Chenot and Mayr Medicine are my two favourite detox protocols at the moment. I’ve done both, I love both, I recommend both. And I get more and more questions from clients: “which one is best for me?”
These client questions in the past few weeks got me thinking deeper about how Chenot Method and Mayr Medicine compare, and which objectives they’re a best match for.
It comes down to a seemingly simple question:
What does my body actually need right now?
When people ask about Chenot and Mayr detoxes, they’re often framed as alternatives. But after spending time understanding both philosophies, it feels more accurate to say this: Chenot and Mayr are having two very different conversations with the body. Both are incredibly efficient. Both are demanding, too. But they speak to different starting points, and different intentions.
This becomes especially clear when I advise clients at different stages in their health journey:
- Those who are dealing with health or energy challenges and need to fix or regenerate something
- Those who feel fundamentally well, but want to optimise their health on several levels
If your body is asking for help
For people arriving with health challenges (post-surgery, digestive issues, fatigue, inflammation, metabolic imbalance, hormonal disruption…) detox is rarely about “wellness” in the glossy sense. It’s about relief. Reboot. Sometimes even answers, to finally understand how their body works, after inconclusive diagnostics from the world’s best medical experts in their respective fields.
The Mayr Medicine perspective: start where the problems often begin
Mayr medicine begins with a simple but confronting idea: many modern health problems start in the gut.
The Mayr approach doesn’t rush to fix everything at once. Instead, it recognizes that problems resulting from decades of certain lifestyle habits, probably won’t be solved overnight. This first step is to slow the body down and observe.
Mayr Medicine makes you simplify food to the point where digestion becomes something you can feel. You chew more. You eat less. You notice reactions. You learn, sometimes uncomfortably, how your habits have been working against you.
For people with clear digestive symptoms, bloating, IBS, reflux, food sensitivities, or chronic inflammation linked to the gut, this can feel like finally addressing the root instead of managing the symptoms. And they’re often surprised that Mayr Medicine is not more talked about.
What’s powerful about Mayr isn’t just the detox itself, but the education. Of course you leave lighter after a program at MAYRLIFE, Lanserhof or Buff. But you also leave more aware.
You understand how stress, speed, and unconscious eating patterns have shaped YOUR health. Not the health of the human body in general, the health of YOUR body, with YOUR mind, YOUR genetics and epigenetics, etc.
If I draw a parallel with cars, it’s like having a super skilled mechanical engineer look up into the engine of a unique car, and figure out how this car works, what fuel it needs, what lubricant, what pressure in the tires, etc. Of course it will also do a maintenance of your car, but fundamentally, it gives you a clear manual explaining you how your engine was designed, and how to make it work.
For some people, especially those who’ve felt ignored or misunderstood by conventional medicine like I was, this feels like finally the end of a long journey looking for answers.
But Mayr can also feel austere. It asks for discipline, patience, and a willingness to be uncomfortable with simplicity. I’m very much into the pleasure of food and patisserie, and yet I can testify how much this austere aspect of Mayr Medicine is totally worth it.
The Chenot Method: reset the whole system
Chenot, by contrast, looks at the body as an interconnected system that may be overloaded on multiple levels at once: metabolic, inflammatory, hormonal, energetic.
For someone whose health challenges feel diffuse, with low energy, weight that won’t shift, brain fog, inflammation without a clear cause, Chenot often feels like someone finally zoomed out.
Instead of focusing primarily on one system, the Chenot method runs diagnostics, looks at biomarkers, and then layers multiple therapies together. Nutrition, hydrotherapy, body treatments, movement, rest. Everything is choreographed to support detoxification and regeneration simultaneously.
For people who feel depleted or overwhelmed by their own bodies, Chenot can feel remarkably supportive. You’re not being asked to “push through” discomfort; the experience is designed to carry you while your body recalibrates.
It’s less about learning to live with restriction, and more about giving the body the conditions it needs to remember how to function properly again.
