Mum loses 6st in time for her 40th birthday without fat jabs after piling on the pounds eating family's leftovers
"I've always loved food – my whole day used to revolve around it," said the accountant from Truro, Cornwall.
5
5
5
She snacked on crisps and cheese in front of the TV, served up huge dinners, and often returned for third helpings of homemade curry.
"I loved big portions," Lisa admitted.
"I would eat my dinner, then my husband's leftovers, and then whatever our two children didn't eat.
"I'd tell myself it was to minimise waste, but I was just out of control."
At her heaviest, Lisa tipped the scales at 17st 6lbs and wore a size 18.
Years of yo-yo dieting had left her demoralised — from Atkins to Weight Watchers to extreme calorie counting, nothing stuck.
"Food was my answer to everything — whether I was happy or sad," she said.
"I wasn't a binge or comfort eater, I just loved to eat.
"Cooking for my family was my way of looking after them. I'd dish out mega portions and polish off everyone's leftovers."
As her 40th birthday approached, Lisa reached a breaking point. In January 2024, she vowed to lose five stone before turning 40 in November.
"I had to make a change for good," she said. "I didn't want to feel bloated and insecure on such a milestone birthday."
The difference between binge eating and overeating
Rather than follow another fad, Lisa adopted a new approach: intuitive eating.
This involves listening to her body's natural hunger and fullness signals.
Alongside this, so started doing daily five-minute Joe Wicks workouts and 10,000 steps a day.
"I didn't restrict myself or count every calorie," she said. "I just stuck to sensible portions and made smart choices."
By May, Lisa had shed four stone.
She kept up the routine and by her birthday on November 1, she'd not only reached her target — she'd exceeded it, losing a total of six stone.
5
5
She now weighs 11st 6lbs, wears a size 10 and says she feels like a new woman.
"I didn't think I would achieve my goal, but I'm so glad I did," she said.
"It meant I'd remember my 40th as feeling confident and happy, not insecure and bloated."
'I don't have to restrict myself'
Lisa, who lives with her husband Michael and their three children — William, nine, and twins Charlie and Poppy, six — has maintained her weight loss and found new joy in everyday life.
"I feel great, not just physically but mentally," she said.
"I love getting my steps in and walking with friends.
"I've fallen back in love with eating — even though I don't eat anywhere near as much as I used to."
She still makes home-cooked meals, but anything left over now gets frozen for another day.
"I don't have to restrict myself or have a difficult calorie deficit to be slim," she said.
"Intuitive eating and making smart choices are not just more enjoyable but sustainable."
She added: "I don't have to buy whatever is in my size, but clothes that I love and make me feel good.
"My family are proud, which means the world."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
35 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Edinburgh University's ‘skull room' highlights its complicated history with racist science
Hundreds of skulls are neatly and closely placed, cheekbone to cheekbone, in tall, mahogany-framed glass cabinets. Most carry faded, peeling labels, some bear painted catalogue numbers; one has gold teeth; and the occasional one still carries its skin tissue. This is the University of Edinburgh's 'skull room'. Many were voluntarily donated to the university; others came from executed Scottish murderers; some Indigenous people's skulls were brought to Scotland by military officers on expeditions or conquest missions. Several hundred were collected by supporters of the racist science of phrenology – the discredited belief that skull shape denoted intelligence and character. Among them are the skulls of two brothers who died while studying at Edinburgh. Their names are not recorded in the skull room catalogue, but cross-referencing of matriculation and death records suggests they were George Richards, a 21-year-old medic who died of smallpox in 1832, and his younger brother, Robert Bruce, 18, a divinity scholar who died of typhoid fever in 1833. Exactly how the Richards brothers' skulls came to be separated from their bodies, recorded as interred in the South Leith parish church cemetery, is unknown. But they were almost certainly acquired by the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to study supposed racial difference. Researchers believe their case exemplifies the challenging questions facing the university, which, it has now emerged, played a pivotal role in the creation and perpetuation of racist ideas about white superiority and racial difference from the late 1700s onwards – ideas taught to thousands of Edinburgh students who dispersed across the British empire. University records studied by Dr Simon Buck suggest the brothers were of mixed African and European descent, born in Barbados to George Richards, an Edinburgh-educated doctor who practised medicine on sugar plantations and who owned enslaved people – possibly including George and Robert Bruce's mother. Edinburgh Phrenological Society's 1858 catalogue records the skulls (listed as No 1 and No 2) as having belonged to 'mulatto' students of divinity and medicine. 