When Her Body Failed Her, She Reached for a Fruitarian Diet. It Wasn’t the Cure. 

It’s January, which means we’re in peak “new year, new you” territory and the wellness industrial complex is firing on all cylinders. Everywhere you turn, someone has a plan, supplement, or product that will miraculously cure you and make your aching, aging body feel better.

But writer, runner, and college professor Jacqueline Alnes wants to remind us that many of these promises are too good to be true. Her new book, The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour, offers her own story as a cautionary tale.

In the spring of 2010, during her freshman year as a Division I collegiate runner, Alnes began experiencing a series of mysterious and debilitating neurological symptoms. Her vision blurred and she was prone to blackouts. At times, she was unable to run, walk, or speak. Her coach, peers, and medical professionals mostly dismissed her symptoms. She eventually quit the team, and spent two years searching for answers. Desperate, she turned to an online fruitarian community called “30 Bananas a Day.” Its proponents claimed that the raw vegan and primarily fruit diet was a cure-all for almost every health condition, including symptoms that were similar to Alnes’. (Alnes didn’t go fully fruitarian, but maintained a vegan diet.)

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The Fruit Cure isn’t just a reckoning with Alnes’ own experience with extreme diets. The book also highlights the flaws in our healthcare system, and interrogates how wellness culture often embraces pseudoscience and preys on people’s vulnerabilities.

I caught up with Alnes to discuss her book’s larger themes: the intersection of illness and athlete identity, the shame many people feel about our never-perfect-enough bodies, and why wellness culture can be so seductive.

OUTSIDE: You write about your experience as a collegiate runner at a Division I school. Despite your debilitating symptoms, everyone—doctors, athletic trainers—kept telling you you were fine, and you kept trying to run in part because you didn’t want to disappoint your coach. How do you think your experience as an athlete highlights bigger systemic issues in sports and athletics?
ALNES: One of the things I think a lot about is compliance. There’s a tenuous balance between wanting to push yourself and not going overboard but also not knowing how to get yourself out of it. When you’re 18 or 19 years old, saying no to your coach is hard. It affects the dynamics on the team, potentially your playing time, your ability to travel with the team.

The insularity of collegiate athletics was nice at times. Everything is there for you—friends, practice, social life. When I realized I was losing that, I realized I hadn’t ever really talked to someone who wasn’t on the team. There weren’t any adults around me who I could go to and who would tell me that it was OK to stop and there wouldn’t be any repercussions in the process.

Recently, one of my students was talking about how universities are obsessed with talking about mental health right now, but the actual lived experiences of students still go unaddressed. In my experience, those resources aren’t publicized. If they do exist, are they a real solution? Are they handing out stress balls? Is it a suggestion box that no one pays attention to? It happens in athletics too, where we have things like sports psychology but that doesn’t deal with the reality of the underlying issue.

You write: “My entire self-worth hinged upon my ability to run well; I couldn’t conceive of myself in any other capacity.” It’s an identity you cultivated since you were a young girl. Do you think that kept you from understanding or accepting that you were ill?
I had such an internalized sense of ableism as a young adult. As a runner, I was taught that if you wanted something badly enough, you could overcome any measure of physical or emotional pain. That messaging seeps into not just how you see yourself, but those around you. You start to think that if girls aren’t giving it their all, it means they aren’t strong enough. If they can’t get over a hip injury, they aren’t trying hard enough. It was like a game to see who could push through the most pain, and there were definitely some people who pushed too far. I remember feeling that I was weak for not being able to get over my symptoms and that it was a personal failing. We need to let athletes know that they can rest, they can falter, they can recover. We don’t hear those narratives as much as we do about the comeback, the win, the underdog.

Your book touches on people’s relationship with their bodies, especially as athletes—how our bodies should look, perform, be controlled—and how we often feel ashamed when our bodies aren’t “perfect.” What did you learn about this through writing the book and reflecting on your experience?
As an athlete, you have this acute awareness of your body, almost like a spidey sense. That also works in illness. I knew fundamentally that something wasn’t right and I couldn’t run through it. But because so many people I trusted—and people who were in positions of authority—told me I was fine, I didn’t trust myself.

Developing a relationship with your body is complicated when you don’t have any external knowledge to validate what you’re going through. It can make you feel like you’re screwed in this sport and you don’t know what to do about it. Seeing the books that are out now, like Lauren Fleshman’s book and your book, I wish I had those when I was younger. I had a male coach in high school. When I slowed down senior year, I didn’t understand why. It could have been easily explained by changes associated with puberty and hormones.

