She's got washboard abs, a tiny waist and claims to be lazy about fitness: So is fitness guru Freelee's extraordinary diet of 51 bananas and two kilos of potatoes a day really the secret to her super-toned body?

Freelee the Banana Girl eats 'mono-meals' consuming up to 15 bananas for breakfast, 20 mangoes for lunch and nearly 2kg of potatoes for dinner



Australian woman is also a strong advocate for being 'raw-til-4', which means she has no cooked meals until the evening

The 34-year-old suffered from a range of health problems and was 20kg heavier before committing to the lifestyle seven and a half years ago

Health guru says the lifestyle has worked for many of her blog followers and YouTube subscribers



She promotes a very alternative lifestyle, eating kilos of fruit or vegetables in one sitting and sticking to raw food until 4pm.

But the Australian woman, known as Freelee the Banana Girl, claims that her incredibly lean figure and toned muscles can be attributed mainly to her unusual diet.

Speaking to the MailOnline, Freelee, 34, revealed that despite what people may think when they see her athletic body, she hardly sticks to an intense fitness regime.

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Freelee the Banana Girl claims that her incredibly lean figure and toned muscles can be attributed mainly to eating kilos of fruit or vegetables ‘I’m too lazy when it comes to fitness…I like to do the bare minimum,’ she says.

‘The great thing is that some people think, oh you know, you must work out all the time, I bet you do like a marathon every couple of days and I’m like no, I’ve never done a marathon, and the fact is that it’s diet, it’s 80-90 percent diet and the rest is fitness.'

'I would definitely not call it a lot. When I was on the other diets I was doing a lot, I was training twice a day. But now I would train every second day, for about half an hour… I go jogging or maybe bike riding.'

Her diet is very different to what the average person would consider following, and though Freelee has based her eating habits on the concept behind a raw vegan diet, she’s taken it one step further.

Freelee eats what are known as ‘mono-meals’ which can see her consume 15 bananas for breakfast, 20 mangoes for lunch, and nearly 2kg of potatoes for dinner, 'whatever I can get hold of in large quantities'.

She’s also a strong advocate for being ‘raw-til-4’, which means the self-proclaimed health guru has no cooked meals until the evening.

Freelee eats what are known as 'mono-meals' which can see her consume 15 bananas for breakfast, 20 mangoes for lunch, and nearly 2kg of potatoes for dinner, 'whatever I can get hold of in large quantities' The 34-year-old revealed that despite what people may think when they see her athletic body, she hardly sticks to an intense fitness regime

‘Sometimes I might have a 500gram pack of corn pasta, like gluten free pasta... you’ve just got to make sure you keep the salt and the fat low.

'That’s what people don’t do and that’s why they think that pasta is fattening because they put things like creamy sauces and oily dressings.

‘The sugar and the carbs are guilty by association.’

WHAT FREELEE EATS IN A DAY:

Breakfast: At least 15 bananas Lunch: 20 mangoes Dinner: Nearly 2kg of potatoes She consumes between 2,000 and 5,000 calories each day



Freelee eats up to 51 bananas a day and consumes between 2,000 and 5,000 calories. The recommended number of calories for women is around 2,000.



When asked if her body is overloaded with sugar from eating so much fruit, Freelee defends the idea saying that the body works better when it has one simple ingredient to digest as opposed to a whole host of different elements.

‘It’s not a problem at all because the body regulates how our physiology is actually geared up to eat, because we were designed to be fruit eaters the body just regulates it, it deals with the fructose it fuels every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies and excess is burned up through dietary thermogenesis process where just through your bodies functioning heat is created and then that burns off any excess sugar in the body. And that’s why I’m not obese after eating so much.’

Though Freelee has earned some qualifications in health and nutrition, she says her current diet came mostly from undertaking her own independent research.

‘It’s mainly self-study, mainly my own research but I have an advanced certificate in nutrition - which is completely irrelevant to how I eat now. I also went to college after graduating high school and studied dietetics, which it’s funny because my teacher was actually obese, and she was teaching us about nutrition.

Freelee draws on Asian cultures' cuisines to prove her point that a high-carbohydrate diet won¿t make you fat, so long as you keep fat and salt levels low ‘It’s like going to a homeless person on the street and asking for financial advice.’ Despite meeting criticism over what some people have called an extreme and unhealthy way of living, Freelee credits the discovery of the diet for turning her life around, while proudly showing off her slim and toned figure as proof that it works. Before committing to the lifestyle fulltime seven and a half years ago, she suffered from a range of health problems, was 20kg heavier than she is now and was living an unsustainable life that was taking serious tolls on her health and wellbeing. ‘I was just really ill. I was sick, I was suffering from bulimia, chronic fatigue syndrome, low thyroid function, irritable bowel syndrome, that was probably my worst problem, I had the worst digestion imaginable.

