Thursday February 21, 2008
The Mount Athos diet
“Moderation in all things,” my grandfather always used to tell my mother, and my mother said it to me. It’s one reason he lived to be over 90; and so may you, if you are able to follow the regimen in the Guardian and Observer’s latest weekend giveaway – the “Mount Athos Diet”.
These two special reports are quite fun, in a pop science kind of way. Their stated aim is to give some insight into the lives of the “world’s healthiest people” – in this case, the monks at Mount Athos, the male-only, semi-autonomous religious community in Greece. Thanks to their diet – regular fasting, home-grown vegetables, simple wine and occasional fish, never any meat – these monks have one of the lowest incidences of cancer in the world. It’s a Mediterranean diet, but without a souvlaki in sight. What could be healthier than that?
I have visited Mount Athos, about eight or nine years ago now, and I can concur about one thing: a trip to the Holy Mountain does help you lose weight. When I was there I lost half a stone or more. But as the Guardian points out, the diet can’t take all the credit. There are lifestyle factors too – and the trouble is, the lifestyle isn’t exactly transferable to life in the Big Smoke.
First, in Mount Athos there is scarcely any infrastructure. This is a Good Thing, on account of all the hermits. There are a small number of forest tracks, just big enough for a pick-up truck to get from one side of the peninsula to the other; there is a boat for getting around the coast; but most of the time, if you want to get anywhere, you’ve got to walk. To get from one monastery to another, you’re going to spend a lot of time lugging your frame up rocky footpaths which zig-zag their way up some of the steepest mountainsides in all of Greece. Monks have to do this dressed in black cloaks, even before they start working the paddy fields they’ve cut into the hills. No wonder they lose weight.
Second, as the booklets say, Athonite monks don’t eat much. Just how little they eat became clear to me in my first day on the peninsula, when, after eight hours’ walking in the hot sun, I turned up at a monastery on the north coast to find that the only food available was a small bowl of thin soup. It was so insubstantial I couldn’t eat it; my body needed carbs, and, apart from a chunk of bread, carbs there were none. Even the next day, at a posher monastery on the south coast (yes, some monasteries are posher than others), I ate a small square of pasta and horta (bitter Greek greens) with a glass of village wine. And that was it. If I hadn’t brought some honey and peanut bars with me I would have expired.
Finally, and not as irrelevantly as it may seem, in Mount Athos there is not a lot of telly. Or rather, there is no telly at all. Even electricity is a fairly recent introduction. Partly because of this, and partly because they are monks and that is what monks do, everybody gets up at five o’clock in the morning and goes to church. And as any Brit who has ever been to a Greek church ceremony will know, the typical Orthodox service may be spiritually uplifting, but it is also a drawn-out affair. For the psaltist and the priests (the ones doing the singing), it is a complex and often repetitive arrangement of New Testament Greek psalms, chants and responses, lasting anything up to four hours. For the congregation, it’s pretty much the same except that you don’t have to turn up right at the start – but you do have to do a lot of standing up and sitting down, at exactly the right times, or everyone stares at you. Yes, it’s a moving experience, listening to the lilting tones of the psaltist in an ancient Byzantine monastery, watching as the incense burner sways, the sun rises and light enters the open door from across the open sea. But the three-hour build-up to these moments is more exhausting than you think. I often wonder how many calories you use up when you are half-asleep on your feet.
So. Would I recommend the “Mount Athos Diet”? Of course I would. If you can get up at 5am, stand in church for three hours in the morning before breakfast, then work in the paddy fields all day growing food for your supper, followed by an hour or two of private contemplation and an early night, all without the company of women – if you can do all that, then following the recipes in these booklets should help you become one of the world’s healthiest people. Only thing is, you’ll be living in a different world.
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