I have never particularly liked my body. I know it is vain and silly to care about such things (and my figure has never been that bad - it has just never been that good), but I do care. Not enough to go crazy and sacrifice the things I love (wine, toast, sitting on the sofa...), but enough to worry every time someone takes a picture of me. Enough to jump on a process that promised a body I could love without having to exercise every day and be hungry all the time.
Which was how I found myself on Pauline de Jessey's massage table biting a towel because I was in so much pain.
Pauline is a beautiful, slender Parisian, who can massage away fat with her scarily powerful fingertips. I shall repeat that in case you didn't quite get it. She can massage away fat. She uses a technique called Remodelage, which was created nearly 20 years ago by Martine de Richeville, an acupuncturist, psychologist and eurythmic masseuse, in order to rid the bodies that came to her of old, stubborn fat, so often acquired through emotional overeating. It is incredibly popular in Paris, where Martine has two very busy practices that offer only this treatment, and she herself is so in demand that it is almost impossible to get an appointment with her. Fortunately, her disciple, Pauline, has brought the technique to London, so we can all get thin by lying on a table and having someone squeeze our flab really hard.
Which brings me back to the pain.
'Fat is just toxins, water and swollen fat cells,' Pauline explained, as she grabbed handfuls of the stuff around my belly, pulling it, rolling it, kneading it, pinching it, a dab of almond oil the only lubricant. I whimpered, but she didn't relent. Pauline thinks of massed fat as a 'blockage'. The theory is that it's very hard for blood and fluids to circulate when there are great big lumps of fat in the way. By manually pulling and 'unsticking' them from the surrounding tissue, healthier circulation is promoted. The fat and toxins can then be more easily broken down and eliminated, improving the quality of the skin, getting rid of the dimply effect of cellulite and 'remodelling' the physique. 'For me it is very satisfying - it is like sculpting,' said Pauline.
This was just the first session. I ached for five days afterwards. But I also felt lighter, springier, like some ancient dams in my body had been breached and things were moving again. So, like a masochist (with flabby knees), I wanted more. Pauline recommends 10 visits for proper results. And, she promised, by the end the massage wouldn't really hurt. 'The pain is because of the toxins - once they are gone, you will be falling asleep.' Yeah, right.
Pauline also suggested I go on a special French diet. Remodelage is less efficient on overweight people, and most of those I saw going in and out of her pristine white room at Grace Belgravia were enviably slender. Probably because Pauline had made them so.
The diet is called Libre Forme 8, and was co-developed by French biochemist Fabienne Theodoloz, who studied how the body breaks down food. The point of the regime is to ensure optimum digestion, optimum health and optimum Parisian chicness.
To prepare, Pauline weighed and assessed me - even my index finger knuckle was measured, as apparently this would give the boffins at the Libre Forme 8 institute all the info they needed to establish what my weight should be. 138lb. Yikes. There are rules (there are always rules). Nothing fizzy, no water with meals or for one hour after meals, strict eating times for the first six weeks - breakfast at 7.30am, lunch at 12.30pm, a snack at 5pm, dinner at 9pm - and NO eating between meals, not even a mint tea, as that will get your digestion whirring into action. Just black coffee and black English breakfast tea.
The idea is that you do all your digesting while you sleep. This means a tiny, and I mean tiny, breakfast ('half a pear without the skin, chew well the pips!' instructed my menu plan), a small lunch of limited ingredients, like a slice of ham and some raw mushrooms, but eat as much as you like for dinner, as long as there are no carbs (including evils like peas, carrots, celeriac and pulses), except for a weekly carb extravaganza. Most excitingly, they encourage you to have a glass of red wine (but definitely not white) every night, and if you are still hungry after stuffing yourself with duck breast and spinach, some cheese. Cheese and wine, every night - this was a diet I could get with.
By day three I was no longer hungry at 12.30. After a week I had lost 6.5lb.
For the first fortnight I was massaged twice a week (still agony), and Pauline told me not to do any exercise. 'It is so strange in the UK,' she mused as she tortured my ankles. 'People go to the gym, exercise like mad, and then eat so much avocado. That is not how to lose weight.' Instead she suggests a gentle regime of yoga (they do some lovely classes at Grace Belgravia, which is handy), swimming and the occasional run. She also lies with her legs in the air for ten minutes every evening and wears compression tights in winter to improve her circulation; she generally follows the small breakfast and big dinner regime, and when she drinks champagne ('I love champagne!"), she adds an ice-cube to reduce those malevolent bubbles. This is called a 'Piscine', which makes it sounds very smart.
After four weeks I had lost more than 15lb.
I was also scheduled to have a massage with the fabled fat-massage guru Martine, who was over from Paris. She is 67 years old, still massages for 12 hours a day and doesn't really speak English. So there I lay, like an anatomical experiment, while Martine palpated parts of my body, at one point grabbing the flesh on the back of my thigh and pulling it like she might actually remove it, all the while murmuring in French to Pauline, who translated. Martine believes that our mental and physical wellbeing are intrinsically connected, that we store fat in certain ways because of emotion and experience and that memory is stored in our connective tissue. By 'releasing' the fat on my thighs she was releasing long-held anger and sadness. The swelling and fat deposits on my lower back were to do with me protecting myself from other people, putting up barriers and detaching myself. From the evidence of my body, she concluded that I had a tendency to disassociate from other people and even from myself. Which might sound completely insane, had my psychologist not been talking to me about my tendency to disassociate just the day before... By the end of the treatment I felt light-headed and subtly transformed.
- the calves and knees still hurt, but my tummy? Hardly at all. I was getting LOTS of compliments, had dropped two dress sizes and could see a visible reduction in my dimply thighs. But there was something even more miraculous. I could see my Achilles tendon. I had been this weight before but I had never seen a tendon. For the first time in living memory, a graceful ankle!
After six weeks I had lost almost 20lb. I had also, we discovered after a session with a tape measure, lost two inches around each knee, one and half inches around each calf, and a magnificent four and a half inches around my hips and lower back, my protective 'buffalo hump' as it is so charmingly described on the Remodelage website.
I no longer have a buffalo hump. I intend to never have a buffalo hump again. It is now two months since the intensive part of the treatment and I have maintained the results, with just one towel-biter massage a month, the occasional yoga class, small(ish) breakfasts and lunch, but jolly red-wine fuelled feasts in the evening. I am not hungry, I am not deprived and the whole process has really not been hard. I am only slightly annoyed that the French have been keeping this secret of how to be slender AND have fun from us for so long.