{"id":57348,"date":"2024-09-25T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2024-09-25T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=57348"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:38","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:38","slug":"stomaching-wellness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/stomaching-wellness\/","title":{"rendered":"Stomaching Wellness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was bad because I couldn\u2019t run, bad because I wasn\u2019t sick enough to have a diagnosis but also bad because I was symptomatic enough to be in a wheelchair, bad because I couldn\u2019t will my body into submission the way that I thought I should be able to.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The internalized ableism on display in this sentence from Jacqueline Alnes\u2019s The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour <\/em>can be painful to read. But her admission offers a vital window into how a culture that devalues disabled and ill bodies feeds a wellness industry that often traffics in harmful deception and outright scams.1<\/a><\/sup> Part investigative journalism and part personal illness narrative, The Fruit Cure<\/em> recounts how a lack of medical explanations for the neurological episodes that impaired Alnes\u2019s speech and mobility during her first year of college led her to the wellness website 30 Bananas a Day. There, a pair of toned, white, Australian influencers who called themselves \u201cDurianrider\u201d and \u201cFreelee The Banana Girl\u201d insisted that a diet consisting almost entirely of raw fruit would perfect her body by alleviating diverse ailments and helping her lose weight. The diet, as she saw it then, would make her \u201cgood.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Desperate for answers and compelled by Durianrider and Freelee\u2019s claims to have healed themselves through their radical diet, Alnes found herself mired in this online world of fruitarianism. As she began to \u201cvilify\u201d certain foods and severely restrict her eating, Alnes developed her own \u201cfar-fetched\u201d and self-blaming explanations for her illness. She acknowledges that such anxieties \u201cwere easier to grapple with than the state of my health as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through an extended investigation of fruitarianism\u2019s past and present champions, Alnes shows how the wellness industry can exploit chronically ill people while providing a poor substitute for more sustainable and affirming forms of self- and community care. While chronic illness memoirs often apply a critical lens to biomedicine, The Fruit Cure <\/em>interrogates how the wellness industry fails and exploits those whom biomedicine, too, has been unable to relieve. As Alnes shows, the wellness industry positions itself as a health resource and an alternative to an insufficient health care system, making chronically ill and disabled people among its primary targets.<\/p>\n

This examination of the intersection of chronic illness, ableism, and wellness makes a generative intervention into the genre of illness narratives. It\u2019s not merely the wellness industry\u2019s propensity to scam and exploit that makes it dangerous, though certainly that dynamic is central. Rather, Alnes\u2019s story demonstrates that the wellness industry\u2019s promotion and legitimization of ableist self-perceptions makes it an especially dangerous force in the lives of the chronically ill. Alnes articulates how wellness messaging distorted her relationship to her own body by perpetuating rather than disrupting an ableism that alienated her from her disability. She details how, once she adopted her restrictive, supposedly healing diet, giving it up would mean letting go of a relentless pursuit of able-bodiedness and accepting her disability: \u201chow would I know I was worthy of care?\u201d she writes. Alnes demonstrates the tight interconnection between, on the one hand, an ableist culture that views wellness as an outcome of individual morality and discipline, and on the other, a wellness industry that profits from selling the scam that we can self-improve ourselves toward a cure.<\/p>\n

\n

Critiques of what is increasingly referred to as the \u201cwellness industrial complex\u201d are nothing new. In fact, both wellness claims and critiques of them have proliferated over the past decade. Even as wellness culture flourishes online and in the marketplace, many have become increasingly attuned to the ways in which the wellness industry repackages thin, white, able-bodied beauty standards as \u201chealth\u201d; exploits consumer\u2019s very real mental and physical suffering in the interest of making a profit; and replaces collective social change with individual solutions to a host of problems.3<\/a><\/sup> While the concept of \u201cself-care\u201d is grounded in the history of community-oriented initiatives led by activist groups such as the Black Panther Party, the wellness industry distorts that tradition, replacing mutual aid with consumerism.4<\/a><\/sup> As Alnes puts it, \u201cThere are profits to be made from making people believe in an illusion of the thing they want most,\u201d and those potential gains only motivate influencers to continue promising unlikely solutions and doling out diagnoses for various chronic illnesses.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the book is at its strongest when Alnes interrogates the link between wellness and chronic illness, examining how the former advocates ableist \u201ccures\u201d that valorize a rigid notion of fitness and individualize health as a moral imperative. A Division I collegiate runner at the time her symptoms begin to appear, Alnes reveals how important able-bodiedness was to her self-image before she became ill. \u201cMy entire self-worth hinged upon my ability to run well,\u201d she admits early in the book when describing the \u201cdangerous\u201d play-through-the-pain mentality common to elite athletics. Her tenacious commitment to performing her able-bodiedness by running even when injured eerily resonates with the self-punishing wellness protocols she later adopts.<\/p>\n

