Zieser spoke – and you could tell that he carried his slides within him, even if no slides were visible – of study names that he mentioned with such self-evidence as if he were speaking of old acquaintances: PREDIMED, Lyon Diet Heart Study. He said “hazard ratio”, and you could hear the shudder of those who did not know what it meant but sensed that it was supposed to sound important. He said these were not “marketing claims”, and one believed him precisely because in such establishments one is used to everything being marketing.
Then, as if to pull the South into supermarket reality, he suddenly became very prosaic.
He spoke of frozen spinach, of peas, of passata instead of fresh tomatoes. He said rapeseed oil was, in everyday Western life, a good unsaturated fat source – and that was a sentence, esteemed reader, dear reader, that was so drearily sober that it almost became comical: the South as rapeseed oil. Yet the guests nodded gravely, because they seek seriousness in sobriety.
He spoke of oatmeal, of whole-grain pasta, of yogurt, eggs, cheese, even of beef; he said that classic Mediterranean often meant more fish and less red meat, but as a template basic form the pattern was clear. He said “template”, and you could feel how the language of the program devoured the language of food.
Hans Castorp thought that food had once been a mystery: you ate, and you did not know exactly where it went. Now, however, it went into tables, into patterns, into “calorie_day_goal”. And he wondered whether mystery is not a part of freedom.
Zieser did not allow the thought. After this basic patterning, he came to that point where optimization always tips into the dramatic: control.
“Reduced carbohydrates,” he said, “are a very effective tool for fat loss.”
He said “tool”, not “prohibition”. That was clever. For tools are morally neutral; they exist only to be used. And whoever uses a tool is not ascetic but competent.
He spoke of deficit, of maintenance, of surplus; he spoke of how the body, if you give it too little for too long, loses not only fat but also mood. And then he said the word that in such circles sounds like a secret rhythm:
“Deload.”
Deload is known in training as relief; Zieser transferred it to nutrition. Three days, he said, in a moderate deficit – “not hunger”, he emphasized, “but setting” – and then one day of “refeed”, a day with surplus, to “reset” performance, hormones, psyche. He said “reset”, and it sounded as if you could restart a human being like a device.
The guests smiled. A refeed day is, in asceticism, the permitted intoxication.
Hans Castorp heard “three days deficit, one day surplus” and involuntarily thought of carnival and fasting. Of carnival and morality. Of Walpurgis Night and morning morality. It was as if the old game of order and inversion had been poured into a four-day loop. You break the rule in order to confirm it.
“Intermittent fasting,” Zieser continued, “can help to simplify the pattern.”
He spoke of autophagy, that biological self-consumption metaphor that is so uncanny that one can only endure it in the language of science. The body, he said, has mechanisms of cleansing; you just have to give it time. Time – time again. Everything in these programs was, in the end, time management.
Hans Castorp thought of the ring and of the sleep analysis. He thought of how he had been stressed because he was stressed. And he realized that autophagy, as much as it is sold as cleansing, also contains a threat: the body, if you let it, eats itself. That is, if one is strict, the biological basic form of death. It is only called something else so that it sounds like life.
Zieser, who was not responsible for abysses but for repetitions, shifted from food to movement. He did it as if the two naturally belonged together; and in these establishments they do, because everything is organized into “practices”.
