I'm recently back from a week at the Body Camp Mallorca - a holistic wellness retreat with an emphasis on fitness and plant-based eating. As described by one of our fellow campers from New Jersey, the vibe is basically boot camp meets the Four Seasons. It's bougie and sweaty and just uncomfortable enough to feel like getting through the week is a true accomplishment.
I went with my best friend, Angela. I think we first decided to go in 2016? I remember being in a spa in Vegas and we were talking about trying to have an adventure - like a real one, not just 48 hours away. So we said Ibiza 2020, which felt far enough away to me to be possible. I think I was secretly hoping that maybe Ang would forget about it entirely before then.
But my girl Ang is a closer, and by 2018 we had a deposit and tickets and a plan to see parts of Spain and then spend the week paying for all our sins at the Body Camp Ibiza, in September 2020. Of course, like most plans in 2020, that was a joke. As was 2021. Meanwhile we both changed jobs (twice!), the Ibiza location closed, and we each encountered personal crises in our families. I think each of us had days where if we could have just gotten our deposit back and pretended that the plan never happened, we totally would have.
Instead we got on a plane and spent a shortened trip in Mallorca with 21 other wonderful folks. People came for a variety of reasons. One had lost 100 lbs and spent the week as a hard reset every year. Another was a medic in the armed forces and was using the week to jump start her training for her next fitness certification. Mothers of young kids came to spend time focused on their own health and well-being. Some came to celebrate birthdays or support friends. And a non-trivial number of us were going through divorce.
I was grateful for how little time was spent discussing weight loss. Listening to nutritionists and advocates, and just paying attention to what happened to the Biggest Loser contestants, it seems really obvious to me that if we understood how to help people lose weight and maintain that loss, people who hope to lose weight would have very different results than what is currently the case. Not to say that it can't be done, but it surely doesn't seem simple or straightforward. There were definitely people there for weight loss, and the camp offered different "lanes" depending on how much food you wanted to eat every day. But from a programmatic standpoint, the focus was on health, both mental and physical, and living the best possible version of your life.
Even this positive and super inclusive message felt challenging to me, however. I hadn't really planned to tell the other campers about my divorce - I didn't want to be "emotionally slutty" as one of my fellow campers described it, just spilling my feelings out all over the place. But the focus on talking with our fellow campers about goal setting and making good changes when so many things felt really up in the air meant that my attempts at holding it in were not as successful as I had imagined they would be. The good news was that nobody but me was bothered by my hyper-emotionality. The atmosphere was one of support and kindness, with kick-ass workouts mixed in.
I didn't think I was looking for a hard reset when I took off for Spain, but I'm so glad I got one. It's time to start a new chapter, and this was a wonderful way to kick that off.