How Looking At Old Prom Photos Took This Woman From Guilt-Eating At Size 20 To Being A Healthy Size 10

By Liana Jacob

MEET the Essex brunette who gave up on dieting after she met her boyfriend but has since managed to shed an astonishing seven-and-a-half-stone in just a year-and-a-half.

Tesco assistant, Charlotte Pavitt (21), from Essex, UK, used her bubbly personality to mask her insecurities about her physical appearance and what people thought of her. She joined Slimming World in 2013 and stuck at it until she met her boyfriend in January 2014.

Happy in her new relationship, Charlotte didn’t feel like she needed to improve her appearance which lead her to make unhealthy food choices and not exercising. She tipped the scales at 18st 7.5Ibs and was a UK size 20 to 22.

One day she was looking through her sister’s prom pictures that made her feel ‘ugly’, rebuilding her motivation to change her life. With a new diet and incorporating day-to-day exercise into her lifestyle, Charlotte managed to shrink down to a svelte 11st and UK size 10 to 12.

“I was doing Slimming World when I met my boyfriend and I guess looking back on it now, I wasn’t in it one-hundred percent,” Charlotte said.

“I was losing weight because I was worried about what people thought of me when they saw me, I could imagine all sorts of nasty comments that might be whizzing round their heads.

“Once I was with my boyfriend I guess I figured I didn’t need to improve my appearance anymore, as I found someone who loved me for who I was.

“So, I started to make bad food choices again, and before I knew it the weight had piled on and I was all of a sudden the heaviest and most uncomfortable I had ever been.

“I felt ashamed, disgusting, ugly, upset with myself that I’d let myself spiral out of control the way I did and then guilt-eating to make myself feel better.

“I would want to hide in bigger clothes, I would never ever wear anything tight fitting and when I had to, I’d feel completely out of my comfort zone, always worrying about what people thought of the way I looked.

“The turning point was seeing my sister’s prom photos. I think you can kid yourself when you look in the mirror; you can pose in certain ways to get the angle just right.

“The same with taking a photo of yourself. But these photos were taken by someone else and I could see everything that I had become.

“It’s quite clear that I was influenced a lot by what I thought others saw, and now I had visual proof of what they saw, and I didn’t want to look like that girl anymore.

“I had dreams of being slim and confident, of enjoying being young in dresses and shorts, not caring about what others thought of me.

“I lost weight through Slimming World. It is the simplest way to lose weight as their ‘food optimising’ plan makes eating healthy and making good choices second nature.

“The best thing is you never go hungry, nothing is off the menu, even chocolate. You can still enjoy all the foods you love like sweet and sour chicken, curry, roast dinners.

“I can now enjoy life, I do not get out of breath when I walk up the stairs, I have the confidence to wear what I’d like to wear, I can now do day-to-day chores without struggling for breath.”

Mustering up the motivation to start to change her life proved to be the hardest part of her weight loss journey.

“I think the biggest problem with losing weight is finding your reason for it; as much as you can know you should lose weight or as much as you might want too you need to find that switch in your brain and flick it on,” Charlotte said.

“Find that event that’s going to drive you or in my case the photo of the person you do not want to be anymore.

“People that have never met me before just can’t imagine me being as big as I was. It’s only once you see the before photos that you can see how dramatic the change really is.

“Everyone always asks me how I lost the weight, how amazing of an achievement it is and how proud they are of me.”

For more information visit: https://www.instagram.com/charlottepavitt_sw/