I was in a cab shooting uptown after a FlyBarre class in the Flatiron District with a fashion editor friend when I remarked on how clear and smooth her skin was.
She’s around the same age as me — forty-freaking-seven as I have taken to calling it — but she’s been looking 25 lately.
“It’s the clay,” she said, with a conspiratorial smile.
“You put it on your face?” I asked.
“Uh-uh,” she shook her head. “I eat it.”
“You eat mud?” I asked.
“Very expensive mud, babe.”
“How much?”
“Couple of hundred bucks a pound, I forget.”
“No, I mean, how much do you eat?”
“Only a few ounces a day. It’s amazingly good for your colon. And it’s got zero calories.”
I gasped with amazement. You can be the hardest-bitten of hard-bitten fashion editors, as I once was, but you still can’t avoid being flabbergasted by the eye-rolling craziness — eating mud? — of this city on a regular basis. [Editor’s note: Some have touted bentonite clay as a detoxifier, but as with any new regimen, speak with your doctor before starting something like this.]
Over the past two years, in the course of researching my new book, “Fitness Junkie,” my co-writer Jo Piazza and I were regaled with revelations like this on a regular basis. While our book is fiction, it certainly has a real-life counterpart here in New York.
We heard from West Village moms who attended “Free the Nipple” topless yoga (“so freeing”) and aficionados of decaf coffee who, despairing of the chemical process involved in treating their beans, got them decaffeinated naturally — pooped out by birds and cats.
But it’s the world of boutique fitness classes in the wellness movement — sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll are so over — that’s really changing the DNA of the city.
For true fitness junkies, workouts costing upward of $30 apiece are where it’s at, from learning prison-inspired exercises from real ex-cons to slithering around in a sandbox to riding a spin bike in a warm saltwater pool.
Of course, you could just go to the gym. But who just goes to the gym anymore?
When people ask, “What do you do?” these days, they mean, “What class do you take?,” not “Where do you work?”
And your answer — be it SLT, SoulCycle, Physique57 or the hot-right-now FlyBarre session targeting arms and abs by celebrity instructor Kara Liotta — is as clear a pointer to your clique and tribe and to your very place in the social scene, as saying “Condé Nast” or “Wall Street” once was.
Who has time for dinner these days? One friend of mine recently wanted to catch up with six of her best girlfriends, so she booked an 8:30 a.m. session with menacing, tattoo-covered trainer Kirk Myers at the black-walled, old-school “Rocky”-style boxing gym Dogpound. We spent a fabulous morning being barked at to finish our pushups while filling each other in on all the latest gossip. I was surprised that I didn’t once miss the typical nightlife social scene. Being at Dogpound, with the music and the dark lights, it’s an adrenaline rush. It was early in the morning, but it felt the way being out at a bar at 9 p.m. used to feel.
One of the hottest classes of the moment is Bari, a hard-core cardio workout that involves bouncing on a mini-trampoline to rap music surrounded by Danish models-turned-mommies.
When I first walked in, I felt like I was in a casting call for perfect human specimens to play robots in some sci-fi movie. Everyone was very tall and blond.
I started off as a skeptic, but these days I’m as much a group class addict as Gigi Hadid, Chloë Grace Moretz, Katie Couric and all my West Village mom and fashion-fit friends and co-workers. It’s not just about the exercise — it’s like a church or a social club (or maybe a cult).
I have to admit that these days if I don’t get to at least four “classes” a week, I’m a mess. The sleeplessness and irritability that blighted my life for so many years come zooming back. My skin breaks out. I snap at the kids and the husband. And I find myself craving meat and candy, and wondering if I need to go back on Ambien again.
And I’m not the only one addicted to the results: It seems like whenever I go to school pickup, I meet yet another mother who has dropped 15 pounds ahead of her 50th birthday.
I’m still shocked by my own transformation; three years ago, my exercise routine consisted of waving one hand in the air and shouting, “Taxi!”
I could never have imagined trading my chardonnay for edible clay.
But I have to admit my mud-munching friend looks pretty amazing.
My first batch of clay is arriving from South America next week.
Lucy Sykes, former fashion director of Marie Claire and Rent the Runway, is the best-selling co-author of the 2015 chick-lit novel “The Knockoff.” A British transplant who moved to New York City in 1997, she lives in Manhattan with her husband and two sons.