Alnes, whose condition remains undiagnosed, understands why so many people distrust biomedicine and turn to wellness. She describes how both the frustrations of medical misunderstanding and the discrimination that marginalized communities face in clinical settings leads many to seek alternative answers. At the same time, she shows how wellness influencers perpetuate their own harms by exploiting the needs and desires of those seeking care. \u201cWhen you are in the throes of illness,\u201d Alnes explains, \u201c\u2026 there is something comforting about distilling the world into dichotomies: sick or well, bad or good, off-limits or completely nutritious. When so much seems unknowable about the very body you live in, it feels nice to land on a firm platform \u2026 even if the very platform itself is a false reality.\u201d The fantasy of clarity that such binary thinking offers comes at a steep cost. By promising that complying with strict dietary or other self-care protocols will cure what ails you, Alnes argues, wellness influencers insist that still-suffering followers have no one to blame but themselves\u2014a narrative that fuels ableist ideology.<\/p>\n

Buying into wellness culture can also deepen physical and mental suffering by encouraging a fatphobic politics that harmfully elevates thinness as the pinnacle of health. As registered dietician Christy Harrison, who also lives with chronic illnesses, explains in her book, The Wellness Trap<\/em>, supposedly beneficial wellness practices such as restrictive dieting can, in some cases, actually cause chronic illness symptoms such as gastrointestinal distress and amenorrhea. They can (though don\u2019t always) also encourage orthorexia, a form of disordered eating characterized by fixating on consuming \u201chealthy\u201d foods.5<\/a><\/sup> Though the influencers who published their claims on 30 Bananas a Day promised that their fruit-based diet could be a form of treatment for eating disorders, Alnes reveals that a slim physique was always part of the able-bodied ideal they sold viewers. Indeed, she notes that the combination of anti-fat messaging and demonizing of a host of foods promoted on the site \u201ctoe[d] the thin line between \u2018health\u2019 and disordered eating.\u201d
\n<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe Fruit Cure\u201d signals the urgency of disabled communities, digital and otherwise, that can nourish rather than punish chronically ill bodies.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nDespite the clear and manifold injuries she illustrates, Alnes is wary of coming down too hard on alternatives to biomedicine. Her primary critiques are of \u201cextremism\u201d and the unregulated naturopathic marketplace\u2014not alternative remedies themselves. She points out that before they posed a danger to others\u2019 health, Durianrider and Freelee were drawn to restrictive dieting by their own experiences with illness. The problem, in her eyes, is not fruitarianism and similar diets, but the ways that they have been weaponized for power and monetary gains. She traces fruitarianism\u2019s colonial origins and the role that racism has played in its anti-fat foundations, but she also critiques media coverage of 30 Bananas a Day that employs ableist language to dismiss the diet as \u201cinsane.\u201d Though some may find her unwillingness to condemn the diet frustrating, Alnes repeatedly acknowledges that what we eat is shaped not only by health but also by culture, access, religion, and ethics. \u201cTo reduce a diet to \u2018good\u2019 or \u2018bad,\u2019\u201d she explains, \u201cwould be perpetuating the same harms caused by certain extreme fad diets themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

