Why Karolina Went to Bali

Karolina struggled with an eating disorder for years. When she discovered raw veganism, she thought she’d found the answer.

By E.J. Dickson, senior writer at The Cut covering culture. Formerly a senior writer at Rolling Stone, she’s also cohosted two podcasts: ‘Don’t Let This Flop,’ which was featured on Esquire’s Best Podcasts List of 2022; and ‘Podcats,’ which was featured on ‘This American Life.’

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Instagram

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Instagram

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Instagram

At 11 p.m. on December 8, 2024, the night clerk at Sumberkima Hill, a private villa resort overlooking the mountains of Bali, was at his desk when a Polish woman named Karolina Krzyzak checked in. She had made a last-minute reservation through WhatsApp requesting a villa with a pool. She also had two specific dietary requirements: She would need her meals delivered directly to her room, and the meals would have to be only fruit.

The request didn’t strike Bernard Hudepohl, the hotel’s owner, as unusual. It wasn’t uncommon for hotel guests to ask for vegan meals or even for them to make their own juices in their room if they were on a cleanse. But when Karolina arrived at the hotel, he and his staff were shocked by her appearance. She was emaciated, her eyes sunken into her skull and her collarbone jutting out of her flesh. The night clerk had to carry her to her room because she couldn’t make it on her own.

The staff wasn’t sure what to do. They had never seen a guest in such poor condition. The night clerk called the general manager, who asked Karolina if he should call a doctor. She refused. The next morning, the front-desk team came back to the villa and offered to get a doctor. Again, Karolina said “no.”

For the next two days, hotel staff periodically visited Karolina, mostly to deliver her meals. Hudepohl says she didn’t leave her room, though she would occasionally venture outside to sit on the veranda. Soon she no longer had the energy to go that far. She wasn’t even able to turn over in her bed on her own; she called in the staff to help her.

Three days after Krzyzak checked in, the receptionist received a WhatsApp message from a Bali resident who ran a raw-vegan café in nearby Ubud and had met Karolina during her travels. She said Karolina wasn’t replying to her messages — would it be possible for the staff to check on her? When staff members arrived at Karolina’s villa, they found her lying on the floor, stiff and motionless, her skin gray and mottled and her hair nearly white. She died in a villa overlooking paradise: lush green treetops and thatched village roofs and sacred mountains, things she never would have been able to see from her home in Warsaw. She was 27 years old.

For years, friends say, Karolina had dreamed of moving to Bali like the digital nomads and life coaches and yogis she followed on Instagram, who had escaped the drudgery of the nine-to-five to find salvation on the island’s sparkling beaches and verdant jungles. She was particularly drawn to a group of raw-vegan influencers who call themselves fruitarians and eat only fruit. “I’ve been watching all these travel vlogs dreaming one day it would be me there — happy, talking, sharing, laughing, confident, strong, with ma soul fam 🙏🏼 🌞 ✨ 🥰,” she wrote in a text to a friend years before ever arriving in Bali.

Karolina was a firm believer in the power of clean eating: that the purity of what she put into her body translated into the purity of her mind and spirit. This idea is now so commonplace as to seem uncontroversial; countless Instagram influencers have made a name for themselves by creating content about the importance of avoiding seed oils and processed foods, espousing a lifestyle in which proximity to the “natural” is tantamount to health. And as someone with a history of disordered eating and mental illness, Karolina was far more likely than most to take it to an extreme. She fashioned herself after the influencers she followed on social media, posting flawlessly composed images of cinnamon-dusted blueberries and dragonfruit bowls. As she wasted away, her loyal followers cheered her on. “I truly believe that you have the right answers. You know what’s good for you even if right now seems like chaos,” one wrote on a selfie she posted in 2023. “Nice neck and collarbones,” a fan wrote on a photo she posted where her clavicle juts out of her skin. “It is so nice to see you so happy,” another posted on a video of an Instagram Live she did last September. She would be dead less than three months later.

Like many fad diets, raw veganism first became popular among small New Age circles in the 1970s as juicing and colon cleanses became synonymous with healthy living. Raw vegans typically eat uncooked fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and legumes, forgoing animal products and processed foods. Fruitarians make up a smaller, even more fringe part of the raw-vegan community and subsist almost exclusively on uncooked fruit. Many followers believe that fruit is nutritionally complete and contains the most prana,**the Sanskrit word for “life force,” of any food on the planet.

