I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin and now I want to help others says super-slimmer Bev

Bev, 46, saw her weight rise to 13 stone 10lbs after starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT), but after joining a Slimming World Sunderland group in January (2025) has shed over three stones and dropped from a size 14/16 to a size 10.

Bev said: “I started taking HRT for pre-menopause symptoms and I had started to put weight on. I don’t think it was necessarily down to the medication but more down to the fact my body was starting to change shape.

“I wasn’t eating healthily, but I hadn’t been for a number of years and up until that point I hadn’t put weight on.”

Although aware she had gradually been putting on weight it was a trip to the Lake District last summer (2024) which was the catalyst for Bev to shed the pounds.

She said: “I was climbing a mountain with my partner and I felt so out of breath I couldn’t breathe. I kept having to stop every few minutes.

“My partner also took a photograph of me from behind whilst we were doing the climb and when I saw it I felt like I looked huge and I just didn’t like what I saw.”

Bev’s weight gain was also beginning to affect her confidence and she was becoming increasingly withdrawn.

She said: “My normal clothes no longer fitted me, my confidence started to drop and I stopped going out. My friends would call and I would avoid meeting up.

“I had become so unfit that I stopped exercising as it was increasingly difficult.”

With Christmas approaching, Bev said she couldn’t bear the thought of putting on more weight over the festive period and decided to “bite the bullet” and enrolled at her nearest Slimming World group.

She said: “I remember going along the first night. I was excited to get started but also feeling a little apprehensive walking in. My consultant Stacy was amazing, she said to me that night ‘I will get you to your target but you need to make some changes, I can’t do that for you’.

“She asked for my dream weight but I was too scared to imagine I could achieve it so I set an interim target and wrote down my real dream target weight at home that night in one of the books I had in my new member pack.”

Key to Bev’s weight loss has been completely revolutionising her diet.

She said: “I was a big ‘picker’ of food and would graze throughout the day - I love chocolate. I would also have a couple of takeaways each week and we rarely made meals from fresh and relied on frozen food.

“Now I have Weetabix for my breakfast followed by a Slimming World Meal for both lunch and dinner.”

Not content with meeting her own target weight, Bev now wants to help others shed the pounds and has trained as a Slimming World consultant and set up her own group at Washington Mind in Columbia.

She said: “I had got to the point where I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. I now feel good again, but I don’t want anyone to have to feel like I did.

“I could never have lost my weight without the support of Slimming World. As well as making a commitment to myself to lose weight I was also making a commitment to the rest of the group. It’s sharing your support with people going through the same journey.”

Bev’s new Slimming World group is set to start on Thursday July 24 with a session a 6pm followed by a group meeting at 7.30pm.

If you would like to join Bev’s group then you can call her on 07860 276266.