A Mother’s Struggle to Free Her Son from Anorexia (Guest Post by Bev Mattocks)

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I’d like to introduce a guest blogger Bev Mattocks. I first discovered her blog about three months ago, only to find out that it was a blog-turned-book. I was able to read Mattock’s book, Please Eat… A Mother’s Struggle to Free Her Teenage Son from Anorexia. It helped to see the struggle from the perspective of a parent, especially as my own parents have learned to deal with my eating disorder.

In the second chapter of my book Please Eat… A Mother’s Struggle To Free Her Teenage Son From Anorexia I describe my pride at watching my 15-year son, Ben, win the 1500 metre race at the school sports day in July 2009. At the time Ben (who lives in the UK) was into a whole range of sports, not just running. Then, over the summer of 2009, his sporting activities got even more intense. He was swimming, running, and working out at a local gym every day – and more. With this came a whole new dedication to ‘healthy eating’, especially fat-free food. Ben quickly became an expert at slimming down recipes, cutting out the ‘baddies’ from his diet, and examining the nutritional content of food packaging in microscopic detail.

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If Dieting is Detrimental to Athletes, Why Did I Keep Doing It?

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Q: Even though running was your primary goal, when it became evident that the diet was detrimental to running it still pulled you back in. Why do you think it still gripped you even when you knew it wasn’t the direction you wanted to go?

One word: Fear.

When I noticed any detrimental effects on the raw food diet (especially the fruit-focused diet), I felt that I “just wasn’t it doing it right.” I was deeply invested in what I had learned about raw food and its connection to weight loss. I believed that “just eating normally” again would be to ignore “science” and gain weight.

Little did I know how much misinformation I had absorbed. I was following many fruitarians who claimed that the food pyramid was government propaganda and that the fantastic results I was seeing from a select few fruitarians mattered more than working with a registered dietitian. I felt that the world of raw food was something new and exciting I had uncovered and that this alone held the truth to health and success.

I also thought that cooked food would only cause me to binge more. I was afraid of my own appetite, afraid of how “out-of-control” I would feel if I ate any cooked food. And after months of reading from what I thought to be credible sources that protein would “leach the calcium from your bones,” and that eating “cow pus” and “animal carcass” was supposedly “immoral,” I was scared to stop being vegan.

I thought I was meant for this raw food diet. I thought I had more discipline than anyone else, that this was something my competitors could not and would not ever do (I guess I was partly right, haha–very few people would want to do this). After years of toiling away at running, after working so hard, and watching other athletes make it to the top without me, I became frustrated. Why wasn’t my body doing what I wanted it to do? Why, after all the discipline, strength training, high mileage, and eating healthy (or what I thought was healthy), why wasn’t it working?

Restriction–and raw food, at that–was what I believed (at the time) would help me to achieve success at last.

Once I realized that fruit probably wasn’t everything I had thought it to be, it still took weeks for me to “allow” myself to eat cooked food. I can’t pinpoint exactly what it was that made it so long and difficult to make this change, especially since I was bingeing on the very foods I was scared to incorporate into a regular diet. But even when I did make the change back to cooked food, it was a long, slow process (to be detailed in the Running in Silence book). If I thought raw food was the bulk of the journey, I was mistaken.

I was now facing my fear head-on. Yes, I was dealing with an eating disorder. Yes, I would be eating cooked food again. Yes, I had to learn to overcome the bingeing, learn how to eat properly again, learn to be okay with eating (tasty) cooked food.

I had fallen so fast and hard into the raw food eating disorder that I forgot how and what to eat anymore, and I had to act fast–with three or more meals a day and all the running and racing I was doing for my team, I had to learn to eat to fuel my body properly. I had to do things I never would have thought I would ever do again. I had to fight against every rule I had ingrained in my brain for the past few years, grit my teeth, and move past them.

If I wanted a good relationship with food again, I had to face my fears.

Update: Original title was The Power of Fear

Why Did I Attempt a Raw Food Diet as a Runner?

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One of the biggest questions I get is about why I felt the need to follow a raw food diet as a collegiate cross country and track runner.

Nutrition was important to me from a young age because I wanted to eat well to run well–and I started running consistently when I was 5 years old.

I continued to run in middle school and high school. After years of competing against the best high school runners in the state, and losing some weight my senior year, I thought that weight loss helped me to run faster. That’s when food began to consume my life.

The Raw Food “Lifestyle”

When I first heard about a raw food diet in college, I didn’t think it would be ideal for athletes. I told myself that I wouldn’t get enough protein or that I would be more susceptible to injury since I’d be missing out on protein and calcium. But my doubts about raw food slowly vanished when I wrote a paper on the topic for one of my classes (we could choose anything to research, and of course, I was drawn to food topics).

Much of the information I read in raw food books and on raw food websites convinced me that instead of being harmful to athletes, this diet could actually be helpful. And the wording changed as I dug deeper–this was not a “diet,” but a lifestyle.

Abundance at Last

Raw food forums and websites advertised this diet as a way to eat as much as you want. And as someone who thought that the only way I could eat “normally” meant I had to go a bit hungry after each meal, this was exciting. I could lose weight while eating as much raw food as I want? I could finally have an excuse to give up meat and run okay, if not better? I could give a “good” excuse and reason for only wanting the lowest-calorie foods? I could have the confidence to know I wouldn’t be deficient in minerals (according to the raw food gurus)?

What I didn’t realize was how unsatisfied I would feel eating just raw food. As I embarked on the diet, I blamed this feeling on my lack of discipline and “broken” appetite. But really, my intense cravings and eventual bingeing was a result of eliminating so many food groups. Years removed from my raw food diet, I understand why only eating raw fruits and vegetables wouldn’t feel very satisfying, and that my body was trying to tell me something.

All of this set me up for a rollercoaster of different diets, bingeing, and questioning food more than ever before. It also eventually sparked the realization that my odd relationship with food was called an eating disorder, and that I had something more to fix than food itself.

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2023 Reflection: If I had known it at the time, seeing a registered sports dietitian would have been the best way to help me with my relationship with food. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that seeing an RD would have been the answer, and no one recommended it. If anything, as I fell deeper into the rabbit hole of raw food, the more I was convinced an RD wouldn’t understand this “cure.” This situation highlights the importance of talking about disordered eating and how so many athletes could benefit from seeing a registered dietitian. You can find one in your area at eatright.org, or check out additional resources in this blog post:

Need a Dietitian, But Can’t Afford One? Q&A with Dr. Paula Quatromoni

This blog post shows how helpful a registered sports dietitian was once I did finally see one:

My Eating Disorder Dietitian Saved My Life