Using the same image as before with cars, Chenot is the best possible car maintenance you can find. It may not entirely explain how your unique car works, but it gives the deep, and incredibly efficient, maintenance to this vehicle, in a mere 7 nights.
If you’re already healthy, and want more
Then there’s a very different group of people: those who feel good. Strong. Clear. Founders. Business leaders. “Corporate athletes”. Super active people with great genes. But even with the greatest genes, and the strictest healthy life-style, there’s always another level of vitality available.
When I advise such clients, the question shifts from fixing to optimising.
Chenot as a precision tune-up
For healthy individuals, Chenot often shines as a form of high-level recalibration.
The diagnostics provide insight into how your body is ageing, how efficiently it’s managing stress, inflammation, and recovery. The Chenot detox Diet, with its calorie restrictions but nothing missing from a nutritional standpoint, creates a fasting-mimicking state. My “top-performing” clients always notice how it sharpens their mental clarity and resets their relationship with hunger.
For people who are busy, high-performing, and already doing “all the right things”, Chenot can feel like a rare pause where the body is allowed to fully reset without effort or decision-making.
And because this pause is so greatly optimized in terms of time (7 nights for the detox programs, 5 nights for the Body Insights & Optimisation program), they get back to action faster than anywhere else.
Mayr Medicine as a longevity investment
For healthy people, Mayr Medicine offers something subtler: some of the Mayr doctors (not all) are also longevity medicine experts. Mayr Medicine is intrinsically good for preventive health and longevity, but some Mayr Doctors simply have more experience in this field than others.
When you are lucky to have a great Mayr + longevity doctor by your side, it’s like having this stellar mechanical engineer who opened the engine of your one-of-a-kind car, but not just once: instead, having him by your side for your whole life.
Yes, such doctors are ridiculously healthy, and make you wonder, how can you be so serious about eating, exercising or stress management, every single day of the year. They treat their body and mind like a Formula 1 car, or a one-of-a-kind racing horse. Nothing’s too good to keep it in optimal condition.
It strips eating and other anecdotical things in life back to their foundations and asks questions many of us have never slowed down enough to ask.
- How do I actually digest? What’s the impact of a late night dinner? Or a few too many glasses of wine?
- How do I sleep? Or recover from jet lag?
- How does stress show up in my gut? What happens when I truly eat with attention? Should I skip a few meetings over lunch or dinner, and instead eat alone more often?
For optimisation-focused guests, Mayr Medicine in its most advanced (some would call it extreme) is a masterclass towards optimised physical and cognitive performance, as well as longevity.
The benefits may not always be that much greater in the short term compared to other excellent detox protocols such as Chenot, but in the long term, the precision depth enabled by Mayr medicine wins. I’ve seen countless guests who’ve been doing their Mayr Medicine program twice a year for the last 10 or 20 years, despite having always been in great health: yes, there is always something a little bit strange with their obsession around how they eat or exercise, and live in general, but it is also highly visible how much younger they look, and how intensely they actually live. For them, Mayr Medicine is clearly a key to slow down ageing.
If Chenot feels like rebooting a high-performance system, Mayr feels like learning how to properly slow down ageing for decades, while keeping every aspect of the body and brain fully functional for as long as possible.
So which is “better”?
That’s actually the wrong question, if we want to decide between Chenot and Mayr Medicine.
A better one might be:
- Do I need an in-depth maintenance or to understand how my body works?
- Do I want support into healing? Or to actively re-learn lifestyle foundations?
- Am I looking for a whole-system reset? Or to “develop” a new relationship with my body and mind for the decades to come?
For some people, the answer is Chenot now, Mayr later.
For others, Mayr is the necessary first step before anything more expansive makes sense.
And for others, it’s Chenot forever which works the best.
Both approaches are intelligent. Both are medically grounded. And both work best when chosen honestly, not aspirationally.
Because, let’s not forget, the most effective detox isn’t the most famous one. It’s the one that meets you exactly where you are. Let’s schedule a call if this resonates and if you’d like some guidance between Chenot, Mayr Medicine, without forgetting other great medical wellness approaches as well.
All the best,
Victoire