Could Sadie Frost’s detox retreat heal my heartbreak?

It’s come to this. This is where midlife malaise — school runs, domestic upheaval, general work exhaustion — takes you: to a yoga room on an island, your head inches away from Sadie Frost’s bum. “Move your right arm up alongside your ear,” the yoga teacher, a lovely Polish woman named Monika, tells us.

However, as much as I’d like to please Monika, she might as well have told me to move Everest with my nose. Frost — once the face of the Nineties party scene, alongside her best friend Kate Moss and her husband at the time Jude Law, and now an accredited yoga instructor — twists her body, seemingly unburdened by gravity, with the grace of a mermaid frolicking in the waves. I crash on my mat, a beached walrus.

For this humiliation and more I have come to Amchara, a health retreat on Gozo, a pretty island that’s a quick ferry ride from Malta. There is an Amchara in Somerset, which I’m sure is lovely. But when I left the UK in the morning I needed an umbrella; when I landed in Malta three hours later I needed sunscreen. I rest my case.

Amchara is not so much about health as wellness, that vague term of our age that takes in everything from meditation to green juice. I have some scepticism about wellness, mainly because I don’t like being given health advice by people I wouldn’t trust to cut my hair. But it’s hard to maintain cynicism when greeted by the friendly staff at Amchara. Kirstie, who will be looking after my “personalised programme”, suggests a juice-and-soup fast for me (I curse myself for not smuggling some airplane snacks in), yoga (fine), a massage (thank God) and a colonic. Record scratch! A what? Some parts of my body are very much one-direction zones and don’t need tubes or what have you up them. Come on, open mind, Freeman. You have spent the past 12 months ticking off every middle-aged cliché in the book. You need fixing, in whatever form it comes.

If anyone can fix me, maybe it’s Frost, Amchara’s brand ambassador. After all, our lives are basically identical: we both live in north London, we both have an above average number of children (my three to her four) and we both know heartache. Admittedly, mine wasn’t front-page news as hers was, twice — first when she left Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp (father of her oldest son, Finlay) for Jude Law, and later when Law (father of her three younger children, Rafferty, Iris and Rudy), left her. But then I don’t have Kemp or Law-sized alimony payments to get me through my pain, so it all evens out. This summer Frost and her sister Holly Davidson, who is a personal trainer, are running a five-day retreat at Amchara — a retreat within a retreat, called Happiness Ahead.

“I found Amchara years ago and I liked that it wasn’t pushy or chichi, like some of these places are. It was just relaxed and let me step back,” Frost says over our dinner (soup, and very much no bread). Her idea of stepping back is a little different to mine because she promptly swooped in and redecorated all the apartment-like bedrooms at Amchara, painting them in dusky pink or pale green, and making them feminine and cosy. “I figured if you’re detoxing and feeling miserable, you want to be somewhere that’s kind of holding you,” she says. Two days later, when I’ve had no solid food for 48 hours, I do find a strange kind of comfort in my bedroom’s pretty pink walls.

Frost, 58, has been practising yoga since she was a child. Have there been times when she’s especially needed it?

“Definitely. When things happen that you don’t expect, like divorce, things not being how you started out with your master plan. But I’ve never wanted to play a victim. I wanted to be open, strong, kind and compassionate, and having a regular yoga practice gives you that groundedness,” she says in that voice that is, as it always was, both girlish and tough.

Nineties party child to wellness expert is now a well-established cycle of life not unique to Frost. A close friend of hers, the former model Rosemary Ferguson, is now a functional medicine practitioner and can be found on Instagram giving tips on juicing and healthy meals. Moss has launched a wellness skincare line (although during an interview about it with Vogue she smoked two cigarettes, suggesting that her approach to wellness is about as orthodox as mine).

“As you get older, you celebrate in different ways. The old ways don’t serve you. I don’t want to be dancing to the Rolling Stones at a party now,” Frost says. Does she think there’s something about heavy partying in one’s youth that leads one towards wellness in midlife?

“When you’re younger your ambitions are different, especially if you’re in an industry like modelling or acting and you’re more centre stage. Then as you get older it’s less about you,” she says. Frost initially became famous through acting, with roles in films such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Shopping. Now she’s pivoted to directing, with the recent documentary about Mary Quant, called Quant, and an upcoming one about Twiggy. She is, she says, happier behind the camera these days.

How else has she changed? “It’s interesting coming to places like this now but not with a broken heart. I remember going to India five or ten years ago and being that person who was in a beautiful place but crying. Whereas now I feel free.”

So is she single now? “Yeah, yeah. But I think my choices in men are better now. Like, [a boyfriend would now have to be] somebody that’s done work on themselves, someone who’s not all about the external and doesn’t always have something to prove. Someone who doesn’t always think they’re right,” she says, and we exchange “tchuh, men” glances.

Back to Amchara. So in answer to your first question, yes, I was hungry. God, I was hungry. Ingesting nothing but three juices and one soup a day will do that to you — or just me, maybe, because the other guests (very normal, very friendly American and English people) talked about how good it felt to give their digestion “a rest”.

My body certainly got a rest, as I slept about 14 hours a night, although it’s a toss-up whether that was down to the deliciously comfortable beds or the lack of calories. Look, I survived my three-day fast, but I remain sceptical about juice fasts. Maybe it’s because I was anorexic as a teen, but my feeling is they’re a little too close to eating disorders for some; and for others, they might rest their digestion but they hardly establish long-term healthy eating, although Amchara does help with that too, giving a talk about how to eat better at home at the end of your stay. You absolutely don’t have to do the juice fast at Amchara, but it does seem to be the norm for most guests. When I was there some said they were doing it for a week, which strikes me as, frankly, mad.

But the rest of Amchara I absolutely loved, especially the yoga, the beautiful (if freezing) pool and the incredible Dr Kang, whose acupuncture and massage magically cured my long-term knee injury. And Frost is right: Amchara is not precious or chichi. It is ― unusually for a wellness place ― charmingly relaxed.

Speaking of relaxed, the answer to your second question is: yes, I had a colonic. If you don’t know what it is, you’ll have to google it, because some things don’t need to be explained in a family newspaper. All I’ll say is that during the process I felt like the front bit of the human centipede and afterwards I felt completely fantastic. It’s as satisfying as clearing out your cupboards, but internally. Maybe this wellness wheeze has something going for it, I thought, on my way back to Malta, feeling better than I had in years. Especially when I got to the airport, bought a huge bag of crisps and poured them straight into my hungry mouth.
Hadley Freeman was a guest of Visit Malta (visitmalta.com) and Amchara, which has three nights from £1,060pp, including the juice and soup fast, activities and consultations; transfers £56 (amchara.com). Fly to Malta

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