Tory Shepherd: Fitness freaks ‘Bikini Girl’ and ‘Banana Girl’ land body blows in court of a peel
BIKINI Girl claims Banana Girl and her partner defamed her by criticising her methods and accusing her partner of using steroids; they say it’s a matter of free speech.
‘BANANA Girl’ sounds like some sort of bendy superhero, able to peel off her enemies one by one. Or the animated character in a Government health campaign, trying to convince kiddies that fruit is cool.
She’s not — she’s an Adelaide woman (not really a girl) who eats up to 50 bananas a day. Which makes Freelee the Banana Girl sound a little more like a candidate for My Strange Addiction, a bizarre reality show featuring people who can’t stop eating toilet paper, or soap. Or television remote controls.
Wrong again.
Banana Girl is promoting a raw, vegan lifestyle. On her immensely popular website she details her journey from being “pimply, farty, overweight” to the toned woman she is today.
Thanks to fruit.
You can judge her success by the fact she has had almost a million views of a video she made called Fruitarian Girl Pees in a Bucket.
It’s just what it sounds like. A treatise on the benefits of peeing in buckets. The paleo diet has nothing on this.
Banana Girl was back in the headlines this week because she is fighting a court battle with Bikini Girl. Yeah, you heard it. Like Godzilla versus King Kong, but even more vacuous.
To Bikini Girl. Another Adelaide woman, Kayla Itsines, who founded the Bikini Body Guide. Thankfully, she doesn’t appear to actually refer to herself as Bikini Girl.
And she certainly doesn’t have the Fruitarian vibe.
Her mission in life is to inspire women to be the best they can be.
Physically, of course, by helping them get that bikini body within 12 weeks.
Her dual (duelling) messages are: Having a bikini-ready bod is the most important thing in life, and: you should love and accept yourself.
Love and accept yourself as long as you’ve got a six-pack.
Endless selfies of toned, taut women in designer fitness wear. Although in comparison to Banana Girl, Bikini Girl is a bastion of sensible advice.
In an unedifying showdown, these two women are going head-to-head.
As The Advertiser pointed out yesterday, they bring a lot of attention to their causes.
Ms Itsines has more than 2.3 million followers on Instagram and 1.3 million likes on Facebook.
Banana Girl (real name Leanne Ratcliffe) and her partner Harley “Durianrider” Johnstone have almost 500,000 YouTube subscribers.
Ms Itsines says Banana and Durian defamed her by criticising her methods and accusing her partner of using steroids; they say it’s a matter of free speech.
Outside court, Mr Johnstone said they wanted to go to trial to “get as much exposure as possible on eating disorders and Instagram diets”. Exposure is the key word, there.
More than a hundred of Banana Girl’s supporters turned up, chanting “carb the f . . k up”, a Bananaesque catch-phrase, apparently.
The story will keep on giving. How can it not, with two central characters dubbed Banana Girl and Bikini Girl?
It has the titillating appeal of the bitch fight about it, the endless opportunities for pictures of perfect female physiques, and of course the celebrity appeal.
That celebrity appeal, for both these women, has turned into something of a cult appeal — which in turn makes them far less than superheroes.
You can see how both of them believe they are doing a great service for their millions of fans: helping them live healthier, offering a support network and daily sappy messages of hope.
But like so many health and fitness movements now, it comes with a cult mentality. It demands a slavish adhesion to a predetermined journey to a preconceived ideal.
The gurus say: If you follow my instructions, you will become perfect, and with perfection comes happiness.
So what happens to those who lose their way?
Those who can’t work up a six-pack presumably slink off back into their lives, ever more miserably watching their Facebook feeds fill up with amazing success stories of flat stomachs and trim thighs.
A legion of Bummed Out, Bitter, and Blue Girls.