'It can be assumed that the racialisation of these two individuals as 'mulatto' – a hybrid racial category that both fascinated and bewildered phrenologists – is what aroused interest among members of the society in the skulls of these two students,' Edinburgh's decolonisation report concludes. The brothers' skulls are among the roughly 400 amassed by the society and later absorbed into the anatomical museum's collection, which now contains about 1,500 skulls. These are held in the Skull Room, to which The Guardian was granted rare access. Many of these ancestral remains, the report states, 'were taken, without consent, from prisons, asylums, hospitals, archaeological sites and battlefields', with others 'having been stolen and exported from the British empire's colonies', often gifted by a global network of Edinburgh alumni. 'We can't escape the fact that some of [the skulls] will have been collected with the absolute express purpose of saying, 'This is a person from a specific race, and aren't they inferior to the white man',' said Prof Tom Gillingwater, the chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, who now oversees the anatomical collection. 'We can't get away from that.' The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by George Combe, a lawyer, and his younger brother, Andrew, a doctor, with roughly a third of its early members being physicians. Both were students at the university, and some Edinburgh professors were active members. Through its acquisition of skulls from across the globe, the society played a central role in turning the 'science' of phrenology, which claimed to decode an individual's intellect and moral character from bumps and grooves on the skull, into a tool of racial categorisation that placed the white European man at the top of a supposed hierarchy. George Combe's book, The Constitution of Man, was a 19th-century international bestseller and the Combe Trust (founded with money made from books and lecture tours promoting phrenology) endowed Edinburgh's first professorship in psychology in 1906 and continues to fund annual Combe Trust fellowships in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Phrenology was criticised by some of Edinburgh's medical elite for its unscientific approach. But some of its most vocal critics were nonetheless persuaded that immutable biological differences in intelligence and temperament existed between populations, a study by Dr Ian Stewart for the university's decolonisation report reveals. These included Alexander Monro III, an anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh medical school, who lectured 'that the Negro skull, and consequently the brain, is smaller than that of the European', and Robert Jameson, a regius professor of natural history, whose lectures at the university in the 1810s included a hierarchical racial diagram of brain size and intelligence. Despite the fact that phrenology was never formally taught at Edinburgh, and its accuracy was heavily contested by Edinburgh academics, the skull room, which is closed to the public, was built partly to house its collection by the then professor of anatomy Sir William Turner, when he helped oversee the construction of its new medical school in the 1880s. Among its reparatory justice recommendations of Edinburgh's investigation is that the university provide more support for the repatriation of ancestral remains to their original communities. This, Gillingwater suggested, possibly underplays the complexities involved – even for cases such as the Richards brothers. He regards the circumstantial evidence in their case as 'strong' but says it does not meet the forensic threshold required for conclusive identification. 'From a legal perspective, it wouldn't be watertight,' said Gillingwater. 'I would never dream of returning remains to a family when I didn't know who they definitely were.' Active engagement surrounding repatriation is taking place in relation to several of the skulls from the phrenology collection; more than 100 have already been repatriated to their places of origin. But each case takes time building trust with communities and in some cases navigating geopolitical tensions over which descendent community has the strongest claim to the remains. 'To look at perhaps repatriation, burials, or whatever, it's literally years of work almost for each individual case,' said Gillingwater. 'And what I found is that every individual culture you deal with wants things done completely differently.' Many of the skulls will never be identified and their provenance is likely to remain unknown. 'That is something that keeps me awake at night,' said Gillingwater. 'For some of our skulls, I know that whatever we do, we're never going to end up with an answer.' 'All I can offer at the minute is that we just continue to care for them,' he added. 'They've been with us, many of them, for a couple of hundred years. So we can look after them. We can care for them. We can treat them with that dignity and respect they all deserve individually.'
