The Seawater Cure: How the French Slim Down
A food-and-wine writer from the U.S. describes his annual pilgrimage to the Normandy Coast for thalassotherapy—a round of treatments that’s proven to be an antidote for his occupational overindulgence.
4 min
AS A food-and-travel writer who lives in France, I face occupational hazards other people might envy: Think white Burgundies, foie gras, butter, cream and the world’s best cheeses. It’s a constant battle to avoid ending up with the silhouette of a pear.
That’s why in the years since I moved to Paris in 1986, I’ve become a fan of thalassotherapy, taking dozens of “cures” at some of the 50-odd thalassotherapy centres along the Atlantic and Mediterranean littorals of France. The word derives from the Greek words “thalassa” (sea) and “therapeia” (to nurse or cure) and refers to a series of treatments—heated seawater baths, stimulating jet showers and seaweed wraps—and exercise such as aqua gym (in-water calisthenics).
While these cures alleviate the fatigue and sluggishness I feel after months of late-night dinners and deadline pressure, I’ve found that a weeklong thalassotherapy circuit that includes low-calorie meals also contributes to a healthier, slimmer, better-toned me. Apparently, Plato believed “the sea cures all human ailments,” but my goal is simply to retreat, relax and, at the end, be able to tighten my belt to its customary notch.
A thalassotherapy experience can be completed in as little time as a weekend, but a typical stay lasts 5-7 days. A 6-day signature cure with room and board and four treatments a day costs about $1,580 at Thalazur in Cabourg, a well-mannered Belle Époque seaside resort in Normandy. It was there I booked my most recent extended cure in February, 2020.
I’d heard of Cabourg as a favourite escape of Marcel Proust, who stayed at the Grand Hôtel and, by his account, would gaze at the flinty waves of the English Channel while enjoying his favourite sole Normande (sole poached in cider with a rich cream sauce garnished with button mushrooms, shrimp and mussels).
The centre is a brisk 10-minute walk from the heart of Cabourg with its fan-shaped street plan spreading out from the casino and the Grand Hôtel. Even if my low-calorie regimen barred me from indulging in sole Normande, I never felt gastronomically deprived as I enjoyed a healthy menu with tasty choices such as freshly shucked Norman oysters and steamed salmon with spinach.
My pleasantly monastic existence found me donning a terry cloth bathrobe and slippers every morning and reporting for my daily program of five treatments. Administered by cheerful spa attendants in individual white-tiled spa cabins, these averaged 25 minutes each. While the seaweed jet baths were blissfully relaxing, the high-velocity jet showers, an attempt to pummel the cellulite out of you and improve circulation, were more of a “grin and bear it” prospect.
I can’t pretend I loved the wraps either: Slathered in puréed seaweed, swathed in huge sheets of plastic film and then covered with a heated blanket, I felt like I was being mummified. This detoxification process promises to rid you of “water weight,” and your parched skin receives a good dose of seaweed’s moisturising oligo elements, but I inevitably developed an itch somewhere I couldn’t scratch. Still, when the slick plastic was stripped away and I could shower, I felt hugely invigorated.
More alarming, I also endured cryotherapy. The attendants locked me in a capsule of dry air cooled to -230 degrees Fahrenheit for three minutes, an experience meant to improve circulation and increase production of cortisol, collagen, endorphins and adrenaline. The adrenaline rush, at least, was real; it was a profound relief to exit my capsule after being subjected to a blast of Arctic chill while wearing nothing more than black paper spa panties.
These morning regimens induced a languorous exhaustion, so I inevitably followed up the light lunch with a nap in the afternoon. Then, refreshed, I took long walks on the beach or bicycled along the promenade in front of the hotel.
Memories of my stay—and the 7 pounds I dropped there—prompted me to test the waters again last winter. I booked a 1-night, 2-day weekend sampler at the Thalazur in Port Camargue on the Mediterranean, an hour from my house.
This centre was smaller but also had lovely sea-views, plus my stylish sea-shack style room came with a large private balcony. The three treatments a day were excellent, too; the cost, about $178, was worth it for the belt-tightening.
When, on the Monday after my return home, I went to the single-window post office in my village, the post mistress raised her eyebrows theatrically. “Bonjour!” she said with a grin. “What happened!? You look great!” I went for a weekend of thalassotherapy, I told her. “Ah, voilà! La Thalasso fait toujours du bien,” she purred.
She was right, of course. I look forward to a week-long saltwater wallow this winter, maybe in Bandol with its views of the Mediterranean, or at the elegant new Relais Thalasso in the seaside town of Pornichet on the sunny Atlantic coast in the Loire region. Unlike at other centers, where you traipse about between treatments, the Relais Thalasso crew stash you in a spacious private suite with a comfy lounge area, the better to nap before another go-round.
Water, Water, Everywhere
France pioneered thalassotherapy but you can find excellent centers in other countries, too
La Perla, Spain
For the uninitiated, La Perla, a stylish centre in San Sebastián in the Spanish Basque Country, is a great place to sample thalassotherapy before committing to a full-on cure. Originally established by Spain’s Queen Maria Cristina, when she was queen from 1829-1833, at the royal family’s summer house here, the spa was rebuilt in 1912 on a site overlooking La Concha, a crescent-shaped beach. A 5-hour day pass gives you access to a hydrotherapy pool, water beds, marine steam baths and an in-water exercise circuit. Another option includes a massage and lunch in the spa’s restaurant overlooking the sea. From $49 for a 5-hour day pass.
Vilalara Longevity Thalassa and Medical Spa, Portugal
Vilalara Longevity Thalassa and Medical Spa in Lagoa, a city in Algarve, Portugal’s southernmost region, is set in lush gardens overlooking the Atlantic. It has two seawater pools, 20 treatment cabins and a variety of cures, including a 5-night detoxification program with 2 thalassotherapy sessions per night, lymphatic drainage massages, access to thalasso pools and a consultation with a nutritionist to personalise a tasty low-calorie meal plan or a liquid diet of anti-inflammatory shakes, juices and soups. From about $3,899.
Divani Apollon Palace and Thalasso, Greece
Situated on the Athenian Riviera, this world-class spa in the Divani Apollon Palace and Thalasso outside of Athens boasts the largest thalassotherapy pool in Greece with 16 different water jet areas in its expanse. The X factor at this family-run beach-front property with 25 treatment rooms is its healthy low-calorie menu created by the hotel’s chef and in-house dietician. Appetising proof that shedding pounds needn’t mean privation: the zucchini-crust Greek pizza with anthotryo (fresh cheese), cherry tomatoes, oregano and EVOO. From about $1,747 for a 3-day stay.
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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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