation for seven days. Devotees say that once you’ve done it you get an energy burst of extraordinary power, as well as presumably having shed a few unwanted pounds. What could be better?

So I flew from London to Ko Samui via Bangkok, then took a boat to the less-developed of the two islands, Ko Phangan. Here I checked in at Thailand’s version of The Priory, The Sanctuary Wellness Centre.

I was feeling up to the task, having undergone the prescribed ‘pre-cleanse’ regime pretty religiously during the fortnight leading up to my trip (no booze, caffeine, bread, etc). After a day of acclimatisation I passed the requisite tests and was officially ready to begin.

The first sign of trouble was when the full extent of the programme was revealed to me. No, it’s not just about starving yourself. There is an almost hourly parade of potions and tablets that must be taken to help detoxify the body (at least that’s what they told me they did, anyway).

Maybe it’s my fairly sheltered upbringing and middle class lifestyle, but outside of a few teaspoons of nasty medicines as a child I’ve never really had to ingest truly nauseating substances on a regular basis. So the sight, smell and taste of the psyllium husk and bentonite clay “purification shakes” I was required to down four times a day struck fear into my heart, and a permanent gag in my throat.

The shakes are designed to soak up all the toxins in the body as they pass through. They probably didn’t know where to start with me. The advice was to drink them quickly, before the contents congealed into virtually solid form, but even with a mixing speed worthy of Tom Cruise in Cocktail I still found the shake resembled three-quarters set jelly by the time I got to the third mouthful.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, 30 large capsules containing unnamed ‘herbs’ also had to go down in five separate batches during the day, thus playing on a major phobia of mine: swallowing large tablets. The herbs apparently help break down the nasty stuff that was clogging up my colon like limescale in a water pipe. This would then be swept away by the colonic irrigation leaving me good as new inside.

But things went wrong the moment one of the capsules lodged itself in the back of my throat like a bullet. I felt the impression it had made in my gullet with every gag-inducing swallow over the next 30 minutes.

Compared with downing all this evil stuff, the colonic part of the programme was something of a cinch. As an adopted Londoner I must confess that I’m more used to taking coffee in sips at pavement cafes rather than in vast quantities up my backside, but this was the way it had to be.

Quite why coffee is mixed with the ten litres of water that must be ‘used’ in every colonic session I never quite got to the bottom of, so to speak, but the sight of one of the Sanctuary’s crew heading off to my bathroom with the newly-brewed coffee pot each morning and afternoon became my cue for action.

For those who don’t know exactly how colonic irrigation works, here’s a rough guide. A large plank of wood is set up as a ‘bench’ supported by your toilet bowl at one end and a trestle at the other. It has a hole cut at one end that opens directly above your toilet bowl. The hole is surrounded by a plastic splash guard, one of the most important parts of the equipment, for reasons that will shortly become clear.

Above it hangs a big bucket containing the coffee and water – all ten litres of it. A pipe runs from the bucket down through a small hole in the back of the splash guard and is attached to a plastic probe that’s pointing right at ya! The probe is fixed, it’s your job to position yourself on the bench so that you can slide up the plank on your back until the probe is up, up and away, and ready for action.

Then all you have to do is unclip the pipe and the liquid starts to flow freely, while you massage it into the furthest reaches of the colon for a damn good flush out. Only when the desire to ‘go’ is unstoppable do you stem the inward flow and unleash the water. And this is where the splash guard comes in very handy, as the unleashing can resemble a badly directed water cannon if too much pressure is applied. And you have to do your own cleaning up afterwards.

This process is repeated until all the water is gone. You have to ‘hold’ the final intake while you disconnect from the apparatus, clean it all up, peer knowingly into the sieve which is strategically placed in the toilet bowl to catch whatever has been flushed out, dispose of it, and put all the apparatus away. Finally, you can then adopt a more comfortable seated position for the last unleashing, before a much needed shower (freezing cold, of course).

