Clients stay in seven-star luxury with a team of nutritionists, sleep experts, mindfulness therapists and 24/7 diet buddies – but does it actually work? Julia Llewellyn Smith checks in.
I am walking with a group very slowly up the snowy slope of a vineyard in southern Austria. The only sound is the crunch, crunch, crunch of our boots through the drifts.
Our guide, mindfulness trainer Marcus Hillinger, gestures silently to us to stop. He bends over and starts taking off his boots and socks, then signals to us to follow him. With huge reluctance, I comply. I start trudging again, back up the steep incline, the 25 metres or so to the lodge where we are staying. Now we have moved into the shade and the cold snow is burning the soles of my feet. It is unpleasant and you just have to grit your teeth and keep going at this annoyingly slow pace. By the time we are back indoors I have lost any feeling in my feet.
One member of the group starts to cry. “This makes our clients feel so proud,” says Signe Lassl. “They think, ‘I accomplished this. It was painful but I did it.’ Going out in the mountains is nothing special to most of us, but think how this feels if you weigh 23 stone [146 kilograms], if you have almost never walked any distance for years. This may be the first time someone has made it uphill without thinking, ‘I’m going to die.’ It shows them they can change their lives.”
Lassl, 53, is my 24/7 personal “buddy” on The Vienna Recovery (TVR), the world’s most expensive weight-loss programme, which costs £75,000 (NZ$151,472) a week and which, ideally, needs to be followed for 12 to 16 weeks. A “new beginnings” week-long programme is also available for £40,000. The cost is eye-watering, but to TVR’s prospective clients it’s irrelevant. “Money is not a problem. These people have money,” Lassl says, with some understatement.
Still, for that money you would expect a touch more than a chilly trek up a hill. Apart from Lassl – who, having lost 7st 12lb, knows exactly what clients are going through and will talk them down should they want to escape for a sneaky McDonald’s — there are 20 experts at each client’s beck and call, who use every technique in the book, from psychology and hypnosis to epigenetics, to create a programme tailored to achieve life-changing weight loss. “If we see something works fine, we will go more for that,” says Lassl. “If it doesn’t, there are many more things we can try.”
Hearing I will be the first journalist in the world to gain a taster of this programme, my friends react with understandable hilarity. “What do you get for that price?” asks one. “Champagne enemas?”
Everyone imagines I will be in a super-luxe spa wafting about in a bathrobe and doing Pilates on a solid-gold reformer. Most confuse TVR with Austria’s Mayr Clinics, where you are encouraged to chew each mouthful 40 times. I am full of trepidation about the methods TVR heralds to justify its ginormous price tag, including psychiatric assessments and hypoxic training, where I inhale reduced oxygen to make my body think it is training at high altitude and thereby improve its aerobic functioning. It all sounds terrifying.
Money is not a problem. These people have money.
As soon as I head for the car park at Vienna airport, it is clear I am not only too poor to be TVR’s target customer, but also (mercifully) not nearly large enough. These clients are not here because, like me, they fancy losing their extra lockdown baggage, but because they are eating themselves to death. TVR’s average client is obese, with a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or higher. Someone with a BMI higher than 25 is considered overweight, while over 30 is obese.
“We will not be people’s first port of call,” says Christine Merzeder, the psychiatric nurse in charge of clinical coordination. “People will have already spent thousands on other doctors shopping around the world for a cure that hasn’t worked.” She adds that the ideal time to book in would be when a person is tipping from fat into morbid obesity. “It’s when they’re saying, ‘I feel out of control,’ and need to push the emergency brake.”
“Coming here is the last chance before a gastric bypass,” says TVR’s managing director, Rainer Gopp. “We take them to a surgeon who explains how, if they don’t comply, that is what will happen to them, and then they are going to be leading a very different life, not a normal life.
“We’ve provided this car for you because you are small enough to fit in it,” Gopp says as I climb into a Mercedes saloon (the chauffeur will be at my disposal until the end of the visit). “But usually it would have to be a people carrier.”
On the way into the city centre, passing endless restaurants offering schnitzel that will never pass my lips, I learn more about the programme. It is brand new, its launch postponed by Covid. There is no hard data yet, but I am told that their first clients lost significant amounts of weight faster than expected. The goal is to lose 7st 12lb year on year — larger amounts would be unsustainable.
If TVR has a quality stamp, it is that it was two years in development with Paracelsus, uncoincidentally the world’s most expensive rehab programme, which is based in Zurich and London and charges the same amount over similar timescales to help clients overcome addictions, mainly to drugs and alcohol, although eating disorders and weight loss are also part of the package.
