What the Mayr cure actually is
There are four principles at its core. Rest the digestive tract, clear it out, retrain how you eat, and replace the minerals you lose along the way.
In practice that means small portions of cooked, mild food, an early light dinner, and no snacking between meals. Coffee and alcohol go. Most guests also lose the habit of eating while doing something else, and focus on their chewing and what they are eating instead.
At the time of FX Mayr, the prescribed therapeutic diet was stale bread roll and milk, for six weeks. Today, it is varied, healthy, and really enjoyable in our partner clinics. Some days can include a certain level of fasting, depending on the guest’s needs, and the doctor’s prescription.
However, Mayr medicine makes the stay a little different from most fasting cures.
- The first is the salt taken on waking, usually Epsom (magnesium sulfate) or Glauber (sodium sulfate) dissolved in lukewarm water, followed by a half-hour wait before breakfast. This is meant to ensure the bowel remains active despite the lower amount of food ingested.
- The second is manual abdominal treatment, which is an essential part of the Mayr medicine protocol: a trained doctor palpates and works the bowel segment by segment. That treatment is the genuinely distinctive part of the method.
- The emphasis on chewing (including chewing exercises), is paramount. Most addresses for regular fasting cures insist on the importance of chewing much less.
What a week actually feels like
You wake up, drink the salts, and wait. A walk is ideal during the wait, and the 3 properties are great for that morning routine. Then breakfast. Treatments fill the morning and afternoon, and gentle activities (core workout, stretching, meditation …). Lunch and dinner depend on what the doctor prescribed for you that day, both in terms of quantities and what’s in it. Dinner is early in most Mayr medicine clinics, so that the gut has enough time to finish its work before sleep time. Some evenings, there are lectures by the doctors, in order to better understand the mechanisms at work, and how to stay healthy beyond the stay. Doctors see you several times a week.
Days two to four are the hard ones, as in most detox cures or fasting retreats. Headache, fatigue, feeling cold, a short temper, and broken sleep are all normal and all temporary. In Mayr health resorts, this is often compensated by alkaline powder which you dissolve in water and drink, depending on what the doctor prescribes for you.
Guests who arrive on three coffees a day feel it most: it is advised to slow it down before starting the cure. By day five most people report feeling a lot better, and this compounds progressively until the end of their stay.
Where they are in Austria
Lanserhof Lans is twenty minutes from Innsbruck airport, up in the Tyrolean hills. It is the easiest of the three to reach from London. The health resort has 67 rooms, and the architecture style of Lanserhof properties is always stunning.
VIVAMAYR Maria Wörth is on Lake Wörth, twenty minutes from Klagenfurt. There is a direct London flight in season, but most guests arrive from Ljubljana, which is under an hour. The property has 46 rooms and its own pier.
MAYRLIFE is the newest building, ninety minutes from Salzburg. Most guests have never heard of Lake Altaussee before coming to Mayrlife, and it’s a beautiful, pristine lake surrounded by mountains. It is an alpine feeling. It opened in 2015, back then under the VIVAMAYR brand, and rebranded in 2023 when it became independent. It has 60 rooms.
How they differ
Lanserhof is more high-end and also offers a wider spectrum of medical services. It includes imaging, cardiology, blood purification therapies and a true longevity program.
VIVAMAYR is what most guests choose when they simply want the best gut health retreat and nothing else. The place is comfortable and impeccably clean, but it’s not a 5 star hotel. On the health side, they offer only one base program, VIVAMAYR PURE, which is personalised for each guest, because everyone’s gut is different. There are six optional add-on modules to deepen certain things.
MAYRLIFE is very similar to VIVAMAYR in the medical approach and the services, even though their catalogue includes more programs: this is just a frontend, because every stay still starts with the same Mayr doctor consultation, and this is where the actual protocol is defined for each guest. Mayrlife feels more alpine because of its location, and VIVAMAYR feels more mediterranean.
How long to go for
Seven nights is what most guests choose. Ten to fourteen gives deeper results, especially when the protocol involves actual fasting, with stages in the Mayr diet with drastically limited quantities of food. A week spends two or three days on progressive adaptation, reducing quantities. That leaves almost no room for the refeeding days, which are part of the treatment.
If this is a first stay, and if your availability and budget allow, book ten nights. The last three are where the eating gets rebuilt deliberately. And when you fly home, don’t go straight to a gastronomic restaurant, despite how much you dreamed of it during your retreat at Lanserhof, VIVAMAYR or MAYRLIFE.
And even though most clinics welcome you any day of the week, most guests like to check in on Sunday, and have their first doctor consultation on Monday. For 7-night stays at MAYRLIFE, this is unfortunately not possible, because you cannot check out from MAYRLIFE on Mondays.
Don’ts
Some people should not fast at all, but Mayr medicine adapts the intensity of the fast extremely well to each and every case. Pregnancy and breastfeeding rule out strict fasting.
For guests with a history of eating disorders, very low body weight, uncontrolled thyroid disease, and advanced liver or kidney failure, Mayr doctors have certain ways of adapting the cure, or telling these guests honestly it’s not for them.
Mayr medicine is also famous for its results on certain types of diabetes and other inflammatory conditions. Always a good idea to check with the medical team what can reasonably be expected of a stay in such cases.
As the foundations are medical, the stays include check-ups and it is a good idea to bring any recent blood work or health exam results you may have undergone recently before your stay. Guests on a GLP-1 drug such as Ozempic or Mounjaro, are also advised to disclose it. Lanserhof offers a program specifically built around GLP-1.
Besides fasting, one practical point worth having in mind. These retreats are intense and focused. Your body and brain turn into fasting mode, and does not operate the same way as you usually do. Your motivation is different as well. And you spend time in the toilets. It’s not always a good idea to consider such a retreat with your companion: most guests prefer to be on their own. It’s also not recommended to assume you will have the attention to actually work while you’re doing the program. If that sounds unbearable, we can recommend softer alternatives. We would rather place you in one than sell you a cure you resent by day 3.
Benefits of Mayr fasting
Fasting is an efficient health cure, and the medical foundations of Lanserhof, VIVAMAYR and MAYRLIFE ensure it is done in a supervised environment, and the results are actually measured.
The largest research dataset about fasting covers 1,422 guests and was published in PLoS ONE in 2019. Weight, waist and blood pressure all came down, with adverse effects under one per cent. A 2021 trial in Nature Communications added a five-day fast to a standard blood-pressure diet. In the fasting group 43 per cent cut their medication, against 17 per cent of controls.
Mayr medicine has been around for decades. However to our knowledge, no randomised controlled trial of the Mayr protocol exists. The benefits of the chewing, the salts and the abdominal work are easy to understand, but there hasn’t been research studies where the control group was specifically asked to not chew. Besides, the acid-base rationale offered for alkaline powders rests on a hypothesis that has been tested and rejected several times, and yet, guests at the Mayr clinics feel the difference.
As we advise and support a large number of clients in their respective health goals, we can also share that very few of them don’t find the answers they were looking for with Mayr medicine. Very few means there are a few “failures” to heal indeed. While it works great for most clients for whom we recommend a Mayr medicine clinic.
One more thing worth knowing. What happens in the eight weeks after you leave Lanserhof, VIVAMAYR or MAYRLIFE, has more impact on your health than which of the three you choose. You are in control, and in charge, of your healthy lifestyle habits. They are just showing you the way.
