Student reveals how a lick of Marmite sent her into a PANIC ATTACK after she became obsessed with clean eating and losing weight
WHEN a lick of Marmite sent Eliza Moyse into a full-blown panic attack, she realised her “wellness” obsession had spiralled out of control.
A disciplined eater, Eliza had dutifully swapped pasta for courgetti and cut out refined food, dairy and gluten.
What she hadn’t realised was she’d developed an eating disorder in the process.
Until, that is, she was faced with a blob of Marmite.
“It was part of a science experiment at school in 2014, when I was 16, and I couldn’t refuse,” remembers Eliza.
“But afterwards, I was in a complete state because I’d just eaten some processed food. I went and hid in the loos and had a panic attack.”
Ridiculous as it may have sounded a decade ago, making spaghetti out of courgettes and juice out of kale has become a massive part of today’s wellness movement, and the industry is worth around £24trillion globally.**
The trend has seen the advent of spiralizers, NutriBullets and spirulina powder, and from 2015-16 avocado sales increased by 31% in the UK alone.***
Meanwhile, wellness pundits such as Deliciously Ella, Madeleine Shaw and the Hemsley sisters have published bestselling books, launched apps, opened cafes and embarked on lucrative collaborations with beauty and fitness brands.
But now experts are questioning whether our obsession with clean eating is actually damaging thousands of vulnerable women – and not just impressionable teens.
Dietetic and nutrition practitioner Ursula Philpot says she’s seen an increase in women in their 20s and 30s struggling with disordered eating like orthorexia nervosa – an obsession with clean eating – as a result of following this sort of regime.
Plus, researchers from UCL recently found that 3% of women in their 40s and 50s have an eating disorder – which is significantly higher than previously thought.
“Disordered eating often starts with people just wanting to get healthy by cutting out stuff,” explains Ursula.
“They avoid gluten, then dairy products. But it ends up with them living off just rice and veg, which is unsustainable, so they become secret binge eaters.”
She also points out that the language used within the wellness movement is hugely triggering.
“A clean diet – what does that mean?” she asks.
“If you don’t eat in that way you’re somehow dirty?”
One clean eating expert who spectacularly fell from grace is the Australian blogger Belle Gibson, 25.
She claimed she’d been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009 and cured it with healthy eating.
Rights to her book and app, both called The Whole Pantry, were snapped up.
But then in March 2015 she was unmasked as a fraud, after donations pledged to cancer charities failed to materialise.
Belle admitted to inventing the whole story and is currently subject to a federal court case in Australia.
Deanne Jade, founder of the National Centre For Eating Disorders, says one of the reasons the clean eating trend is so appealing is because it doesn’t focus on weight loss.
“The target is not about shedding pounds, but being healthy, which taps into society’s general feeling that diets don’t work,” explains Deanne.
“However, the people who are most likely to follow this are those who are not psychologically healthy, and that’s the problem.”
This is what happened with Eliza, now 19, who is studying religious studies and theology at the University of Leeds.
Her obsession started after she read a fitness blogger’s Instagram post in 2012, which said clean eating could improve your energy and complexion.
Eliza and her friend Sarah* decided to give it a go.
“It seemed simple enough – eat less refined sugar and processed food,” she remembers.
“So we chucked out all the junk we ate like crisps and cookies.”
However, while Sarah’s interest quickly waned, Eliza stayed focused.
“I liked how in control I felt,” she admits.
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Within weeks, Eliza was making all her food from scratch, from smoothies to sauces.
“If friends went out for pizza I wouldn’t go, as I didn’t want to eat anything made from ‘dirty’ ingredients,” she remembers.
“It didn’t take long for the invites to stop coming and my friendship group shrunk to just two close friends.”
Although she never weighed herself, Eliza noticed that within six months her clothes were getting looser.
“First it was my jeans, and then I realised that my bra was saggier than usual,” she remembers.
“Over time, nothing fitted my 5ft 8in frame properly, but I just ignored it. As far as I was concerned, losing weight was a sign that I was getting ‘healthy’.
“That was until the Marmite incident, when it started to dawn on me that maybe things had gone too far. But even then, I wasn’t ready to turn my back on clean eating, because I was afraid of feeling overweight.”
Eliza’s worried parents Rod, 55, and Jane, 53, often raised their concerns with her, but it wasn’t until June 2014 that they made a breakthrough.
“We were in a restaurant and I just couldn’t eat a grain of my risotto,” remembers Eliza.
“My parents looked at me with such concern, it was like finally waking up. I simply said to them: ‘I’m not well.’ And I could see relief wash over them.”
Over the next few weeks, Rod and Jane helped Eliza introduce foods back into her diet that she wouldn’t normally eat, such as pasta and bread, and took her to see a counsellor.
“It really helped,” she says. “I slowly began to change my attitude and realised that pre-prepared foods aren’t ‘bad’ or ‘dirty’.
