At a luxury health spa in the Austrian Alps, a large-living writer interrogates the growing popularity of the medicalised holiday — with surprising results
IT WOULD BE FAIR TO SAY I TAKE IT BADLY. Do I want to go to a remote Austrian medical health resort for 10 days to experience first-hand the booming industrial wellness-travel complex and write about it for Esquire? 10 days? This is the kind of thing you’d threaten me with if you wanted me to reveal where I’d hidden the diamonds. Or to get me to tell you the secret codes. The suggestion that I’d do it the day after getting back from Glastonbury feels totally inhumane. I say I’ll do five, final offer. It still feels like a prison sentence.
Then again, it might be a useful way to detox from the festival. Or a different way, at any rate. Over the years, I have honed my own very precise Glastonbury detox: I lie in bed eating pizza and pasta for three days while drinking red wine and alternating between rewatching old movies and crying in the foetal position. While this system worked fine for me in my twenties and thirties, it might be fair to say it seems to have reached its limit of effectiveness as I’ve got older. There’s also the question of the extra two stone in weight I’ve been lugging around forever (see Glastonbury recovery diet above) and that no amount of dieting ever seems to shift. Might this be an opportunity to finally put a dent in that?
In short: Austrian health clinic here we come.
IT IS, OF COURSE, A TALE AS OLD AS TIME: since the 19th century the rich have gone to the mountains, the coast and the deep countryside to undertake “cures”: for their nerves, their health, their weight and because, well, it’s just the thing to do. Nowadays we’re more likely to say “wellness” than “cure”, and while “wellness” is a word that makes me want to go on a three-day drinking binge, the wellness tourism industry in Europe is anticipated to grow by 20.9 per cent each year until 2025. For whatever reason — health awareness, medical advancement, rampant narcissism — our bodies are once again big business.
Today, the destination of choice for the true player is Mayrlife, formerly known as VivaMayr Altaussee (it used to be partnered with another resort in Lake Wörthersee owned by members of the same family, which still goes by that name). Tucked away in the mountains east of Salzburg, this is where the Australian actor Rebel Wilson came and began the process of changing her entire body shape. It is where Hollywood moguls, oligarchs and the simply very wealthy come to reset the body clock or to get the weight off before a big event.
The original “Mayr cure” was the brainchild of Austrian physician Dr FX Mayr, who, almost a century ago, believed we were destroying ourselves by eating badly and wrecking our guts. In 2005, Dr Christ
