The Banana Diet

This has been a long time coming.

I've told this journey way too many times to not captivate the hearts of those who don't believe in "slow and steady wins the race," especially when it comes to losing weight. So here it is, in full, for the internet to judge.

On Saturday the 4th of June, 2015 I had decided that my baby chubby cheeks would finally be met with destruction after watching the season finale of Vampire Diaries where I'd discovered every character had abs and a chiselled jaw, whether you were a vampire or some random beast that were to be slain. Something about watching supernatural beings with perfect bone structure made me look in the mirror and think, "Right, that's enough."

So I set off on my venture, trawling through YouTube and Google, gathering every piece of evidence of fast weight loss as I could. Dodging the infomercials and Photoshop while searching for real life case studies. And then it happened. I came across Freelee the Banana Girl. A twenty-something, energetic girl on YouTube who swears by her diet of pure bananas that turned her from a regular chum to "almost fitness guru look-alike but less muscle physique."

And best of all, it was easy as crap. The premise, slightly simplified, was: get a whole bunch of bananas, eat a whole bunch of bananas, and you'll lose weight, feel more energetic, and be more attractive. Sounded like the perfect plan to me.

Day 1

Day 1 was a Monday. I was working at a Digital Marketing firm and as soon as I returned home that afternoon I bought 30 bananas. (If you can't do that step, probably not really worth trying at all.) Living with my sister at the time, as she walked through the door I was met with several expletives but mostly "what are you doing now..."

After a short explanation I began eating. One by one I managed to consume around 4 bananas before I was way too full for my own good. Not the strongest start, but a start nonetheless.

Day 2

As I woke up the next morning I was feeling fairly normal. Jumped on the scale to only find I was 0.5kg up from yesterday. This disheartening feeling of betrayal and failure all at once. But I was shortly distracted by the incessant singing nuances of my sister, and life was back to normal. So I grabbed 5 bananas and drove off to work.

Eating three bananas for lunch and two bananas as a "snack" in the afternoon, I started to wonder how long it would be until I got sick of them. But surprisingly it seemed okay at this point, even after six of these beastly fruits.

When I returned home I realised I was exhausted, so I quickly went to my stash of bananas, ate two, and went to bed.

Day 3

Oddly, I woke up feeling energised. No slump getting out of bed. But I did remember waking up throughout the night with some cold sweats, which had me worried. So I jumped on my trusty steed "the Goog's" and began trawling through any piece of information that could confirm death wasn't around the corner if I continued.

I found that apparently eating a pure banana diet would put you far over your potassium and sugar levels for the day. And with the "common knowledge" of too much potassium being dangerous, I did briefly consider that I might be speedrunning heart failure. But Freelee looked fine, the commenters seemed fine, and I was nothing if not committed. So I kept going.

Week 2: The Salt Crisis

By the end of week one, something started to shift. Not my weight (barely budged), but my cravings. My body was screaming for salt. Like, aggressively. I would walk past a fish and chip shop and nearly black out from desire. The bananas were fine, I wasn't sick of them yet, but every cell in my body was demanding sodium like it owed them money.

So I caved. Slightly. I started eating a few olives every couple of days. Just a small handful. Technically not bananas, but I figured olives were close enough to "healthy" that Freelee would forgive me. The salt hit was genuinely euphoric. I'm talking eyes rolling back, full body relief. If you've never been salt deprived, you cannot understand the joy of a single kalamata olive after ten days of nothing but fruit.

Week 3: The Blender Era

Around week three I started getting creative. Eating banana after banana was getting monotonous. Peeling them, chewing them, the texture, the repetition. It all started to blur together. So I bought a blender and started making banana smoothies. Just bananas and water at first, which sounds as depressing as it was.

Then I had a stroke of genius (or desperation) and added a tiny bit of cocoa powder. Suddenly I had something that almost tasted like a chocolate milkshake if you squinted hard enough and had very low standards. This was a game changer. I was blending six or seven bananas at a time, chugging them down, and feeling like a health icon.

The olives continued. I kept that quiet.

Week 4: The Green Banana Incident

This is where things took a turn.

