Vegan Marathons: A Prescription for Recovery?

So I was reading a story about Grammy-winner Alanis Morissette, when a line jumped out at me.  In LimeLife, Meieli Sawyer Detoni writes about Morisette’s metamorphic vegan diet and weight loss after a bout of self-indulgence and weight gain in the wake of a break up with ex Ryan Reynolds. As Detoni describes the nuts and beans, kale and collards, she writes, “the nutrient-rich diet also gave Morissette the fuel to train for and complete a marathon this year, to raise awareness about eating disorders.”

Come again?

A vegan diet to lose weight and train for a marathon – TO RAISE AWARENESS ABOUT EATING DISORDERS?

I’m wondering what therapist would prescribe such a regime to a person with a history of anorexia or bulimia. Reportedly, those two illnesses are in Morisette’s past as are some nasty eating habits. Add in the exercise extreme, and this seems more a recipe for disaster than health, if not the signs of a person jogging around the perimeter of an eating disorder, while not fully recovering.
 
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against veganism, vegetarianism, marathon-running or athletic training. I am a vegetarian and have run mini-marathons in the past. But I’m looking more at the pattern: months of overindulgence, played out as weight gain, followed by a restricted diet, resulting in weight loss – some 20 pounds or more. Add in the exercise regime: light weights, biking, swimming, kickboxing and dancing – and, of course, training for a marathon, according to the Daily Mail reports.

I’m just shaking my head.

I know how hard it is to recover from an eating disorder. One can arrive at a normal weight range and look great enough to be celebrated by all the media as “healthy.” But yo-yoing through the extremes of eating, weight gain and loss, while running a marathon doesn’t strike me as healthy.

Nor is this the message we want to send about eating disorders’ recovery. It fits more of the previous blog I wrote, "Pie in the Face: Stress in the Brain" that deals the brain alternations that take place after repeated cycles of overeating and starving.

I imagine someone on her way to recovery reading this news story. Perhaps, she’s feeling guilty on her meal plan that includes fish or eggs. Or feeling inadequate in her gentler yoga practice. I want to send kudos to those who are in that place. It’s hard to find moderation in a culture where extremes more easily make headlines.

Comments

[Aaron Bernstein]

I completely agree, especially in your last statement about our cultures obsession to be obsessed. It is either one extreme or the other, love or hate, all the way or not at all. That is what veganism is to me. I am not against it except when those who choose to be vegan try and tell their consciousness is above mine to eat meat. Look for every reason to be a vegan there is someone who is suffering from an eating disorder because much like those who take anything to the extreme, diet included there is no end. . .

i myself am recovering from an Eating Disorder, and although i needed only minimal professional help i have researched the disorder so much that i am confident to assume that the eating disorders people suffer from are more than a mere obsession, an unusual loss of control. They are a symptom of our culture that prides itself on a false interpretation of perfectionism, often produced by the media.

I find depressing to know that the perfect image of a woman or man's body is those developed by magazine editors, TV, and everything in between, what happened to being happy, where you stand, not what you could or should be.