How has the way you view yourself as an athlete evolved since college?
I used to be single-mindedly devoted to this idea that I was a runner. My life was how fast I ran, whether I was better than the girl next to me, whether I sped up or slowed down year to year. Even during my PhD, I ran myself to injury because I would rip off miles as fast as I could every day to prove that I was a runner, that I was worthy.

Giving up running meant giving up my identity. I had to grapple with figuring out what this form of movement means to me outside of those numbers. I had to give up chasing the ghost of who I used to be and who I wanted to be. I learned that you can find real joy and meaning in your body, even if it’s not the perfect, young, acne-free endurance vessel—because none of us are really that. I wish I’d learned to accept that earlier.

Something that used to frustrate me is how the narrative in sports movies often ends on a hopeful note. I’m healthy now. I run marathons and am faster than I was in college. But that grief of losing my old self never went away. The fear of living in a body that was so uncontrollable never left me. I didn’t overcome it.

In your search for answers, you came across a website—30 Bananas a Day. What drew you to it?
During that time, what I craved most was for someone to listen to me. There were so many instances when I said, “I don’t feel well,” and someone told me I was fine. I started to wonder if I will ever return to my body and feel safe in it the way I used to.

I’m laughing because it’s still so absurd, but I read a post on the site from “Shannana Banana.” She also experienced a series of mysterious symptoms. No one could help her, and she lost her life as an athlete. When she found this diet, she got her life back.

I wasn’t ready to say that my symptoms were out of my control—that would be like giving up. When you get sick, there’s some shame in that. People ask what you did or didn’t do to get sick. Did you eat well? Did you try yoga? How much are you sleeping? It may come from a place of love, but it makes the person feel like they aren’t doing enough.

I wanted something where I could say that I was trying my best to get better. This aligned with that narrative—that you have the power to change if you find the right tool, the right drive, the right mentality. With this diet, even if I wasn’t eating only fruit, I could control the toxins entering my body, or at least try to.

One thing that struck me is the isolation of living with illness, how that made you susceptible to the promises of the proponents of “30 Bananas a Day” and how, in the end, it was a real community, not a virtual one, that saved you. Can you talk to me more about that?
On a baseline level, I am a very doubtful, careful person so it’s funny to me that I believed wholeheartedly in this. I think it came from that sense of isolation when you have nowhere left to turn. You will turn to the person who will give you the answer you want to hear.

During that time, it was hard for me to be known. It’s still hard to let people know me. There’s so much internalized shame about my body. I viewed it as bad. I didn’t want to be in it. I didn’t enjoy the way I was in it. What were other people going to think? My college teammates thought I was weird and strange. Would others think I was unlovable in the same way?

But life can be so much richer if you let people see those parts of you that are hard to open up about. There were people who showed up for me time and again, who reminded me that I am myself, with or without this condition. [Editor’s note: Alnes has never received a firm medical diagnosis for her condition but some doctors refer to it as a migraine-seizure variant. She’s on a treatment plan that has successfully kept her episodes at bay.]

Your experience is a powerful critique of the failures of our medical system and how it leaves an opening for wellness culture and influencers to swoop in. Why do you think we are so willing to buy into whatever the wellness industrial complex is selling?
There’s that illusion that you know these people because there’s so much on video, on YouTube, and they use pseudoscientific rhetoric. It draws you in. For me, there was a certain allure that maybe they did know something more than the systems. Researching this book and being online—probably too much—I understand why people have qualms about Big Pharma. It’s that nasty underbelly where people want to make money off of sick people. I get why you want to think an essential oil will cure you of cancer.

Our attention spans are so short now that information has to be digestible and interesting. If someone says, do this one thing and it can help you, it’s more appealing than your doctor telling you to do things in moderation. Instead, you can definitively know that you did something, you took action. It aligns with the idea of shame and this desire to be good.

What do you hope that people take away from your book?
I hope people come away listening to themselves. Even when what’s happening seems improbable or you’re losing a sense of reality, you have to trust that you know what’s going on with yourself and try to find an answer.

It can be really beautiful not to live in extremes, to live with imperfection, and to give yourself permission to change, to be flawed, to have seasons where you may not be as productive. It’s something that I’m still working on.