Get Shrink-Wrapped

Get Shrink-Wrapped
Friday, January 16, 2009

It sounds like a deal with the devil. Hand over $125, submit your body to a bizarre and almost medieval spa treatment, and one hour later ... voila! ... you're inches thinner. No carrot sticks or grueling workouts required. Like reaping the benefits of a year of Pilates in a single hour.

Well, if the devil is handing out deals like that, we're in. So when Suddenly Slender, a new Baristanet advertiser, offered to let two of us try a treatment (which involves getting strapped and wrapped up like a mummy) for free, it was an offer we couldn't refuse. No matter what happened, we figured, it would make a good story...

Leave your hangups at the door, because body wrapping is not for the self-conscious. There's a lot of intimacy, but owner and alternative healing advocate Mary Davis is quick to calm any trepidation.

Here's the drill: enter a warm (un)dressing room, strip to your underwear, don a fuzzy robe, and take a nourishing magic mineral shot (tastes like apple/prune juice). Then Mary records your weight and 18 body measurements - to compare with the measurements she'll take after one hour in the body wrap. Now, it's time to wrap.

Ace bandages soaked in a hot mineral solution that's supposed to leach out the bad contaminants are tightly wrapped around your entire body, toe to head, transforming you into a mummy-like creature. It's tight, stiff, very strange. We've got plastic bags on feet and hands to catch the toxin run-off, and we don a plastic poncho to keep warm. We're a frightful sight walking into the exercise room. Oh, yeah, you gotta move around for the next hour...There's a low-tech cross trainer, mini tramp, giant vibrating machine. The wet bandages do get cold, (we did this on the two coldest days of the year) so we both spent a lot of time in the 140 degree infra-red sauna, watching a flat screen TV through the window.

Even though we were "brining", every 20 minutes, we got basted like a Thanksgiving turkey with the natural mineral potion. We're thinking...this better be worth it.

The results: Instant gratification.

We went on separate days, one in the afternoon, one in the morning. On the scale, we both lost exactly the same: 1.4 pounds each. The measuring tape showed an overall reduction of 9.7 inches for me, 9.6 inches for Deb, but since there are 18 measurements, that's an average of about half an inch lost overall. My biggest inch loss was a whole inch off each upper thigh, and half an inch off my middle - Hooray! Deb's big loss was 1.3 inches off each upper thigh, and slightly over a half inch off the mid thigh - Woo-hoo!

Davis professes therapeutic benefits of the wraps - chasing away aches and pains. The various wraps are said to be particularly effective for individuals with joint pain, rheumatoid arthritis, or who are undergoing dialysis and chemotherapy. Davis says there's the added benefit (for some the primary benefit) of lifting, toning, tightening and reducing inches. It's not about water loss, Davis insists, its about detoxifying, and if you don't go binging, the results of the wrap should last. In just 6-10 wrap sessions, she says, you could drop a whole dress size.

So is it real? Well, we'd like to think that it is, that the hour each of us spent shivering in our mummy wraps jump started our diets and got us on the way to the slender new bodies we really want. We can tell you this for sure: we each shed a little weight, it didn't kill us and we have a heck of a good story to tell at dinner parties.

Prices start at $45 for an Ionic Detox Footbath to $85 for face taping (a non-surgical lift), to $179 for the Dream Body lay-down wrap. We both got the Slender Tone wrap, which is now on special for $125.
Posted by Annette Batson on January 16, 2009 2:41 PM

http://www.baristanet.com/2009/01/the_baristas_wrap_up.php