The clinic was full of gargantuan single men on their own, writes Julia Stephenson. If they hadn’t been so huge it would have been a single girl's paradise. But sleeping with one of them would have been like a heavy door falling on you with the key still in the lock. It's a good job I didn't come here looking for love.

The run-up to Christmas in my part of London is a nightmare. Most of the year I love living next door to the classy Peter Jones department store, the Mother Ship, where all my needs can be so conveniently met. (Well, most of them.)

But in the days leading up to the festive season, whenever things got dull on daytime TV I only had to look out of the sitting room window to be riveted by the goings-on in the haberdashery department opposite. Till rage was in full swing as tweedy shoppers wrestled over the festive gift goodies. Who needs the Jeremy Kyle show?

This year it was more frantic than ever. Every time I set foot outside I was mown down by hordes of jostling, filthy tempered shoppers. And then the sales began, and the manic bargain hunters were in a complete frenzy. How I wished I was back in Marbella (sunny place, shady people) eating the strange concoctions which passed for food at the Buchinger health clinic.

You see, last year my friends Mick and Jan had the excellent idea of opting out of Christmas altogether. They suggested I spend the festive season with them at the Buchinger clinic, an exclusive yet Spartan health farm in Marbella.

Despite being unknown in Britain, the Buchinger clinic is an institution amongst Europe’s hoity-toity set. The place is chocca with Ruritanian royals, Austrian aristocrats and Spanish grandees who recover from the ravages of the good life by enduring the clinics famously strict regime.

Europeans are great fans of robust health regimes while the Brits are far too lily-livered for enemas, fasting and cold showers. Instead we have luxurious but chaotically run health 'spas', where guests are pampered with expensive but ineffectual beauty treatments. Often the food is so lavish you actually put on weight.

When I arrived at Buchinger Marbella, champagne still oozing out of my pores from a knees-up the night before, I was guided to my room which was bright as a new pin and had views over stunning tropical gardens towards the distant sea. As I unpacked I could hear the heavenly sound of palm trees rustling in the wind. The terrors of the Peter Jones haberdashery department seemed an awfully long way away.

Mick and I had decided not to fast, but Jan was keen to lose a few pounds and bravely decided to follow the nine-day fast. The fasters are separated from the gourmands at mealtimes and enjoy in isolation their one small bowl of gruel twice a day.

Still, the thought that in nine days she would be slimmer and enjoy the spiritual and mental clarity that is a benefit of fasting inspired Jan to keep going.

Fortunately Mick was good company which distracted me from the awful food. Meals revolved around bread, potatoes, dairy and fruit and a bizarre sweetened cream cheese concoction which came with every course. Piles of bread appeared with every meal - in fact, sometimes it was the meal. And twice a day more slabs of bread with a strange mottled cheese were brought to my room. The clinic was caught in an Eighties F-Plan diet time warp. But at least the birds on my balcony had a feast.
 

The fasters were certainly very cheerful. Many holiday here every year and enjoy a jolly gruel-fuelled reunion. Pieter, a massive Dutchman, was on his second visit. 'I love coming here,' he explained. 'I fast for nine days and leave feeling tremendous.' All the fasters I spoke to couldn’t praise the regime too highly and they certainly radiated energy and good health, even if most of them resembled tree trunks.

Back in Britain I spoke to Margie Finchell, a health practitioner who was disappointed with the Buchinger cure. She has since developed a fast based around fresh vegetable juices and daily colonics which has been very successful with her patients.

'Going without food stimulates the body’s detoxification processes,' she says, 'but you do need the enzymes from the juices to enable you to lose weight and encourage a more thorough detoxification. Without the bulk of food one becomes constipated, but enzymes in the juice encourage bowel movement, and the daily colonics sweep out everything else.'

An ironic aspect is that fasting lowers the metabolic rate so that when you start eating again you need fewer calories than before — but most people ignore this and eat 'normally' again. No wonder the fasters were not as svelte as they might have hoped.

But it's worth coming here for the various treatments: I loved the Thai massage and, in a triumph of hope over experience, couldn’t resist a luxurious facial.

Of course facials are always a complete waste of time, but I am a sucker and cannot resist the flimflam. In my experience the procedure will involve a sweet-natured dim girl rubbing cream onto your face, wiping it off, then rubbing more in and then relieving you of lots of money. Sometimes you get a yawny face massage while she tells you about her holiday plans.

But I just knew this facial would be different. It was two hours long and used diamonds to exfoliate the skin. There was the usual rubbing in of creams and taking them off again. But then the therapist deviated from the norm and things got more exciting. She placed my head in a plastic headrest, put on a slimy blue face mask, then clamped my head into a metal cage with rollers attached. When she switched this contraption on the rollers massaged the mask firmly into my skin as well as massaging my scalp. I was in seventh heaven and could have stayed there all day.

After 20 minutes she unclamped me, took the slimy mask off and proferred a mirror with a great flourish. To my disappointment, my skin looked just the same as it had before.

There were other highlights. Jan is a culture vulture and insisted on dragging me along to museums and galleries. There was no stopping her; for someone who wasn’t eating she had an awful lot of energy. `I feel marvellous. We’ve just time to see one more Picasso,’ she insisted as I sat mutinously in a coffee shop, averting my gaze from an escaped faster who was gorging himself on cream cakes in the corner.

One morning we walked to the glitzy Marbella Club. I gazed longingly at the skinny perma-tanned eurotoffs, stalking the massive breakfast buffet inside. All I had to look forward to for my breakfast was a solitary prune (presented elegantly in its own prune pot) and a matching pot of the bizarre sugary cream cheese mixture.

Too soon our week came to an end. Jan went with great excitement to be weighed only to be told that she hadn’t lost an ounce. Oh, misery!

So it was with a sense of gloom that we flew back into Gatwick on a miserable grey day, only to find the trains were on strike. We were shepherded towards a grubby `special bus’ which set off towards London's Victoria station.

'There is nothing `special’ about a special bus,' Jan observed mutinously, when the ancient contraption eventually shuddered to a halt at our destination.

But at least we could get a square meal and a decent cup of tea.