I'd been buying bananas from the supermarket in small batches. Ripe, yellow, ready to go. But I got lazy. I found a wholesale deal online for a massive bulk pack of bananas, and like the absolute genius I am, I ordered them. What arrived was essentially a crate of green, rock solid, completely unripe bananas.

Now, a normal person would wait for them to ripen. But I was four weeks deep into this thing. I was committed. I was also hungry. So I just... started eating them green.

If you've never eaten a green banana, let me paint you a picture. Imagine eating a candle that tastes faintly of banana and has the texture of raw potato. It's starchy, it's dry, it fights you on every chew, and your body immediately knows something is wrong.

But I kept going. For days. Green banana smoothies. Green banana chunks with cocoa powder. Just straight up biting into unripe bananas like some kind of fruit gremlin.

Week 5: The Cubicle Incident

What I didn't know, and what nobody on YouTube bothered to mention, is that green bananas are absolutely loaded with resistant starch. And resistant starch, consumed in the quantities I was inhaling, will shut your digestive system down like a government office on a public holiday.

The constipation hit me like a freight train. Days went by with nothing. I felt like I'd swallowed cement. My stomach was bloated, I was in pain, and the bananas just kept going in with nowhere to go. It was a traffic jam of biblical proportions.

Then one morning at work, sitting in my cubicle, the dam broke.

I'll spare you the worst of it, but I will say this: there was blood. Quite a lot of it. Weeks of backup trying to exit all at once is not something the human body handles gracefully. I barely made it to the bathroom, collapsed onto the toilet, and what followed was twenty minutes of what I can only describe as a medical event.

I was pale. I was sweating. I was genuinely wondering if I was about to pass out on the floor of the office bathroom at 10:30am on a Wednesday.

And then someone walked in.

This poor bloke pushes the cubicle door (which I'd apparently failed to lock properly in my haste), sees me hunched over, white as a sheet, blood visible, and absolutely loses it. "MATE, ARE YOU OKAY? DO I NEED TO CALL AN AMBULANCE?"

I now had to explain, out loud, to a coworker I barely knew, that I was not in fact dying, but was simply suffering the consequences of eating nothing but unripe bananas for the better part of five weeks. The look on his face was something between horror and complete bewilderment. He didn't really know what to say. Neither did I. He slowly backed out. We never spoke of it again.

Week 6: The Vitamin C Solution (That Created a New Problem)

After the cubicle incident, I knew I needed to fix the constipation situation without abandoning the diet entirely (because I am, apparently, incapable of learning lessons). So I hit the internet again and discovered that high doses of vitamin C can loosen your stools. Perfect. Easy fix.

I bought a huge bottle of vitamin C tablets and started popping them like candy. And it worked. Almost too well. I went from complete shutdown to the opposite extreme within about 48 hours. The balance between "cement" and "waterfall" turned out to be incredibly narrow, and I spent a good few days overshooting in both directions.

But the real kicker came at the end of that same week. See, those chewable vitamin C tablets are basically pure ascorbic acid. And I was chewing five or six of them a day, sometimes more. What nobody tells you (or maybe they do and I just wasn't listening) is that ascorbic acid will absolutely destroy your tooth enamel. By the end of week six my teeth were noticeably more sensitive. Hot drinks, cold drinks, even breathing in cold air made me wince. A trip to the dentist confirmed what I already suspected: I'd done real damage to my enamel. The kind that doesn't grow back.

So to recap: I started this diet to look like a Vampire Diaries character, and I ended up bleeding in a work bathroom, traumatising a colleague, and permanently damaging my teeth. Six weeks. That's all it took.

The Aftermath

I stopped the banana diet the day after the dentist visit. Six weeks in total. I did lose about 3kg, which I gained back within two weeks of eating normally again. My teeth remain sensitive to this day. The coworker from the bathroom still avoids eye contact. And I've never looked at a banana the same way since.

If there's a lesson here, it's this: if a diet sounds too simple to be true, it probably is. And if you absolutely must try eating nothing but one food for weeks on end, at least make sure they're ripe.