‘I’d just had that for years and years and I was always searching for a cure for it. I was trying all these different diets, I was trying Ayurvedic diets, Chinese medicine diets, Paleo diets, Atkins, all the different styles of diets and at first I’d be excited, I’d be like this is it, this is it! I’d ring up my mum and be like this is going to heal me, I’ve found the diet. ‘I’d start them and then within a couple of months at the most I’d be off them and I’d gain even more weight. ‘I was doing calorie restriction and I was taking weight loss drugs and I just really wanted to find a lifestyle that healed me, and that I could actually eat as much as I cared for, feel good, look my best and also support the environment. And so I found this lifestyle.’

Freelee claims that adopting her low fat raw vegan diet saw her shed 40lb or 5st 7lb

Freelee also credits her diet with clearing up her acne, chronic fatigue syndrome, low thyroid function and terrible digestion

Freelee grew up on a farm in Queensland in a small fishing town of about 300 people, and claims to have been conscious of her weight from as young as 11 years old.

She also says she was working out twice a day trying to lose weight during her twenties, but was feeling fatigued and generally unhealthy after forming bad habits in her late teenage years.

‘When I moved from the country to the city [Sydney] I got involved in taking recreational drugs and out of that I developed an eating disorder… I became really skinny and I had no appetite. I wanted to be skinnier and skinnier so I could look good in the city and going out clubbing you know, all of that stuff that you’re into when you’re in your late teens.’

‘From that I developed anorexia, and then after anorexia I started to binge like crazy, and it was motivated by media images and things like that you know you’ve got to be a stick skinny supermodel to be happy in life, that sort of thing.’

‘I just started starving myself and throwing up and that went on for years and years and years.’

‘It ruins your teeth, and your health and causes a lot of problems and I was always a big eater too, I always liked to just eat massive amounts of food and so when I came to this lifestyle and I worked out that I could eat as much as I cared for and only get leaner and healthier, that was another really big attraction for me.’

Freelee, who is not she about showing off her figure, claims that adopting her low fat raw vegan diet saw her shed 40lb or 5st 7lb

Sporting a perfectly flat stomach and lean limbs, it is easy to see why many are won over, especially since a key point of her diet is never to restrict calories

Though since she made the switch for good to her strict raw vegan lifestyle, the 34-year-old maintains that it’s getting a big following in mainstream society now, with everyone from doctors to lawyers catching on to the alternate existence.

Freelee draws on Asian cultures’ cuisines to prove her point that a high-carbohydrate diet won’t make you fat, so long as you keep fat and salt levels low.

‘If you look at the longest lived cultures and the leanest cultures on the planet they’re high carb eaters. They get most of their calories from rice, vegetables and fruit. Such as Asian cultures, they get the majority of their calories from carbohydrates, so if you look at Chinese and Japanese [people] they’re the leanest, and they have been since the beginning of time.’

Aside from healing her ailments, Freelee says the lifestyle has worked for many of her fellow ‘fruit bats’ including her mum who says her lifetime eczema cleared up after making the change four years ago.



And there are other stories of success that come to her from her thousands of blog followers and over 200,000 YouTube subscribers.

Freelee says the lifestyle has worked for many of her fellow 'fruit bats' including her mum who says her lifetime eczema cleared up after making the change four years ago ‘Diabetes – Type 2 Diabetes…that’s one that a lot of people don’t believe, that’s a high sugar diet. It sounds crazy but diabetes is a fat metabolism problem. There’s a lot more to go in to but there’s a number of people who have overcome Type 2 Diabetes on this lifestyle and there are also a number of people who are Type 1 Diabetic who are thriving on the diet.’ Consuming only organic produce in such large quantities could be a little tough on the wallet, but Freelee says you have to make that sacrifice if you want to follow the lifestyle. ‘Well we don’t have discount bodies, that’s what I say. I don’t have a discount body so I like to feed myself the best quality nutrition, and sometimes it can be a bit more expensive but if more people eat this way the costs will come down. The demand is going to be created and so eventually the cost will come down.’ ‘The thing is in time you will see how it actually saves money because you won’t have as many doctors’ visits, you know you won’t have to worry about operations and things that come with a standard diet. So you save money in a lot of other areas.’

Often appearing in her videos in bikinis and bearing her washboard stomach, Freelee shows fans how to eat 'Raw until Four'