Body-Mind Connection

At a retreat in South Africa how quickly eating well can lead to feeling good

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Healthy, nourishing dishes being prepared at Oppidum Health Retreat

DURING THE WELCOME SESSION at Oppidum Health Retreat, we are asked to share our intentions for the next few days. “Survive without caffeine?” I offer. I am sitting with a group of others, including four practitioners, on the wide veranda of a farmhouse overlooking the distant Tsitsikamma Mountains outside Plettenberg Bay, a one-hour flight (followed by a 90-minute drive) from Cape Town. We're spread across giant couches and rattan chairs, sipping pomegranate juice. It’s overwhelmingly peaceful, the kind of place that immediately encourages you to wind down. Everyone around me laughs, but I'm being serious. Suffering through days of brain fog and debilitating headaches, knowing that I will go back to drinking coffee when I'm home, feels like a punishment—counterintuitive even, like pouring hours into learning how to ride a bike and then deciding you'd rather walk.

I know why they remove it: Caffeine is a stimulant that makes people feel “zingy,” and the aim of this five-night experience is to do the opposite. “We're trying to get you to be as calm as possible in your parasympathetic nervous system,” says Nicola Whiteman, a medical doctor and founder of Oppidum, a gut-repair program and wellness retreat. “That way, you can really access how you're feeling.”

That opening statement of intention at Oppidum, on a private nature reserve along a quiet road that leads into the mountains, is key to its programming.