A woman knew what she had to do after her mum was given an "out of the blue" diagnosis.
Lauren Voyce, from Rainhill, said she battled with her weight from a young age, but she struggled to find the right support. However, things came to a head last April for the 32-year-old when her mum Karen Martin, 65, was diagnosed with breast cancer following a routine appointment.
Lauren told the ECHO: "Because of mum's high BMI she wasn't able to have the first line of treatment that they wanted to give her. She was first diagnosed in April last year, it just came from a routine mammogram. It wasn't that she even found [a lump] - it was just out the blue."
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Doctors were thankfully able to find Karen a different type of chemotherapy to treat the cancer, but it left Lauren worrying about her own health.
She said: "It kind of spurred me on to do something about my own weight issue because I've got a little boy, and to think that if anything happened to me and I couldn't have the right treatment because my BMI was too high, I'd never forgive myself."
The mum-of-one decided to join Slimming World in May last year and has managed to lose five stone in the space of nine months. Lauren said: "The biggest thing with Slimming World is I'm in control of it. It's not someone else telling me what to do.
"I saw a dietician, I saw all kinds of health professionals when I was at school, and it was very much a prescriptive thing of 'this is what you must do, try this'. Well, that doesn't work for a lot of people and it certainly doesn't work for me.
"If your mind is in the right place then Slimming World definitely works. Once I started seeing the results and seeing how things were changing it spurred me on even more.
"I gave it everything because I had that drive and it obviously paid off. I'm really proud of what I've achieved. I've achieved more than I thought I would in the time frame that I did."
After a difficult nine months, Lauren said her mum has now "started to feel a bit more like herself" and has been able to return to work. She added: "She's certainly getting there now."
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