A mum told how she dropped six dress sizes after avoiding looking at herself in the mirror for years.
Carmel Healey, from Crosby, ballooned to 17 stone at her heaviest and was a size 22 in clothes. The 59-year-old said she started piling on the pounds in the last few years of her career as an Associate Director of Nursing for the NHS, during which time she would often skip lunch, grab junk food on the go and order takeaways when she got home.
Carmel made the decision to take early retirement in 2017 after working for the NHS for 38 years as a nurse and a midwife, following the death of a family member. It was after taking retirement that Carmel bought a treadmill and decided to start exercising, but she soon had another setback when she suffered from a knee injury which left her needing physiotherapy.
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Carmel said: "I was getting fatter because I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything. I didn't want to go anywhere, I didn't want people to see me and of course that was compounded then when we went into the first lockdown because obviously I wasn't doing anything.
"My son was cooking all the time - every day we were baking because what else could you do at the time? I was just so uncomfortable in my body. I couldn’t walk anywhere, my knees were killing me.
"I was literally falling over all the time. My weight was making it difficult to walk properly, because my knee was bad as well it made it worse. I have a walled wardrobe - it’s mirrored; I never looked in it which is pretty difficult when it’s on the wall and if I did get out of bed and look I would never take in what I could see."
Carmel decided to join Slimming World group in September 2020 and in the space of 12 months she managed to reach her target weight of losing five and a half stone by following Slimming World's Food Optimising Plan, which aims to re-educate people on getting the balance right on the types of food they eat. But her weight loss didn't stop there - and she has now lost six and a half stone in total.
Carmel's diet on a typical day before she lost weight consisted of "lots of toast with jam" for breakfast, snacks of cakes, biscuits and crisps throughout the day instead of lunch, and a takeaway pizza for dinner followed by dessert.
Carmel's diet on a typical day since joining Slimming World now consists of fruit and 0% fat natural yoghurt for breakfast, beans on wholemeal toast with no butter for lunch, and homemade spaghetti bolognese for dinner followed by a piece of fruit.
Carmel said: "I got into 'my zone’, I call it. No matter what was happening, even if I didn’t lose weight one week [I thought] 'I’m sticking to this, I’m determined, I want to be a different person’ - as in healthy, well and feel much better about myself, and I stuck to it.
"I do believe in mindset, you have to really want to do it. You have to be committed to it and once you commit to it and you’ve got over those first few weeks you’re there because once I started losing weight it was an incentive.
"There was no way on this planet anyone was going to take a picture of me at my biggest. I didn’t want to be in photos, I found it very difficult whereas now I’m happy to be photographed.
"I feel fantastic but also elated because the biggest thing is the fact I feel so healthy in mind as well. It’s lifted my spirits."