Neither Paracelsus, which has been running for 11 years and to date treated more than 150 clients, nor TVR works along traditional rehab/fat-farm lines. With privacy at a premium, Paracelsus hosts just three clients (in separate accommodation) simultaneously. Meanwhile, for now, TVR sees just one, meaning it treats a maximum of four people a year in “seven-star” surroundings, with a round-the-clock team that includes an acupuncturist, a sleep therapist, a dermatologist and an orthopaedic physician, not to mention a chef, butlers and concierges.
Merzeder, who founded Paracelsus, says this is what one percenters expect. “When they go on vacation, they don’t go to a five-star hotel. They go to a seven-star place. We can’t make them downgrade from what they’re used to. We don’t think about this as working with rich people. We’re working with human beings. We can’t employ staff who are green with envy around these people. When they go in to work with them, they can’t be noticing the seven Rolexes lying around and thinking, ‘Oh, I only have half a Rolex.’ They need to see and treat the humanity.”
At the same time, Merzeder admits that the super-rich can have slightly different issues from what Liz Hurley notoriously called “civilians”. “Those high-flyers have much higher expectations,” she says. “They put themselves under so much pressure — and you really see that with women who overeat. They have the pressure of looking great because they’re a princess or a top executive or whatever. So, first of all, we need to guide people to discover their own humanity and have them do some work to take the burden they put on themselves off their shoulders. That’s a huge process.”
Paracelsus makes much of its roster of (unnamed) celebrities and CEOs, but many of its clients are also these people’s “trophy wives” or scions of mega-dynasties, children of the founders of huge corporations or royalty. They are both male and female and many are from Asian and Middle Eastern cultures where obesity used to be virtually non-existent, but now is rocketing.
They have the pressure of looking great because they’re a princess or a top executive or whatever.
In China and India, which have the largest number of underweight people in the world, levels of obesity are rising alarmingly quickly. Half of China’s vast population is overweight, 16.4 per cent of them obese. In the United Arab Emirates, 25 per cent of men and 31 per cent of women are obese. In Kuwait, those same figures stand at almost 38 per cent and 49 per cent.
“In those very hot countries, often people have very unhealthy diets,” says Gopp. “Exercise isn’t part of the culture. Usually it’s too hot to walk anywhere at all, so they stay inside and servants bring food to them.”
“Often in summer you see them in the mountains in Switzerland — lots of Middle Eastern families walking around, all clearly massively overweight,” Merzeder says. “I think this is actually a good programme for them all to do together — maybe husband and wife, sister and brother.”
The programme starts with a week-long visit to the client’s home from a doctor, psychologist, co-ordinator and the all-important Lassl (or her male equivalent, because some men won’t countenance a female “buddy”) to understand what is at the root of their obesity. Usually, Merzeder says, this is psychological. “We had one young woman who’d been raped and couldn’t tell anyone. She protected herself by overeating.”
TVR’s team also take a blood sample for an epigenetic test — one of TVR’s USPs — the results of which, delivered a fortnight later, can tell you, among other things, how genetically predisposed you are to putting on weight, how hard those genes will make it for you to lose weight (in my case very — boo), how much we might be inclined to eat when stressed (for me, not much — yay!) as well as what types of foods you can eat plentifully (carbs, hallelujah!) and what to avoid (salt — boo again).
Then follow about 12 weeks in Vienna staying in the palatial surroundings such clients take for granted. I’m booked into the 150-year-old Hotel Imperial, all weighty chandeliers, marble statues, gilded portraits of Habsburg royalty and sweeping staircases.
Clients are often put up in one of the royal suites with 7m-high ceilings, gold silk wallpaper studded with huge oil paintings and elaborate parquet floors. Everyone from Mick Jagger and Pelé to Michael Jackson and the late Queen has slept in these surroundings. It’s the Queen who causes considerable brouhaha for TVR, since the suite’s lavatory is wall-mounted.
“A wall-mounted toilet will accept only 23st of weight, so our clients would break it,” says Gopp. “So each time they stay we have to replace it with a floor-mounted one. But then the hotel says, ‘Oh, the Queen’s toilet must be preserved,’ so after our clients leave we have to put it back again.” There are similar issues with the bed, which needs to be replaced with a replica. I am now seeing how costs could rapidly add up. Those who prefer a funkier vibe are often put up in the penthouses at the five-star Kempinski nearby, while some prefer their own flat.
On day one I am still worrying about enemas, even if they are Cristal, and if I will ever eat a decent meal again. In fact, breakfast is a pleasant surprise. The team’s nutritionist, Angelika Pinter, has created a menu, prepared by TVR’s chef, that features rye sourdough with cottage cheese for protein (I’m going to see a lot of cottage cheese) and chives, and yoghurt with chunks of apple. It is so generous I can’t finish it.
I am allowed my habitual double espresso. “But normally the clients would drink green tea,” says Gopp. There is minor consternation when I mention my suite’s minibar is packed with nuts and chocolates. “Normally, it would be emptied before a client checks in,” he says. When I return to collect my coat, the treats have been confiscated.
