‘Blatantly untrue’: Wellness author Sarah Wilson hits back over newspaper interview

Sarah Wilson has accused a newspaper of doing “a job on me” after it quoted her saying she had turned her back on her “I Quit Sugar” movement.

Australian wellness author Sarah Wilson has hit out at a UK newspaper that claimed she’d distanced herself from her sugar-free diet, accusing the publication of doing “a job on me”.

Over the weekend the Mail on Sunday published an interview in which Wilson was quoted saying she never told anyone to quit sugar, and had distanced herself from the diet she helped create.

Wilson, who wrote the best selling 2012 diet book I Quit Sugar, last year closed the site associated with the book, IQuitSugar.com. She has also stepped away from still active social media accounts connected to I Quit Sugar, and the eight-week diet program.

In a post on Instagram, Wilson said she met with Mail on Sunday journalist Eve Simmons for an interview on her book on anxiety, First We Make The Beast Beautiful.

But Wilson said Simmons had used the article to claim she was “dysfunctional around food” by writing there were “whispers of secret eating problems” around the online wellness community.

“When you get past the non-truths (sugar in fruit is worse for the body! I eat cake every day!), and the blatantly misleading information about my @iquitsugar message, it’s clear the through line is to pass opinion on the crux of my anxiety,” Wilson wrote.

Wilson accused the article of being a “click-bait story to paint me as being dysfunctional around food”.

“Honestly, everyone has tried to get me on ‘making money out of encouraging dangerous dieting’. To this I say, I ran a 9-month study with @sydney_uni to ensure it was not dangerous. Plus, I gave all my profits from @iquitsugar to charity. And continue to do so.

I did my bloody best. I have been responsible,” she wrote.

“Relevant bits of our chat are not included, context is ignored and the implicit responsibility required when you discuss mental health issues is entirely disrespected.”

In the Mail on Sunday, Wilson was quoted as saying she never told anyone to ditch sugar, and says the diet is “in her past now”, as she talked on topics including her teen experience of being troubled by disordered eating.

In the article, Simmons claimed many in the online wellness community had “whispers of secret eating problems”.

“There is no suggestion that Wilson was among them. But it’s not a surprise when she tells me that she suffered with bulimia,” Simmons wrote, also adding that she noticed in Wilson “the same fragility I see in thousands of women — and men — I’ve come across who’ve struggled with troubled eating, including myself”.

Wilson’s 2012 book spawned a massive movement, with the author gathering a dedicated following of almost 100,000 Facebook fans, and another 390,000 on Instagram. Wilson said in her book that giving up sugar helped her lose weight, “heal” and “sparkle”.

Sarah Wilson said she likes to freak people out by eating sugary foods.

Wilson, the author of I Quit Sugar.

“The information is out there for people to use, anyone can take it and run with it. Now I have other passions to pursue,” Wilson told the Daily Mail.

The IQuitSugar site formerly boasted two million visitors a month and turned a profit of $2.76 million annually.

But Wilson shuttered the site at the beginning of last year, writing a lengthy blog post at the time, explaining that she’d planned to sell the business, but eventually came to the decision to close it.

“My job is done in the sugar-free space and it would be remiss of me stay on board just to extract money for myself,” Wilson wrote.

“I now hand the baton to you, the community. The information is out there. Use it. Please spread the word.”

Wilson added “a hypocrisy seeps in if I remain someone who sacrifices my own wellbeing and values for money and success”.

She said she’d be moving into focusing on writing more about anxiety and food waste.

The IQuitSugarsocial media pages remain active, with a large fan base.

Sarah Wilson has shared recently about her struggles with anxiety.

In 2017, Wilson published First, We Make The Beast Beautiful, about her struggles with anxiety.

Earlier this month, she told The Cut on Tuesdays podcast how she struggled severely with anxiety while working as the editor of Australian Cosmo, a role she held from 2003 to 2007. Wilson explained that she was “running to work, doing 24-hour mountain bike races, sleeping four, five hours a night, drinking a bottle of wine a night, having two coffees in the morning”.

“But I was clutching, I was just trying to clutch, and grip, and hold on, and hold on,” she said. “I figured if I could do more work, I could fix the situation.”

She said she developed a thyroid and auto-immune disease, that slowly worked its way through her body, “organ by organ”. Wilson describes frightening and dramatic symptoms, as her health rapidly declined.

“My nails fell out, my hair fell out, I lost the outer third of my eyebrows,” she said, adding that her weight also began to fluctuate in a “frightening” way.

She said she now manages her anxiety and health by constant monitoring of herself, in what she describes as “staying steady”.

If you or someone you know is affected by an eating disorder, contact The Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 46 73. For help with anxiety, contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.

Originally published as ‘Blatantly untrue’: Wellness author Sarah Wilson hits back over newspaper interview