Famine or Feast?

Is it more rewarding to subsist on broth and cold mountain treks at a German clinic for 10 days or to settle into five-course Michelin-starred meals? One writer heads to the Black Forest to weigh the merits of the purge and the binge.

The Germans have always been goofy about health cures — affusions, colonics, fasts — and they want a setting that matches the rigor of the treatment. There are thermal spas in the Swiss Alps, and the Mayr clinics in Austria, where they perform deep gut cleanses. Journalists have remarked on the intensity of Mayr — the dry spelt bread, the ritual of chewing each bite 30 to 40 times — while conceding that they look and feel amazing afterward.

I wanted those results, too, but I wanted something more from my purge holiday than a flat belly and brighter skin: I wanted a German experience, whatever that meant. I love certain German writers and artists, have listened to Karl Lagerfeld yak about Little Karl in Hamburg and, like millions of American kids in the ’60s, I savored the dummkopf jokes on “Hogan’s Heroes,” the TV series about a German P.O.W. camp. My ideas about the country were pretty high-low.

In that spirit, I proposed a trip of extremes. For the first part, I would spend 10 days fasting at Buchinger Wilhelmi, a retreat in southern Germany on the shores of Lake Constance — “Swabia’s sea” in the opening pages of “The Magic Mountain,” Thomas Mann’s novel about a healthy young man who goes to a Swiss sanatorium for a visit and stays seven years. I wanted a place out of a novel, a hospital of sorts, not fancy but lavish in its authority. My German friends assured me that Buchinger was strict. Founded in 1953 in the town of Überlingen, it lies near orchards and vineyards, although I would enjoy only a daily glass of juice and a cup of vegetable broth. That’s 250 calories a day. No booze or caffeine. I would occupy a small, cell-like room — to be sure, one with a view of the lake — and I would submit to a routine that included hot liver compresses and enemas. After 10 days, I would not only emerge thinner (this seemed a certainty), but energized from all that discipline. “If all goes well,” Raimund Wilhelmi, Buchinger’s co-director, said, “you feel you could change the world.”

The second leg of my trip was to take place in Baiersbronn, a small town in the Black Forest. What was in Baiersbronn? Eight Michelin stars. Somehow, in the past decade, it has become a culinary capital, led by two family-run hotels, Bareiss and Traube Tonbach, each with a three-star chef. (The Hotel Sackmann, also in town, has a two-star restaurant.) I intended to spend my post-fast weekend eating some of the best cooking in Germany.

The outcome of this journey of opposites was nothing that I could have foreseen. In mid-July, I landed in Zurich and drove across the plains of Baden-Württemberg, a kingdom of farms, to the clinic and the lake’s alpine-blue sliver. I was new to fasting and had only an omnivore’s sense of pleasure. But Baiersbronn was just 95 miles from Buchinger. How could I not go and try? I was in Germany, land of kirschen and duck fat.

The sun was still blazing when I pulled up to Buchinger, its facade a cross between Bauhaus and a ’60s motor lodge. I had pictured a more secluded setting, but, thanks to German prosperity, suburban villas had encircled the clinic. Still, the interior felt private. As a young concierge led me to a terrace, I was pleased to see a wide, sloping lawn broken up by flower beds and a swimming pool where people lay about reading and sunbathing. The place had an objective air of health, emphasized by the low, drab buildings that housed patients’ quarters and therapy rooms.

My room was also a luxury-dampener. It contained a wide single, built-ins and a gleaming bathroom. There was Wi-Fi and TV. It seemed like a good place to be while one is deliberately refusing food and the brain is turbulent with thoughts and emotion. In that state, you don’t want to be looking at prints of King Ludwig. If the décor were any less humble, you wouldn’t trust the program. It wouldn’t feel German.

“Fasting is pure, it’s simple,” Wilhelmi said when we met. “The things around you should correspond to your inner state of mind.” His grandfather, Otto Buchinger, successfully used fasting to cure his own rheumatic fever after World War I, and his daughter, Maria, opened the clinic based on his holistic methods. Wilhelmi and his wife, Francoise, a physician, took over in the mid-’80s. Of the few thousand people who stay at Buchinger each year, he said, two-thirds are fasting — often for two or three weeks. The rest are eating low-calorie vegetarian meals prepared by the chef, Hubert Hohler, who is something of a star in Germany. But the main mission is therapeutic fasting to relieve ailments like stress, obesity and arthritis.