“It’s the species-specific diet of humanity. It’s what we lived on for more than 2 million years,” says Dr. Doug Graham, one of the most influential figures in raw veganism. He decided to devote his life to eating fruits and vegetables after having what he describes as a Moses and the burning bush moment: when he was 16, he tells me, he was at the beach one day when he heard a disembodied voice bellow the word health down to him from the sky. In 2006, he published the *The 80/10/10 Diet,*about how to eat a diet of 80 percent carbohydrates, 10 percent protein, and 10 percent fat derived primarily from raw fruit and leafy greens. The book helped popularize the movement, and Graham claims he even worked with professional tennis players like Martina Navratilova and the actress Demi Moore, advising them on nutrition and muscle repair. “There’s nothing wrong with eating the food that’s best for us,” he says.

Most nutritionists disagree. Fruitarianism is “absolutely not a sustainable way of eating,” says Melainie Rogers, a registered dietician and eating-disorder expert in New York. “You’re not getting sufficient protein or fats or omega-3s. The body is essentially running on empty.” The diet can also lead to anemia and malnutrition. Emilia, a former fruitarian and online friend of Karolina’s — who, like most of Karolina’s friends I spoke with, asked to use a pseudonym — tells me that when she was living in Bali and following a raw-fruit diet, she developed osteoporosis and an albumin deficiency, leading to edema and swelling of the feet.

Fruitarianism is niche, but it is becoming increasingly visible thanks to the rise of wellness trends and growing distrust in the mainstream medical Establishment. In addition to Graham, popular influencers include Freelee the Banana Girl, a lithe Australian YouTuber who once suggested that a teen’s death from cancer could have been prevented with a raw-vegan diet, and Kristina Carrillo-Bucaram, a long-haired, bikini-clad influencer with more than a million followers on Instagram, where she goes by Fully Raw Kristina. Karolina followed all of them.

The rise of raw veganism has been accompanied by the rise of a cottage industry of health coaches and self-styled experts purporting to help people recover from various illnesses using a raw-fruit-based diet. Fruitarianism, Rogers tells me, can easily serve as a smokescreen for disordered eating under the guise of health and wellness. She compares it to orthorexia, or a pathological obsession with clean eating and “purity.” “It’s very easy to get caught up in fruitarianism because when you start out, you feel euphoric,” Emilia tells me. “You’re eating a lot, but you’re not gaining weight. Your digestion is perfect, you feel light, you have more energy than ever. You can’t understand why other people wouldn’t want to feel like that all the time.”

Karolina’s struggles with body image started early. “Why do you cry? ’Cause I’m fat,” she posted on her Facebook page in 2013, when she was 15. She was deeply invested in modern dance and ballet, and when she enrolled at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom three years later, she became interested in yoga and started training to get her teaching certification. She also discovered veganism, organizing barbecues and other events for her school’s vegan club. “I am so grateful to have found the lifestyle which I can associate myself so honestly and so fully with,” she wrote on Instagram. “Veganism has truly opened my eyes on so many things.”

Soon she was messaging raw-vegan influencers who spoke openly about being in recovery for their own eating disorders. One of them, Daniella Siira, says she started talking with Karolina in 2017, after she DMed her to ask if it was possible to recover from anorexia and regain her period on an entirely fruit-based diet. Siira told her that it was. At the time, Siira says, she wholeheartedly believed “only eating fruits is the right way, and that’s what everyone should do,” she tells me. “Fast, detox, cleanse yourself, align to nature and her will.”

By her second year of college, Karolina had transitioned to an entirely raw-vegan lifestyle, mostly eating uncooked fruits and vegetables. Her Instagram Stories, which used to feature videos of her dancing in her bedroom or photos of notes she’d scribbled in the margins of books about yoga, were soon entirely about raw food. Her already low weight continued to drop and her parents panicked, demanding she withdraw from school and return home to receive treatment. “It feels like my body is on the verge of life and death,” she wrote to Siira. “I want to heal but I’m just so scared.”

In spring 2018, she returned to Warsaw and went into inpatient treatment at a clinic. But once she got out, she went back to a raw-vegan diet. Her parents disapproved but begrudgingly supported her, making her raw soups and birthday cakes. (Karolina’s family declined to comment for this story.)

Karolina was deeply unhappy living at home with her parents. She earned some money selling jewelry on Etsy. Without a full-time job, Karolina started spending even more time online. She spent hours on YouTube, watching motivational videos from spiritual influencers like Teal Swan and documentaries like The Fall of the Cabal,**a 2020 video series that promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory. She believed in the healing power of crystals and carried tourmaline in her pocket to ward off those who wished to drain her empathic energy. She told Siira that her family thought she was “brainwashed by vegans and social media.”

