The Daily Mail’s Mark Palmer detoxed at the Lanserhof Lans Mayr clinic, AustriaThe luxury spot has just re-opened after an eight-month, £23 million refurb

Mark was put on a restricted diet and underwent a range of therapy treatments

This is a good leveller. For all I know, the man at the next table may be a captain of German industry with a beautiful wife and six accomplished children with whom he shares his Bavarian castle.

But he looks just as forlorn as me, chewing and chewing and chewing on stale bread and wondering when he should take his supplements.

Mind you, this is only day two at Lanserhof Lans, just outside Innsbruck, Austria, the latest Mayr clinic to be revamped on the ‘detoxification and de-acidification’ assembly line.

The hope is that by the end of the week, Herr Forlornness and I will have shed all those nasty toxins, lost some weight and gained a new perspective on diet — and be ready to take on the world.

If we last that long. Because after only a few hours in this 67-room, modern building overlooking soaring mountains to the north and forests to the south, my wife, Joanna, has an excruciating headache and wants to go home.

She says it’s like being in a hospital, albeit one with snazzy white floors and a zen-like calm about it. I repeat what I’ve read about going through the ‘cure crisis’ and how achieving a ‘change of milieu’ will take time and perseverance.

Self-indulgent clap-trap? Well, I’m sure there’s an argument for that and I do know someone who went to a Mayr — so named after the Austrian physician Franz Xaver Mayr (1875-1965) — and developed a strange food fixation and took a year to recover.

But it worked for me two years ago at a sister Lanserhof clinic in Germany, so here’s hoping Joanna hangs in there with the Epsom salts and tasteless bread.