Here’s What a Fad Diet Taught Me About Health
Key takeaways:
Jacqueline Alnes was an elite college athlete when a mysterious illness caused her to experience seizures and memory loss — forcing her to quit the team.
Desperate for a cure, Jacqueline stumbled on fruitarianism and started an extreme diet.
It took years to conquer her disordered eating mindset, but she learned many lessons about health, diet and our culture. She shares them in her new book “The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour.”
In 2009, Jacqueline Alnes was an elite Division I cross country athlete at Elon University in North Carolina. She lifted weights every morning with her team, ran every afternoon, and went to pasta parties on Friday nights.
And then, over winter break, the freshman developed a cough.
“I really didn’t think that much of it because you’re always sick when you’re in the dorms,” Jacqueline says. Little did she know it was the beginning of a mysterious medical journey that would change her life.
In January 2010, her cough still hadn’t gone away. So she decided to see the athletic doctor, who prescribed her azithromycin, an antibiotic often referred to as a “Z-Pak.” But 6 weeks later, she was experiencing increasingly alarming symptoms: episodes of blurry vision, slurred speech, and memory loss. Jacqueline knew her sickness was something more serious.
Jacqueline received other diagnoses over the next year. At first, her doctors suspected vestibular neuritis, an inner-ear infection. Or maybe she was experiencing complex partial seizures, which are often associated with epilepsy. She tried various prescribed medications that would sometimes help at first, but her symptoms always returned.
By the beginning of her sophomore year, Jacqueline was unable to compete in races. Feeling as though her doctors, coaches and teammates didn’t believe her symptoms — or worse, they thought she was making it up — Jacqueline quit the team.
Turning to Google for answers
A year and half later, Jacqueline’s episodes had become so frequent that even walking was difficult. She dropped her classes and moved home to live with her parents in Oklahoma.
Isolated in her room and desperate for answers, Jacqueline did what most people do with their health questions, and she turned to the Internet: Am I epileptic? Do I have seizures? Will I be able to walk again? Of course, Google didn’t have answers for any of these questions. And that’s when she landed on a now-defunct website about “The Frugivore Diet” — formerly known as “30 Bananas a Day.”
“At first, I thought it was funny, [the idea that you could] eat 30 bananas a day and you can heal yourself from anything, which is absurd on face value,” Jacqueline says. “But then I kept going back to the site, and I found this page on it called ‘Testify.’ And that was where all the people who had found the site tell you how their lives have changed.”
The testimonials touting fruitarianism — a highly restrictive vegan diet — made it sound to Jacqueline like most health ailments could be cured or prevented by eating only fruit. The idea appealed to her because their rhetoric matched how she felt inside — not only that there was something wrong with her and it was her fault, but that she had the power to fix it, and maybe that power lay in a new way of eating.
She dove in. “The website [said] oil was evil, so I cut out oil. I cut out peanut butter. I cut out a lot of stuff. I was basically eating carrots dipped into salsa, vegetables cooked in water, pure oatmeal without any fat added to it, spinach salad with vinegar,” she says. “I never went full fruitarian, I just developed a really warped eating disorder.”
Finding balance after extreme dieting
Though Jacqueline followed the diet for only a few months, she says it took years to undo the damage of her extreme mindset. Now recovered, Jacqueline is sharing her health story with others in her new book “The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour.” Here are a few things she learned and wants others to know.
1. Foods are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’
“Even though I only experienced a period of acute disordered eating for a few months, it took me 7 years to finally go to a nutritionist and finally eat well,” Jacqueline says. “It’s because I still held on to these beliefs of ‘this [food] is evil.’ ‘This is good.’”
She learned from dietitians that when you label food as good or bad, it starts to affect the way you view yourself. When you eat a “bad” food, you think you are “bad,” which is an unhealthy mindset, she says.
2. ‘New’ diets aren’t new
In her research for the book, Jacqueline learned the fruitarian diet has been around a long time. In fact, she found that many fad diets on social media are recycled trends from the past.
“People have been experiencing this same [narrative] for hundreds of years,” she says. “There’s always a new trend word to signify what is ‘pure.’ But it all comes from the same impulse to ‘purify yourself from toxins.’ And people just market it in different ways.”
3. We have to stop the blame game
When someone is sick, Jacqueline says, we all too often ask them questions that imply a personal failing caused the illness. What have you eaten? Do you exercise too much or too little? Have you slept? Have you tried yoga? Or this green juice?
It’s this blame game that Jacqueline says paved the way for her disordered eating: If she were to blame for her illness, then she could fix it. Jacqueline says she also carried a lot of internalized ableism before she experienced her own health issues.
“I [thought] people who were sick hadn’t done enough, or they just weren’t strong enough somehow,” she says. “Now I know people can have a range of experiences in their bodies, and [they should be] accepted and treated with care and with respect rather than judgment.”
4. You are your best advocate
During the first few years with her unusual symptoms, Jacqueline struggled with the idea that the authority figures in her life — her coach, athletic doctor, and neurologist — were telling her she was fine, while her body was telling her something different.
“I started to think I was crazy and viewed myself as a failure, rather than viewing like the adults around me as being in any way responsible for saying, ‘Yeah, maybe you know something bigger is going on with you,’” she says.
It took 9 years to find a doctor who pinpointed triggers for her episodes and diligently worked with her to manage them. The experience helped her realize how important finding good care is.
“I think at the end of the day, if you're not getting what you need, you have to do what you can to get that, whether that means switching doctors or voicing [your concerns] again,” Jacqueline says. “At times when I have advocated because I've had a hunch something is wrong, it has turned out in the end that I was right about my body and that it just took someone listening a little bit more or doing one more test or thinking with me creatively about solutions to a problem, and it worked. And that feels satisfying.”
Living in the gray and finding the joy
Jacqueline was devastated when she had to quit her cross-country team in college. But looking back, she says the sport was just another way to exert control over her life, much like her extreme approach to food.
Now, she’s back to running every day with friends, but it’s like being on “a different kind of team,” she says.
And after years of looking for black and white answers, Jacqueline works toward being comfortable in the gray. “Food is not good or bad. Running is not this form of control,” she says. “[I’m] releasing all of those different ways I used to try to assert control and just experience them with joy instead.”
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