The Latest Trend in Wellness Tourism: Fasting Clinics
4 min
Guests at Lanserhof, a 35-year-old clinic less than five miles outside of the Austrian city of Innsbruck that attracts architects, entrepreneurs, financiers, and other well-heeled clientele, often leave hungry. The health retreat is known for its fasting program: a minimum of seven days consuming 650 calories per day, on average. The benefits include a gut bacteria reboot, cell and liver regeneration, and reduced inflammation. A 2019 study demonstrated patients with chronic conditions improved after fasting between four and 21 days.
Medically supervised fasting has long been popular at clinics in Germany and Austria, where spending a week focusing only on your health is not unusual. But the desire to combine a wellness holiday with science-based treatments is on the rise beyond European borders.
Wellness tourism is set to grow from US$436 billion to over US$1 trillion by 2025, according to a report by the Global Wellness Institute. A growing movement called biohacking is accelerating the trend, driven by consumers seeking healthier as well as longer lives.
Melanie Gatt has practiced cellular, also called mitochondrial medicine, at Lanserhof since 2018. She’s seen an increase in clients seeking to reduce inflammation and optimise performance.
“There’s greater demand for improving the immune system, cellular regeneration and longevity,” she says. “Cellular repair is one of the most important issues for this. In the last week, I received three emails from regular clients all interested in longevity treatments.”
Biohacking Goes Mainstream
Entrepreneur and author Tim Ferriss has evangelised intermittent and longer-term fasting, dubbing it a “hack” to manage joint pain and other conditions. Ferriss and others, like Dutch wellness guru Wim Hof, have helped make biohacking mainstream.
Hof built a successful business and cult following globally with his two-pronged approach to combating wear and tear on the mind and body: mood-boosting ice baths and stress-reducing breath work requiring slow breathing.
Hundreds of certified Hof disciples around the world lead weekend and week-long retreats, including Chicago-based James Stewart. He started teaching Hof’s methods 10 years ago, and said one of the secrets to Hof’s success is his universal appeal to both men and women.
“The ice bath is a challenge,” Stewart says. “It’s a bit more robust and active, which makes it more appealing from a masculine point of view. And Wim Hof has made breathwork more palatable to people who might have been on the fence about it 10 years ago.”
A decade ago, Stewart says, he was the only person to brave the cold weather surrounding Lake Michigan for year-round dips. “Now, there are anywhere between 50 to 70 people who dip in winter. There’s something that grabs you physiologically; you’re getting that spike in epinephrine, norepinephrine, and you feel alive.”
Low-tech and high-tech treatments are being embraced by practitioners and consumers. In Los Angeles, Upgrade Labs bills itself as the first biohacking gym in the U.S., with an emphasis on specialized technology to assess cells and repair damage, along with a cryo chamber delivering cold immersion therapy with three-minute sessions in a sub-zero, temperature-controlled room or tank.
A Physical and Mental Reset
At Lanserhof’s clinic, a window stretching the length of an entire wall faces snow-covered mountains in a state-of-the-art setting that feels more like a futuristic command center than a medical office. Doctors provide detailed analysis from a wide range of diagnostics.
A 24-hour heart rate variability monitor reveals how activities like working, resting and eating impact energy levels and sleep quality. Intermittent hypoxic training uses an oxygen mask to simulate mountain climbing to measure how cells adapt to reduced oxygen availability, the study of which won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2019.
Stimulated by oxygen regulation, cells reject and replace damaged ones with healthy, new cells. An endurance test, called spiroergometry, tracks a patient’s individual fat burning zones, versus sugars. The information illustrates what intensity levels are necessary, or not, for an efficient and effective workout. Results dictate treatments like vitamin infusions, and sports scientists devise training plans to achieve peak performance, as well as recovery.
Historically, patients at Lanserhof and other fasting clinics tended to be older; seeking to improve a heart condition or rheumatic pain, but in the last 10 years, the average age of clientele has dropped from 55 to 47 years old.
Now, Gatt says, guests frequently visit as a physical and mental reset. “Some guests want to optimise their endurance, and some have reduced energy after experiencing infections and they want to understand what’s going on with their immune system and restore their energy levels.”
While it is possible to gather excessive amounts of information, extracting and understanding data related to specific health concerns, like burnout, can underline the impact of lifestyle habits.
Witnessing the impact of stress on the body and how quickly or slowly it recovers, is a great motivator to stop ignoring advice to meditate. For many of Lanserhof’s younger clients, Gatt says, the key to living healthier for longer may lie in obsessing less, rather than more about biohacking.
“We don’t suggest extremes, like doing something every day or eating one meal a day, which is not enough, because you start to lose the benefit and it becomes a stressor for the system,” Gatt says. “It’s easy to go too far. Part of longevity and regeneration comes from balance and knowing how to take a vacation.”
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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