Before the concierge left, he handed me a blue booklet with the corner of page 121 folded down. “Here, read this,” he said. “It contains important information about your fast.” He explained that I would begin with a “digestive rest day,” to ease my system into it. I would also be evaluated by a doctor, who would help me choose therapies from the clinic’s deep roster. “For the digestive rest day you will choose from rice, fruit or porridge,” he said. “Just one.”

“For every meal?” I asked.

“Every meal.”

After he had gone, I glanced at the book and tossed it on the bed. The day was too nice to waste indoors. I walked down to the town, full of people — kids, beer drinkers at cafe tables, old people in Tevas and shorts on bikes. I drank in the delights of a German summer and bought a cheese sandwich. My last. Then I dragged myself up the hill to my new home. That night, I dreamed I was getting married.

The next day at breakfast I met three patients: Sarah Marks, who handles client services for an asset-management firm; and Teresa Carulla and her daughter Julieta, all from London. At any one time about half of the patients are German, French or Swiss, with a smattering of Dutch, Brits, Americans and people from the Middle East. I heard that a member of the Obama administration was at the clinic during my stay. One man had been in residence for a year to confront his obesity. But of all the people I met, I found the attitude of the Carullas the most inspiring. Teresa, on her fifth visit, described her ordeal with kidney cancer and how fasting had helped her recovery. (Recent studies indicate such a link.) Julieta, a mother of four — slim, pretty, maybe a little skeptical — was on her first fast.

Sarah, picking at her brown rice, commented that it seemed weird to be spending thousands of dollars to deny oneself food. Julieta smiled. “I know, I had that problem, too,” she said, “even though I saw the benefits to my mother.” She then urged us to go on the morning hikes and take the cooking classes. As I was thinking I would never do that, she said, “You don’t want to miss them.”

Walking back to our rooms, I asked Sarah why she had come to Buchinger. “Fasting has been in the press a lot — that was an attraction,” she said. “And I had never been in this part of the world.” I told her about Baiersbronn, and she looked startled and then laughed. “I just want to be able to wear my jeans again without a red mark left by the button.”

Everything at Buchinger ran like clockwork — the morning checkups, the midday rest periods. One day, Sarah booked herself a Golden Gate Anti-Age facial in the clinic’s beauty salon. The two-hour treatment boasted a gold finishing mask. She got there early but seeing the facialist’s door closed, took a seat upstairs to wait until she was called.

She heard a scolding voice and looked down the stairs. It was the facialist, hands on her white-clad hips: “Mrs. Marks, what are you doing sitting on a chair?”

“I’m waiting,” said Sarah.

“You should be down here! We’ve lost 20 minutes and now you can’t have the golden glow facial.”

Generally, though, this dependability added to Buchinger’s womblike atmosphere (“cold womblike,” in Sarah’s view), where life’s most basic choices are made for you.

On schedule, I went to see my doctor, Dorothe Hebisch, a trim woman of late middle age. Right off, I told her I didn’t have any problems — a problem itself, for then Dr. Hebisch couldn’t propose therapies other than classic massage and foot reflexology. She also suggested I take an art class. Hoping for something more exciting, I said, “What about Kneipp?” A German specialty, it involves being hosed with hot and cold water. Dr. Hebisch agreed and concluded by explaining that I would begin the fast in the morning after drinking a solution of Glauber’s salts.

The next day in my room I drank the stuff, and the expected happened. It wasn’t so bad. Around 1 p.m., a nurse entered and said, cheerily, “I have your hot liver compress.” I lay down and, after placing a hot water bottle on my belly, she girdled me in a cloth. It was a very babyish sensation. But by then, my head was throbbing, so I didn’t care. Sarah reported later that she spent the day “curled up like a dog.” Around 6 p.m., when I went up to the main salon for soup, my legs felt very spongy.

The next morning, feeling better, I joined Sarah and 30 others for the daily wanderung. Julieta was right; the walks were the best thing about Buchinger. Every morning at 6, we’d board a bus at the clinic and in no time were hiking into forests and across meadows, nearly five miles. I missed only one — the morning I got to the lobby at 6:01.

Eventually it was time for my Kneipp water treatment, in the therapy wing. A Mrs. Hoffmann, her blond hair in a bun, led me into a white-tiled room and told me to strip. “You will stand there,” she said, indicating a stall in the corner.

“Is it going to hurt?” I said meekly.

Mrs. Hoffmann laughed incredulously.

“Ja!”

I giggled and danced to the stall. I was glad Mrs. Hoffmann slipped so easily into cahoots, given the setup.

Holding the nozzle of a hose, she told me to stand with my hands pressed against the tile. Then she released a stinging jet of hot water on my skin. It was intense but not unpleasant. I did a full rotation before she lowered the nozzle and said, suddenly, “Now you can cry.”