After breakfast the chauffeur whisks me across town to the offices of the internal medicine specialist and cardiologist Dr Sabine Scherzer for a full medical — a grilling about my sleep, exercise and diet, a thorough scan that includes the liver, kidneys, thorax and carotid veins (if the veins have calcified I will have cholesterol and be risking a heart attack) and an electrocardiogram where I learn I have — and have had since birth — two leaky mitral heart valves.
“But this is nothing to worry about,” says the personable Dr Scherzer, which doesn’t reassure me at all and, after a subsequent session with Dr Google, leads me to increase my aerobic exercise back home to strengthen my heart. But then exactly the point of these sessions is to give you a kick up the backside. “You say, ‘You may only live another year or two if you don’t lose weight.’ Often this is the wake-up call they need,” Scherzer says.
When I am not being prodded or analysed, hypnotised or having a lymphatic massage (this is as spa-like as TVR gets), I spend time with Lassl, who is there to provide constant support, even sleeping in a room beside the client’s to soothe them during 3am freakouts. We bond instantly. Crucially, she knows exactly what clients endure, having weighed 23st and lost 7st 12lb through bariatric surgery, which was “the best thing in the world for me. But if I’d done TVR I wouldn’t have needed it.”
“I used to be very athletic,” Lassl says as we walk from the hotel to the Albertina museum (cultural outings being as much or as little a part of the programme as a client wishes). “I played softball for Austria, but then I got divorced and I met a new partner who died. I’m a workaholic and I was getting home late in the night and eating junk, and the weight piled on. Being obese was horrible, so I understand exactly what clients are going through. There’s a stigma — people think you’re stupid and lazy. Everything you do becomes difficult. You can’t tie your shoelaces. You worry about where you’ll sit on an aeroplane, that you’ll get stuck in a public toilet. You can’t sleep properly. It’s like being pregnant. All your organs are being squashed so you can never get comfortable. You end up sitting a lot. Everything hurts. I’m there for these people — I will help them tie their shoelaces.”
Lassl and/or her male counterpart, Franz Papouschek, who lost more than 13st through diet and exercise, are key to the process because it is with them you will pass much of your downtime. To my relief, this isn’t spent locked in my suite eyeing the empty minibar, but often in a restaurant or even, depending on your predilections, a bar or club.
“That’s the difference between drug and alcohol addiction and food addiction,” says Lassl. “Food is everywhere. You can tell clients, ‘Go for a walk,’ but they’ll end up at a sausage stall on the next corner. Temptation is limitless, so we have to teach them how to cope with being surrounded by food all day, everywhere, to work out what choices to make at a party, at a business meeting. We’ll show them things like how to fill themselves up by eating the right stuff, drinking more water. If they have a beer or a glass of wine, to water it down and just stick to one.”
Most meals served in the hotel are along the lines of a clear soup followed by fish with lentils, followed by a curd cream. Everything appears to be garnished with pumpkin seeds, which I learn are packed with antioxidants.
Usually we have to teach the family chef how to cook and eat and buy food another way.
I would happily follow such a diet at home, but I’d need a chef — not a problem for TVR clients, who typically already employ one. In the final two weeks in Vienna, a client is ideally joined by a family member who learns how to support them. Then its dietician and chef travel back home with the client and stay for two or three weeks.
“Usually we have to teach the family chef how to cook and eat and buy food another way,” Gopp says. “We have to teach them how to buy the right food. I’ve arrived at houses and seen their Porsche Cayenne heading to the supermarket in the morning. I thought it was the sheikh’s Porsche, but it was the staff’s.”
On day three of my condensed programme, we leave Vienna for the countryside, near the Slovakian border, and drive up an icy track to the mountainside lodge where clients will spend at least a weekend surrounded by nature, often for the first time in their lives. “These people live in a totally artificial world,” says our mindfulness trainer, Hillinger. “We need to reconnect them to nature.”
The effort involved in turning just one person’s life around is daunting. It is also depressing to think how rich you need to be to enjoy such a programme.
While I am in Vienna, the NHS approves the diabetes drug Ozempic, which curbs appetite, to be prescribed to obese people. Wouldn’t a weekly injection be a simpler quick fix? Lassl sighs. “I’ve come across drugs like this when I was obese. The problem is they don’t change your way of living and solve the problems that make you eat too much. That’s the only way to achieve long-term results.”
Back home, a couple of weeks later, I have lost 3lb by making a few tweaks to my diet, as recommended by the nutritionists, and being more diligent about lifting weights to boost my dodgy heart valves. Maybe I don’t need to sell my size 10 dresses after all. “In 14 weeks you can only start to change someone’s life, but it gives them a vision of what their life could be,” Lassl says. A life with a lot of clear soups and pumpkin seeds. It could be worse.
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London