Inspired by raw vegans and wellness coaches she followed on Instagram, Karolina started fashioning herself into a spiritual influencer. She posted a lot of fruit: vibrantly colored cantaloupes, dragonfruits, and papayas. The images were beautifully lit and lovingly, almost sensually, composed: a close-up of the moist, supple flesh of a honeydew, a cantaloupe’s ripe innards opening up like a red canna in a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. She also shared her own Rupi Kaur–style poetry in her Instagram captions. “The process is hard / To restore faith in myself ⁣/ To restore strength in my body,” she wrote under a photo in which she wears a daisy-print dress and a scarf in the middle of the forest.

In the photo, Karolina looks shockingly thin. A few of her Instagram commenters expressed concern at her appearance. “Eat as much as possible, not just fruit! Many people support you to recover!” one posted. Most of the comments, however, are supportive, even complimentary. “You are the most beautiful warrior! So strong in your beingness and so much more than this physical vessel,” one of her Instagram followers wrote. “You are a being of light.”

Karolina frequently complained to her friends online about feeling weak and low-energy, and her teeth had started to rot, which embarrassed her. In a post on a Facebook group called The Healthiest Raw Vegan Diet, she shared a photo of her crumbling yellow fingernails and asked group members what the cause could be. The answer is easily Googleable: decaying, indented fingernails is a sign of a condition known as koilonychia, or spoon nails, common among those suffering from malnutrition. Commenters, however, proposed alternative theories. “Do you sunbathe? Stress? Hydration? All of this could affect your health and attract parasites,” one wrote.

Those outside the fruitarian community watched with horror as she documented her decline in real time. “Oh my god I am so worried about her,” one follower on an eating-disorder support forum wrote as early as February 2021 in a thread titled “Concerned over girl on Instagram.” “She has such a beautiful way of seeing the world and writing about it … but it’s terrifying because people in her comments literally say her weight is normal and that eating only fruits is the way to go.” Some of her friends expressed their concerns to her in private, but she would either shoot them down or cut them out completely. “I felt the community was toxic for her,” Dasha, an internet friend of Karolina’s, tells me. “She needed medical and psychological help, and the community often validated her behaviors instead.”

In early 2024, Karolina left Warsaw for Tenerife, a Spanish beach town in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. She had been living at home still, making jewelry and bickering with her parents, when a friend she met on Instagram suggested she visit the island. Karolina saw it as a last-ditch effort to create the beautiful life she had long envisioned for herself.

For a while, at least, it seemed she did. Friends****say she was relatively happy in Tenerife, shopping at farmers’ markets, sunbathing, and even adopting a kitten. It wasn’t long, however, before the kitten ran away. “I think that is what broke in her,” says Polina, another online friend of Karolina’s who was also in recovery. Karolina was depressed, and she needed another change of scenery. By September, she had arrived in Bali, fulfilling her longtime dream of joining the fruitarians in Ubud, a rainforest community about 45 minutes from the Bali airport known for its ancient Hindu temples.

With its vegan cafés and abundant fruit supply, Ubud makes it easier to be a raw vegan than perhaps anywhere else in the world. “There’s literally fruit stands everywhere, because it’s in the jungle and it’s so humid,” says the raw-vegan influencer and wellness coach Raw Zaia, who befriended Karolina when she was in Bali. “The fruit is fresh, it’s local, it’s organic, it’s abundant, and it’s cheap.” It’s also relatively affordable for digital nomads looking to find a picturesque backdrop for their social-media posts.

Suddenly, Karolina was meeting the influencers she’d idolized from afar for years. When Fully Raw Kristina came to Bali and attended raw-vegan meetups, Karolina was also there, beaming. That fall, she attended multiple talks by Graham, the fruitarian health coach. Karolina followed him on Instagram, and a member of the local raw-vegan community who had also struggled with anorexia suggested that Graham might be able to help her recover. Graham says he noticed Karolina immediately. “She didn’t weigh more than 60 pounds, maybe less than 50,” he says. “You just looked at her and said, That girl’s in trouble.”

By late November, Karolina was in dire straits. She was unstable on her feet and walked slowly to avoid bumping into furniture or collapsing. Many people tell me they approached her and offered to take her to a local eating-disorder treatment facility or to call her parents, only for her to politely decline. “When you’re raw-vegan fruitarian, you think that’s the ultimate way of living, and all these other ways, especially the medical way, is wrong and should not be followed,” says Tiyana Jovic, the founder of a sustainable clothing line whose weekly tea ceremonies Karolina attended in Bali. “She felt like the way people wanted to help her was not aligned with her wishes and values.”