These days, my relationship with food is a lot better.
I love to experience new tastes and eat out, and enjoy desserts and chocolate like everyone else.”
Eliza admits that nearly three years of clean eating saw her spend hundreds of pounds on food and gadgets.
A hoarder, she’d keep a stockpile of “just in case” items such as apples and health bars in her cabinet, as well as spiralizers and NutriBullets.
When the food expired or started to rot, she would replace but never eat it.
“It took me so long to realise I had an eating disorder,” she admits.
"l thought I was a normal girl who ate according to the clean eating trend. After all, the experts were full of facts and figures, so how could they be wrong?”
But it’s not just impressionable teens falling into the clean eating trap.
Yoga teacher Catherine Forrester, 31, fell victim in her late-20s after she began following the original wave of wellness bloggers six years ago.
“It began as a simple case of wanting to be healthier,” Catherine remembers.
“So I started following a handful of clean eating ‘experts’ whose regimes promised to give me more energy and make me feel happy and healthy. It made perfect sense.”
However, Catherine, who was studying history of science at UCL at the time, admits her diet quickly turned “slightly insane”.
“Before I started it, I was a vegetarian, but I ended up cutting out dairy, eggs, seafood, refined carbs and processed foods,” she remembers.
“I was vigilant with exercise, too – cycling everywhere and doing hot yoga all the time. It left me feeling exhausted. I certainly didn’t feel particularly healthy.”
Catherine recalls that the terminology used in clean eating also had a profound effect.
“I had to eat ‘right’,” she remembers.
“So I had lots of salad, pulses, raw veg and wholegrains. The beauty of it was I never considered it a diet – after all, it didn’t involve calorie counting as I could eat as many raw courgettes as I wanted.”
However, as she dropped from a size 12 to 10, she felt anxious if she ever accidentally ate ‘bad’ food.
“I told myself it was the same as self-harming,” she admits.
“I’d also feel so jealous of anyone who could eat what they wanted and still seem healthy.”
On one occasion in August 2011, Catherine berated her then-boyfriend for putting too many raisins in her porridge.
“I yelled at him, shouting he might as well be giving me a cheeseburger,” she says.
“Looking back, it was ridiculous, but I truly believed it.”
Catherine eventually stopped clean eating once she finished her course in September 2011.
“I’d been putting huge pressure on myself with my studies, so once I took that away it gave me the breathing space and courage to relax my diet. I began eating the odd biscuit and takeaway curry. I soon realised that cauliflower rice is not a substitute for rice, and that cooking is meant to be fun, not a punishment.”
Now Catherine teaches yoga and advises people on how to prepare simple, nutritious meals.
“I always stick by the government guidelines around healthy eating, which is to eat a balance of all of the food groups, rather than focus on one food being more important than anything else,” she says.
“If anyone asks me about clean eating, I say that a lot of the wellness bloggers might have some recipes that you want to try, but just be aware that you need a lot of variety in your diet. I am wary of people who restrict foods, as it means you are missing out on so much – not just nutritionally, but in every aspect of your life.”
Comedian Bella Younger, AKA Deliciously Stella, has been taking the mickey out of clean eating gurus since 2015, by posting her own pictures of “green juice” (bottles of Sprite and gin rather than liquidised kale) on Instagram.
It’s made her into a social media star, with over 140,000 followers and an eponymous recipe book.
“I think the whole thing is puritanical and smug, and everyone needed a bit of a reality check,” explains Bella, 29.
“People are living in a fantasy land if they think that lifestyle is achievable.”
Sales of clean eating books are starting to slow, while Nigella Lawson and Jennifer Lawrence are just two celebrities who have voiced their concerns about the trend.
In retaliation, a new book, which debunks the myths of clean eating, is predicted to fly off the shelves when it goes on sale in May.
Written by junior doctor Hazel Wallace, The Food Medic gives evidence-based, scientific advice on creating a balanced, healthy diet.
And last month, BBC’s Horizon: Clean Eating: The Dirty Truth documentary added to the debate.
In response to the backlash, Ella Mills – who was left bed-bound after being diagnosed with a rare disease of the nervous system and claimed healthy eating cured her – told the Horizon programme: “My problem with the word ‘clean’ is it has become too complicated. It has become too loaded. When I first read the term, it meant natural, unprocessed. Now it doesn’t mean that at all. It means diet; fad.”
But fad or not, Ursula says it’s time to put aside clean food recipes.
She advises if you want to be fit and healthy, simply apply common sense.
“If you think about women who live long, healthy lives, they have everything in moderation,” she says. “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods, or ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ people, just diets that lack balance, or don’t. It’s that simple.”
*Name has been changed. Sources **Global Wellness Institute ***IRI
Visit . Deliciously Stella by Bella Younger (£9.99, Penguin)