A school chef who was embarrassed by her size 22 frame at her dad's funeral has shed eight stone and given herself a totally new look.
Mum Kat Milner, 35, weighed 22 stone when she attended her dad Andrew's funeral in December 2020 - and when she couldn't find a suitable dress for the occasion she had a wake-up call.
Kat said: “I was 22 stone and had struggled to find a black dress for my dad’s funeral.
“He had passed away suddenly. His funeral was the first time I had seen some of my family for a while and I just felt embarrassed by my size.”
The mum-of-three says she was always a bigger size, even as a child, and was "like a little pudding" at school - which she puts down to her dad being a chef.
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And while she was eating chocolate for breakfast and freezer food for dinner, her size crept up over the years.
After giving birth to her youngest daughter Margeaux in March 2020, Kat says her weight had ballooned without her realising.
“I don’t know how much weight I’d put on during the pregnancy because I was already so big. Probably a stone, so when I went back to work, I was struggling to manage everything," Kat, from Lowestoft in Suffolk, said.
“Even walking up the stairs or taking my baby out in the buggy left me feeling breathless and balancing healthy eating with motherhood and work just felt impossible.”
Kat, who is also mum to 14-year-old Gabrielle and six-year-old Cagney, decided to try out a diet she'd done once before - 1:1 Diet by Cambridge Weight Plan.
The diet, which supplies you with all your meals, had worked for Kat in the past. But she'd ended up putting the weight back on.
“I’d tried everything over the years including the cabbage soup diet and the Special K diet, but when you are just eating the same mundane food every day, it’s just too hard to stick to for more than a few days," she said.
Kat, who also lives with husband Ben, 34, started following the plan in March 2021 - eating low calorie meals from the plan and consuming 800 calories a day.
At first, she didn't do any exercise because her meals were already putting her in a calorie deficit - meaning it wasn't long before she started seeing results.
Watching the weight fall off her, Kat says she ditched her baggy T-shirts and stretchy leggings and marched into New Look to buy a new pair of jeans.
Now weighing 14 stone and fitting into size 14-16 clothes, Kat is still on the plan, but she's eating a much more sustainable 2000 calories a day - the recommended daily intake for women.
“There’s no black left in my wardrobe now. My favourite colour is orange, so I chopped off my long, blonde hair when I'd lost 4st and dyed it orange, too," she said.
"But the biggest change, thanks to my weight loss, has not been to my appearance, it's been to my mental health. I just feel so happy now.
‘’I feel a million times better about myself and just want to say ‘yes’ to every opportunity life throws at me."
Since losing the weight herself, Kat has now trained to become a consultant for the 1:1 Diet.
She said: “I have my very own slimmers now and I love to see how, once they start to lose the weight, they get themselves back.
“The most important thing I tell them is that losing weight starts with one step and to focus on that step instead of thinking about the whole staircase.”