Still, there must have been some part of Karolina that wanted to get better, or at least recognized that she desperately needed help. Graham says she approached him after one of his talks in Ubud and asked if he had ever worked with anyone as thin as she was. Graham said he had, and he emailed her a detailed treatment proposal for her to gain weight on a raw-vegan diet. Despite being concerned for her health, he never suggested Karolina check into a hospital. “She didn’t want to deal with doctors; she didn’t want to go to a hospital,” he says. “She only wanted to be treated on a raw-vegan diet. She was very clear about that.” He’s insistent that Karolina could have recovered if she had worked with him; the nutritionists and eating-disorder experts I spoke with said that given the state she was in, it’s more likely that Karolina would have needed hospitalization and a feeding tube to recover.

Graham wasn’t the only person Karolina asked for help. She met an influencer named Jennifer Pietsch, a 23-year-old from British Columbia who had also turned to fruitarianism after struggling with anorexia (though when she met Karolina, she was no longer fruitarian and ate meat). Pietsch marketed herself as a holistic nutritionist and eating-disorder recovery coach on social media, where she sold custom nutrition plans and “healing” recovery retreats despite lacking any formal medical training. Pietsch and Karolina became friendly, and Pietsch says she tried to help her. But when Karolina asked to move in with her, Pietsch said “no.” “I’m only comfortable working with people that want to recover,” Pietsch said. “And she didn’t.”

When Karolina died, the news didn’t attract much attention outside the tight-knit raw-vegan community. It was covered only by Indonesian news outlets, and even within the fruitarian world, she had been a minor influencer with only a few thousand followers.

That changed a few weeks later, when one of Pietsch’s Instagram posts made the rounds on Reddit. The photo — which she had posted on December 6, five days before Karolina was found dead — featured Pietsch, Karolina, and another woman who also appears to be severely underweight smiling at the camera. “Helping others with eating disorders is my mission, the reason I was able to come back alive from death,” Pietsch wrote in the caption. “The women I support remind me of my own truth and growth.”

Commenters accused Pietsch of exploiting the women in the photos and using them to promote her services. “This is incredibly concerning,” one person wrote. “You are in no way qualified to be treating people with eating disorders.” Pietsch says she kept the post up to “honor” Karolina’s life. “I don’t really care what people say in the comments.” (She’s since deleted the post from her feed.) She says Karolina’s death inspired her to start raising money to launch her own eating-disorder recovery center in Bali exclusively for raw vegans and fruitarians. She envisions it as a retreat with lush palm trees and yoga classes, “maybe some light resistance training,” that emphasizes “connecting to food and the earth to help yourself heal,” as opposed to “just being focused on tube feeds.”

The raw vegans I spoke to didn’t see any connection between fruitarianism and disordered eating. Karolina didn’t die from solely eating fruit for the last seven years of her life — she died, they argue, because she had essentially lost her will to live. Karolina could have recovered from her eating disorder while still on a purely fruitarian diet, they say, if only she had adopted a more positive mind-set. “It’s sad a lot of people would blame the diet,” says Zaia. “They’d say, ‘Oh, all she ate was fruit.’ But this was someone who ate one fruit a day and was really hating herself and just barely getting by. It really has nothing to do with the fact that she was fruitarian.”

Many of Karolina’s friends struggle with guilt. Emilia, the woman who left the raw-vegan community after developing edema in Bali, says she warned Karolina that the community was not as it appeared on Instagram — that many influencers behind the scenes were struggling with their own health issues or didn’t adhere to the diet at all. But she says that after years of suffering, Karolina was too deeply invested in the fantasy she had constructed in her tiny Warsaw bedroom. “I’ve met a lot of people who get caught in this illusion of trying to achieve purity of the body. And eventually you realize that the body, in its essence, is impure, and that the soul is infinite, and you need the body to be strong if you want to live in this world and be compassionate and help others,” Emilia told me. “I don’t think Karolina ever realized that.”

Siira, the raw-vegan influencer who initiated Karolina into the community, stopped being vegan a few years ago after finding it too difficult to recover from her own eating disorder on a raw-plant-based diet. When Karolina died, she went back to her DMs to read their old conversations. She was horrified by what she saw. “Looking back, I think I wooed her into this fruitarian raw lifestyle,” she says. “She was healing, and she took a step back because of my eating disorder feeding hers.”

Siira doesn’t blame the fruitarians for Karolina’s death — she had been sick long before she ever arrived in Bali. But she does wonder why Karolina died alone, without the sun-dappled soul fam she had traveled nearly 7,000 miles to find.

In the U.S., theNational Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline* can be reached at 866-662-1235.*

The Woman Who Ate Only Fruit