We need to talk about Sarah Wilson.
For those who aren't familiar with her, Sarah Wilson is a well-known Australian media personality and a former editor of Cosmo magazine who is the face of the wildly popular no-sugar fad. She used to have a column in Sunday Life magazine where she would try 'tips and tricks for daily living' every week and write about them. One of her assignments was to cut out sugar for a week; the concept obviously sat well with her, because she began writing about her attempts to cut out sugar on her personal blog. What started as a one-woman quest quickly burgeoned into an empire of diet plans (sorry, "challenges"), cookbooks, and TV appearances galore, abetted by pseudo-scientific claims endorsed by one man, David Gillespie. Like thousands of other suckers, I avidly followed her blog, snapped up her first cookbook online, and attempted one of her no-sugar challenges. Anyway, long story short, I went to a therapist, realised that all diets are stupid, and stopped reading her blog. The end.
Today I returned to her blog in a fit of procrastination in the vain hope that she might have returned to writing about something other than no-sugar (I like her funny yet gently self-effacing tone, and used to also enjoy her life philosophies before they became extreme), and came across this post: I Ate Sugar. After about two and a half years sugar-free, the poor lady ate two chocolate croissants.
Let me make this clear. She is not a fraud because she ate sugar. Instead, I admire Sarah for writing that piece, because it so clearly illustrates why cutting out food groups or creating rigid rules will never 'cure' us emotionally. Her angle on this fad has always been health rather than weight loss, as she suffers from an autoimmune disease. If she cut out sugary foods purely for this reason, then I don't think she would have a problem. However, lurking under the surface has always been the emotional aspect. She tells us that eating the croissants was a deeply ingrained way of dealing with strong emotions, as it is for so many of us. She acknowledges in her books that one of her motivations for cutting out sugar was to feel "cool" around sweets, because she felt out of control around them. Instead of working through these emotions, she has tried to control the food. This is a common strategy for those of us with disordered eating. Yet she has never recognised it as such.
The alarm bells start to ring when she speaks of being overwhelmed by "vile guilt" about eating the croissants. As many people commented on the blog piece, this behaviour was familiar to them as binge eaters or people with disordered eating. Rather than allowing herself to feel the emotions fully, or even eating the croissants and then sitting with those emotions, binge eating for Sarah did what it always does- redirects the focus from the emotions to the food. She says that it took her all day to feel 'normal' again. That suggests that maybe her definition of normal is too tightly controlled, either in terms of food or emotionally.
The real problem is not Sarah's personal struggle, but that she has a large readership of people who will read this piece and take from it that the response to a binge should be 'getting back on the horse' to avoid future dieting failure. Some of the comments I read were lovely messages on nurturing the body and soul and treating oneself with love and compassion. However, many others spoke of their guilt and frustration of their inability to "conquer" sugar and carbs, "failing" at diets, and even binge eating. One commenter wrote of her failure to adhere to the sugarfree regime, "Stress has stopped me from being focused". It has probably never occurred to her that the stress is what she should be focusing on, not the diet. Furthermore, by adopting aforementioned pseudo-science to claim that sugar is as addictive as cocaine (remember when carbs were the enemy? Or fat?), Sarah has moralised food and so moralised the eater of food. If you follow the diet, you are good. If you slip up and eat cake, you are bad.
Ultimately, I can sit here on my high horse and feel smug that Sarah and her readers are dumb for believing that cutting out a food group will end all their worries, but I struggle just as much as they do. Sarah's public persona is not that of someone who propagates lies to make a quick buck; I am sure that she wants an end to the binge eating/restricting cycle as much as I or her readers do. However, this has convinced me more than ever that restrictions of any type will not ease your emotional pain. Dieting truly does not make you happy, because a binge is always just one strong emotion anyway. If you "slip up", either from intuitive eating or otherwise, treat yourself with kindness and compassion. At the end of the day, you are only human.
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