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

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Instagram

Revisit this story from September 2025.

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.