At times, Alnes\u2019s critique is sometimes blunted by her emphasis on the personalities and sagas of Durianrider and Freelee themselves. Of course, the book is in part about<\/em> Alnes\u2019s fascination with these influencers, but it can be difficult to share in that fascination as a reader, especially given the strong case that The Fruit Cure<\/em> makes against paying attention to them. Though Alnes writes that she is \u201cless interested in the drama of YouTube and more invested in what these situations can teach us about intersections between profit, personal responsibility, and wellness culture,\u201d she devotes a few too many pages to detailing the scandalous hypocrisy of the influencers who, as it turns out, also found their own advice unsustainable, as well as the allegations of sexual harassment against one of them. Fans of scam documentaries of all kinds and especially of the popular podcast Maintenance Phase<\/em><\/a> will enjoy her extensive and careful reporting, but zeroing in on the specific faults of the 30 Bananas a Day stars somewhat distracts from Alnes\u2019s critique of wellness culture as a whole and the compulsory able-bodiedness that undergirds it.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, The Fruit Cure<\/em> is a thoughtfully researched book that weaves together journalism and historical research to contextualizes the illness narrative at its core. Indeed, Alnes never lets the reader forget that we are reading an illness narrative, and she pushes us to consider our expectations of the genre. Perhaps it is unsurprising that in a text centered on consequential fruit consumption, Alnes frequently invokes the garden of Eden. Her interest in the Book of Genesis leads her to offer what she refers to as multiple \u201corigin stories\u201d in the first half of the book, signaling the difficulty of pinpointing a defined starting point when narrating illness. Her identity as a runner also clearly informs her thinking about starting and finish lines. About a year after her symptoms pushed her to leave the college track team, Alnes ran a marathon, an occasion that she notes would have offered a satisfying conclusion for many readers. \u201cPart of me wishes I could end my story here, at this marathon,\u201d she writes, \u201cI could say: I overcame my symptoms, I returned to my sport, I was whole \u2026. But it wasn\u2019t the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The<\/em> Fruit Cure<\/em>\u2019s actual ending is far less conclusive than what Arthur Frank calls the \u201crestitution narrative\u201d of illness.6<\/a><\/sup> Alnes reveals that she still experiences unexplained neurological symptoms, but that she has learned both how to manage them and to accept her imperfect body. She takes care to differentiate the quick-fix promise of \u201ccure\u201d from the slower process of \u201chealing,\u201d which she explains requires \u201cacknowledg[ing] and work[ing] to remedy the real issue.\u201d For Alnes, healing has largely involved coming to terms with her disabled identity. For example, she describes registering for disability services during graduate school and seeking support for disordered eating recovery from a nutritionist. When she writes that \u201chealing is still ongoing\u201d and \u201cprobably always will be,\u201d she doesn\u2019t mean that she is still pursuing a cure for her illness; rather she underscores how difficult it remains to disentangle her self-worth from \u201cthe forces that once held [her] in their grip.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to differentiating between \u201ccure\u201d and \u201chealing,\u201d Alnes introduces a third term to characterize what she sought from wellness culture: relief. \u201cI found relief,\u201d she writes, \u201cin people like me sharing their symptoms openly online.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup> Indeed, when she found 30 Bananas a Day, she hoped that it would alleviate not only her \u201csickness\u201d but also the \u201cloneliness\u201d that she acknowledges so often accompanies being disabled in an ableist world. Throughout The<\/em> Fruit Cure<\/em>, she describes how the onset of symptoms left her isolated among her collegiate peers. In some of the most troubling passages in the book, she recalls teammates mocking her neurological symptoms, especially her impaired speech. She also describes feeling stigmatized as a wheelchair user on campus, which contributed to her spending most of her time alone in her room. The message boards on 30 Bananas a Day relieved that pain by offering her \u201ca salve for solitude.\u201d
\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Eating Out in the Apocalypse<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Molly MacVeagh <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/p>\n

Offline, though, it\u2019s clear that the advice wellness culture had to offer actually hindered her ability to form and appreciate community. She recalls feeling \u201cperpetually in a state of anxiety about how I would participate in group events while not saying out loud what I had begun to believe\u201d about food and health. Though, after quitting the track team, Alnes eventually found an affirming home among her two roommates, her restrictive eating habits left her, as she puts it, on the \u201csidelines\u201d of the dinner table where those bonds might otherwise have been nurtured or relished. What starts out sounding like a forum for validation and belonging among disabled community quickly converted into an echo chamber of affirmation for wellness practices that are not only dangerous but isolating.<\/p>\n