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Hospitals are meant to cure and care for our loved ones, not destroy their quality of life
Among the daily cascade of statistics about the state of the NHS lie, as we all know, individual human stories and for some a quiet rage about how hospitals meant to cure and care for patients are destroying their quality of life. Last weekend, we 'celebrated' my older brother's 82nd birthday in a nursing home. Not where he or we had planned to spend it. In early April, he went into a West Midlands hospital with an infection, shortly afterwards diagnosed as pneumonia. He was in a four-bed section of a ward which appeared fairly well-staffed. But despite numbers, it's difficult to do one's job properly or competently when there's a dominant culture of not caring. A father of three and formerly a successful business owner, my brother has had dementia for several years now but, prior to his admission, he had a good quality of life. The pub one day or night a week for a zero beer with old friends and new, who made a fuss of him, meals out, and two days a week at dementia day care. Supported by a number of privately paid part-time carers, my sister-in-law cared for him so well, and he tucked into his food and watched his beloved sport on TV. So, what happened to all that? After four weeks in an NHS hospital, my brother was finally discharged, cured of pneumonia but unable to walk, doubly incontinent and having lost quite a lot of weight. He was not taken to the toilet but kept throughout in 'nappies'. My sister-in-law frequently had to tell staff when his bed was soaking wet. He lost weight because meals were deposited in front of patients – if you were able-bodied you ate, if not, or confused with dementia, the meal just sat there before it was taken away. Only one male nurse we saw made any attempt to help patients eat. Physio was initially offered but only when he was still very ill with pneumonia. When well enough, we asked for physio but were told he hadn't engaged. So, no physio, despite protests. He now sits in a wheelchair in what is an excellent nursing home paid for by his wife, after she discharged him, but the life he had is gone forever. Precious time was wasted at the hospital as unworkable home care packages were proposed. Having fractured her spine last summer lifting my brother from a fall and also recovering from an NHS treatment that has – at least temporarily – worsened her health, my sister-in-law can no longer care for him at home in the state he is now in. It's more than fortunate that she has the funds (for now) to pay for a nursing home. So many others have no choice but to be in the hands of cash-strapped councils. I've deliberately not shared my brother's name to protect his dignity and privacy, nor identified the hospital as a formal complaint will be made. I know that my brother's plight is not unique. But how can we ensure that the elderly and vulnerable, unable to speak for themselves, are not robbed of their mobility, dignity and quality of life as a result of such a short hospital stay. I'm angry and sad in equal measures, and determined to warn others who are older and liable to require hospitalisation, to beware. Your NHS may have some nasty surprises in store. Meanwhile, Secretary of State, it's too late for my brother, but what are you going to do and when to ensure that NHS hospitals are places of safety and prolong rather than shorten a decent quality of life?
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Nurses expected to vote to reject proposed pay deal
Nurses in England are expected to 'overwhelmingly' reject a proposed 3.6% pay rise, it has been reported. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has been balloting its members over the prospective pay rise, which was accepted by the Government in May. BBC reports suggest the offer will be firmly rejected by nursing staff. The RCN previously described the award as 'grotesque', saying it will see nursing staff receive a pay rise 'entirely swallowed up by inflation' – with doctors, teachers, prison officers and the armed forces all receiving a bigger increase. Any decision on strike action would not be made until later in the year, the public broadcaster reports. It comes days after GMB health workers, including ambulance crews, rejected the Government's pay deal. The union said its members voted by 67% against the 3.6% pay award offered for 2025/26 in England. GMB has written to Health Secretary Wes Streeting calling for an urgent meeting to discuss pay and other issues of importance to its members working across the NHS and ambulance services. Rachel Harrison, GMB national secretary, said: 'We await his reply with interest.' The GMB represents about 50,000 health workers, including 20,000 in the ambulance service. The announcement was made on the first day of a five-day strike by resident doctors, also over pay. The RCN has been contacted for comment.