“What?” I asked.

“Now you can cry!” she said, grinning. And before I grasped her meaning, an icy blast hit me. I crumpled in a poor imitation of the Venus de Milo as we both screamed with laughter.

I got more restless as time went on. I swam every day, and I was learning new things — maybe above all that I didn’t need much food. I lost 10 pounds. But the euphoric energy that the Wilhelmis spoke of never materialized. Some days I could barely move I was so tired. I was surprised at the similarities between Buchinger and the hermetic world conjured by Mann — the pedagogy, the fact that no one was immune from being called a patient, all the talk of moods and weight loss. (Yes, like a nature lover bringing Thoreau to the woods, I brought “The Magic Mountain” to the clinic.) Not understanding at all what time means in such a place, I began to wish the days away, so I could get to Baiersbronn and back to normal life.

“So you want the two extremes?” Wilhelmi said with a chuckle when I told him my plan. Francoise, however, was full of cautions when we met on my last day. By then, I was back on regular food. “Your sense of taste is so refined after a fast that a cherry is like a firework, so the tendency is to eat more,” she said. “Just be very, very attentive at Baiersbronn not to eat dessert. Or have just one bite. And, please, don’t take bread and butter!”

As I was due for lunch in Baiersbronn, I said my goodbyes early to Sarah. She, too, was ambivalent about her fasting experience. I mentioned Francoise’s warning about the bread. “Am I really going to say no to a cute waiter offering seven kinds of bread?” I said. Sarah shook her head and added: “especially if some of the bread is warm.”

So, a little before 1 p.m., after crossing one forested valley after another, I sat down at Schwarzwaldstube, the domain of the chef Harald Wohlfahrt and one of the most celebrated restaurants in Europe. The occupants of a dozen tables in the small, elegant room were already into their first courses.

I was in heaven. At the suggestion of the maître d’, I ordered the five-course set menu. And as he started translating from the German, my head began to swim. “To start,” he said, “yellowfin tuna and mackerel, the tuna baited in star anise and served with oysters, tips of passe-pierre … then Breton lobster cooked in a crustacean butter and served on green asparagus, with small squids. …” I thought of Sarah back at Buchinger, and our cups of broth. “The main course, quail, charcoal-grilled and served with a mash of tomatoes and artichokes … a slightly smoked marrow … the cheese course and then dessert of cherries from the region, marinated in port wine sherry and filled with a hazelnut stone … served with elderflower ice cream and a granite of sour cherries.”

It was just as Francoise had predicted — every bite was an explosion in my mouth. Pushing some of the quail and mash onto my fork, I thought, This is pure pleasure. Leo Tolstoy may have said that the refusal of food “is more than pleasure, it is the joy of the soul,” but poor Leo never got to taste Harald Wohlfahrt’s cooking. I ate everything — the portions were small — and drank a split of wine, a delicious white from Karl H. Johner in the Baden region.

When I got up from the table, it was 3:30 p.m. I felt great, not the least bit full. Then I went for a long walk in the valley. The next morning, at breakfast, I stuck to oatmeal, ignoring the big German buffet at the Traube Tonbach. Later, I headed to the Bareiss for lunch by its three-star chef, Claus-Peter Lumpp. That meal was also sublime, playful in its flavors and colors. And at each hotel, I adored the scene: the returning families, the afternoon cakes on the terrace.

But it is also true that I couldn’t wait to join that other great German tribe — the hikers in the Black Forest. I was up at dawn to walk, and out again in the afternoon. I went five miles. So Francoise needn’t have worried; in the end, Buchinger’s philosophy prevailed. And what was that philosophy? Cleansing the body of bad toxins? Gaining self-control? Finding inner peace?

Ja-ja-ja. It was all that and something besides — time. If you’re not filling up huge portions of your day with eating — or your brain by thinking about food — then you have more time for other stuff.

You may even discover hidden talents. Shortly after I returned from my trip, I received an email from Miriam Bredella. Miriam is a remarkable woman — chic, German-born, an associate professor of radiology at the Harvard Medical School. I met her at Buchinger. She was on her first fast, with her mom. Miriam is actually doing research with fasting volunteers in Boston to study the effect of fasting on different kinds of body fat. But that’s not why I mention her. Miriam took the art class, among other activities. “I hadn’t drawn or painted since I was in middle school,” she said. “I just started drawing with charcoal and painting with my fingers. It was like meditation. It was one of my highlights.” And, almost as a token, she attached the paintings for me to see. They were of boats and the sun on Lake Constance.