The relief that Alnes found upon reading accounts like her own online is exactly what makes the illness memoir itself such an appealing genre. Online communities have the added benefit of polyvocality, reassuring readers that they are in good company despite their feelings of isolation. For Alnes, who \u201cfor so many years \u2026 longed to be the girl on the team, someone who belonged, racing around a bend,\u201d the 30 Bananas a Day site offered her the opportunity to join a new team, but one that carried the same pressures of bodily performance and conformity. \u201cThe messaging is elementary but clear,\u201d she writes of the site, \u201cstay with the group,\u201d meaning don\u2019t slip up on the diet, \u201cand your life will be better.\u201d Reading these lines, I wished that Alnes had found a different kind of chronically ill community, one she could \u201ckeep up with\u201d by reading and engaging with their stories rather than by restricting herself alongside them. In another version of this narrative, she might have found a community premised not on wellness or cure, but on the \u201crelief\u201d that can come from solidarity and mutual support. Though The Fruit Cure <\/em>reads largely as a cautionary tale against being consumed by wellness, it also signals the urgency of disabled communities, digital and otherwise, that can nourish rather than punish chronically ill bodies.<\/p>\n

  1. On the importance of critics of contemporary wellness discourses grounded in the perspectives of disabled people of color in particular, see Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk, \u201cReclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care: A Crip-of-Color Critique,\u201d South Atlantic Quarterly<\/em> 120, no. 2 (April 1, 2021): 325\u201342. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. In this review, I deliberately avoid including detailed accounts of Alnes\u2019s and others\u2019 restrictive dieting practices so as to avoid inadvertently promoting them. See also National Eating Disorders Association, \u201cSharing Your Story Publicly.\u201d<\/a> \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. See for example Rina Raphael, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care<\/em> (Macmillan, 2022); Amanda Hess, \u201cOur Health Is in Danger. Wellness Wants to Fill the Void<\/a>,\u201d the New York Times<\/em>, April 6, 2020; Marisa Meltzer, \u201cSoak, Steam, Spritz: It\u2019s All Self-Care<\/a>,\u201d the New York Times<\/em>, December 10, 2016; Jenna Wortham, \u201cBody Scrubs, Feather Robes, and Other Failed Experiments in Self-Care<\/a>,\u201d Bon App\u00e9tit<\/em>, January 24, 2017; Aisha Harris, \u201cA History of Self-Care<\/a>,\u201d Slate<\/em>, April 5, 2017; Laurie Penny, \u201cLife-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless<\/a>,\u201d the Baffler<\/em>, July 8, 2016; Jordan Kisner, \u201cThe Politics of Conspicuous Displays of Self-Care<\/a>,\u201d the New Yorker<\/em>, March 14, 2017; Jen Gunter, \u201cWorshiping the False Idols of Wellness,\u201d<\/a> the New York Times<\/em>, August 1, 2018. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  4. Harris, \u201cA History of Self-Care.\u201d<\/a> \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  5. Christy Harrison, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses, and Find Your True Well-Being<\/em> (Little, Brown, 2023). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  6. Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller<\/em> (University of Chicago Press, 1997). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  7. The writer Meghan O\u2019Rourke calls such online patient forums \u201ctoday\u2019s version of the sanatorium.\u201d Meghan O\u2019Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness<\/em> (Riverhead Books, 2022). \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u201cThe wellness industry\u2019s promotion and legitimization of ableist self-perceptions makes it an especially dangerous force in the lives of the chronically ill.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":57349,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[1109,104,1744,189,590,85,1572,33,2416],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1863],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-57348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-ableism","tag-disability","tag-eating","tag-food","tag-health","tag-illness-medicine","tag-melville-house","tag-nonfiction","tag-wellness","section-disability"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStomaching Wellness - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cThe wellness industry\u2019s promotion and legitimization of ableist self-perceptions makes it an especially dangerous force in the lives of the chronically ill.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/stomaching-wellness\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stomaching Wellness - 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