This Moroccan boot camp has all your health and wellness needs worked out – but can you really lose weight and get fit in a week?

My body has aches in places even an anatomist wouldn’t know existed, and I am cold to the bone, as our assault course drill is in the middle of a huge storm. There is also thunder in the stony heart of my personal trainer, nicknamed “The Terminator”. His shoe is pressed into the small of my back and my chin has also found a new companion, a glut of mud. In fact, we are being run ragged (and even humiliated), until literally on our knees, by a no-nonsense staff whose only objective is making sure their clients shed a severe amount of poundage.

This is the nightmare vision many of us have of fitness-cum-weight-loss military boot camps, so there is a lot of trepidation about what to expect as I rock up to the one New You Escapes organise in Morocco every June.

Billed as a luxury health and wellness holiday, our splendid hotel, La Maison des Oliviers, where we will do most our activity programme, definitely looks the part – visualise traditional Moroccan riad design, quaint courtyards, swaying palm trees and immaculate swimming pools. It’s around a 10-minute drive from the centre of the country’s fourth largest city: bustling Marrakech.

The rest of the group on the course are women; 12 in all, of varying ages – over half are millennials – from Western countries, although some Asians have taken part previously. At 7.30am sharp on the first morning of the programme, we meet the New You Escapes team: Yusimi, the charismatic boot camp manager; nutritionist and yoga teacher, Rosa; and Dave, the physical training instructor (his former role in Britain’s Royal Air Force). Bald, stout and with forearms as thick as lampposts, it looks as if he could run through brick walls – just as long as he does not expect me to bulldoze them down, too, during my weight loss exertions.

At the induction, I feel slightly the guinea pig because a series of vital statistics are taken with a tape measure: biceps, thighs, waist and – the one I dread most owing to my comfort eating – the buttocks. One’s fat percentage, total body water, optimal ranges, body mass index (BMI) and metabolic rate are also calculated, inter alia – so it all appears a tad scientific. And then Dave asks me my goal for the week. Still a bit worried about what awaits me, I whisper: “To survive”.

On a typical training day, which lasts from 7.30am until 7pm, there are three intense, 60-minute sessions.

For instance, on the first one, we do “Morning Glory” where, despite the risqué title, the only thing that is stiff are certain leg muscles after a deluge of shuttle runs on a sandy dirt track in the hotel grounds; a boxing stint that enables my inner Rocky to emerge, as it involves hitting a partner’s pads with uppercuts, hooks and various combinations; and “Tonne-up”, an uber-tough workout of 10 different circuit exercises (abdominal crunches, press ups and walking lunges, etc) that we do 10 sets each of in a particular sequence, which specifically target distinct sections of the body – upper, lower and core.

As we do 10 sets (if we are able) in this drill, the final result is an astonishing 1,000 individual exercises. “This high-volume session is included as it shows that if clients put their mind to it, they can overcome any sort of mental or physical barrier,” says Dave.

That being said, after such a long initial day, lying on the floor with a body that could not seem more wrecked if I had done the Great Wall marathon carrying a sack of potatoes, for a nanosecond I think: “What the hell am I doing here?” Surely putting myself through such a vigorous schedule in an attempt to shrink my moobs just isn’t worth it.