Needless to say it’s best to ensure that the final intake is not to ‘brim full’ levels….

I soon realised I had a natural talent for colonics – that is in terms of the number of fill-ups each would take anyway. Not counting the final upright one, I was managing just two or three unleashings each time, apparently an all-comers record. I was hoping I might get my name inscribed on the water bucket, or maybe receive a trophy or something.

And some mighty odd-looking stuff started appearing after a day or so too. I won’t go into the details but I think the term ‘better out than in’ could certainly be used in this instance.

But this isolated success was all starting to look rather academic as the sheer scale of the task ahead started to unravel me mentally, and break my fragile morale. As each hour progressed the shakes started giving me the shakes, taking on the characteristics of actual poison, and the tablets seemed to grow in size to resemble AA batteries.

Even more annoyingly, none of this appeared to be affecting my fellow fasters, each of whom was wolfing everything down as if their lives depended on it.

It proved to me once and for all that that the mind really is more powerful than the body. If you can control your mind you can do anything – probably no great revelation to most people out there, but at that point it really hit home to me, as I hunkered down in my bungalow trying to fight off waves of nausea.

Sleepless nights were by now the norm, not to mention mood swings of outstanding scope, from occasional ecstasy to deep depression. I was waging war against myself…and losing.

Faced with such a seemingly insurmountable challenge, I did what any right-thinking, stiff upper lipped, “give us your best shot, Johnny Foreigner” Englishman abroad would do. I decided to cheat.

This basically involved limiting the volume of ‘shakes’ and pills to a level at which I could cope and finish the programme.

Avoiding my first self-made shake of the day (scheduled for 7am) was easy. Alarm goes, wipe sleep from eyes, fix up shake, and then whoosh! Over the back stairs of my bungalow it goes. I can’t believe it was the first time this had happened either – the vegetation below looked pretty sick….

Avoiding the lunchtime shake required a little more ingenuity. So I concocted a refreshing walk through the jungle to the next beach which, of course, would require a ‘take-away’ kit of the shake that I could strategically dump as well.

Of course the ‘walk’ was also a fake. Instead I spent the time camped in my hot and stuffy bungalow with the door shut, sulking. That fooled ‘em!

I have to say I didn’t feel too shame-faced about all this. After all I was still starving myself, putting a daily dose of 20 litres of coffee and water where the sun doesn’t shine, and chewing through the rest of the shakes and pills the course demanded. So as far as cheating goes it was hardly up there with Maradona’s Hand of God.

But sadly it was a lot less successful.

Even with a much reduced dose I just couldn’t hack it. I was visualising quaffing then vomiting shakes virtually every minute of the day, and that wasn’t good for my prospects, to be truthful. The more I was reducing the dose the more realisation was dawning that no more at all, ever was the only truly viable option.

So I reluctantly admitted defeat four days in. Gave up. Welshed out. There’s no good way of describing it. But in mitigation I think the following two paragraphs culled verbatim from my journal sum up my mental state at that point:

Fuck my colon. It’s cleaner now than it was and that’s good enough for me. I never wanted to grow old and decrepit anyway, so if it ends up taking me down then bring it on. And so what about the extra energy? I want to go back to feeling tired again; at least I’ll get some kip.

Dr Rich Anderson (the pioneer of colonic fasting) can take a running jump. I’ll go back to the beer, kebabs, pork pies, fish and chips and Matteson’s smoked pork frankfurters and be bloody happy about it.

Not necessarily the musings of a rational man, methinks….

But once I’d brought my woe to an end, things improved sharply. The much vaunted energy boost did happen even after a truncated fast. And I did start to sleep soundly as well, which must have helped. I also started to finally enjoy Ko Phangan, a very pretty island even it is rather overstocked with smug, dreadlocked trustafarians dodging the real world.

So, Dr Anderson, I hate you for what you put me through, but I have to concede that your programme works, not just for me but for the others who fasted at the same time as me and who were all pleased they did.

Now where did I put that lettuce…?

Ends