A mum lost seven stone in one year after ditching fad diets and weighing scales. Siobhan McDonald is a make-up artist and nail technician who spends her time making other women look and feel their best.
But at her heaviest weight of 18 stone she felt far from glamourous, and deep down hated the way she looked. A health scare forced her to reevaluate her lifestyle and diet.
For the first time in her life, she made the decision to eat healthier not for how she looked but for her health. She changed her mindset and stopped going to weekly weigh-ins at slimming clubs and not doing fad diets.
Instead of counting calories she started counting chemicals - opting for fresh, homecooked foods and avoiding anything processed. Now, she has slimmed down from a size 22 on top to a size 10-12.
It all started back in 2021, when Siobhan was talking to one of her clients called Rachel Williams. Rachel had just trained as a weight loss coach and asked if she could help her.
Rachel told her to look into the root cause of why she was overeating and address this. They had weekly chats, where she'd encourage Siobhan to harness the power of positive thinking.
Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Siobhan, 36, says: "For me, this wasn’t about trying to lose weight, it was about trying to be healthy. It was trying to change my mindset, and learning about nutrition and getting a bit more self worth so that I finally felt I deserved to change my life.
"The weight loss was more a happy coincidence of realising I needed to be nourishing my body instead of filling it with food."
Siobhan got Covid in 2021 and ended up in hospital with pneumonia. She says: "My health in general at that point was just at rock bottom, I was overweight, I was miserable and my health just reflected that.
“I 100 per cent believe I was so ill with it because of my mindset, because I was overweight and I was unhealthy. I just did everything you’re not supposed to do to nourish your body and I paid for it."
Siobhan left hospital and started a 12-week programme with Rachel, she said: "I’d always done diet clubs in the past and would lose a few stone and then put it back on. But this wasn’t a diet, it was all about changing my mindset to fuelling my body.
"Because I’d been so unwell, and I know I was unwell because of my weight and my negative mindset, it was more about changing the way I think about my body. I wanted to be better, and having this reason I was doing it for. For me that was for my children - I wanted to be able to go to the gym with my son, because he likes to go to the gym, whereas I wouldn’t have ever done that before because I didn’t want to embarrass him.
“I wanted to go to the play centres with my daughter and be able to run around and not feel self-conscious, or be worried I would break something. That was my anchor, my reason why."
Rachel worked with Siobhan to really look at what she ate and how to make it more healthy. Siobhan says: "I used to love toast, I would have loads of supermarket white bread with margarine or Nutella or pate on top which was giving me no nutrition whatsoever.
"Rachel said why not try sourdough instead? So now I’ll have one slice of sourdough toast with real butter or whole foods like peanut butter or with homemade tomato salsa and avocado on top. So really the calories are not less, but I am now nourishing my body.
"I used to drink Diet Coke all day, but now there's always a drink of water with me. I still eat what I like, but if I feel like cake I have one slice, and I'll make sure it's a freshly-baked cake. Rather than in the past going to a supermarket and buying a whole cake with lots of additives in it and I'd end up eating the whole thing throughout the day.
"Don’t get me wrong, still my favourite thing to do is eat, but I just make sure it’s now good stuff. I’m very aware now that what I’m feeding my body is good for me, it makes me feel good.
"I don’t feel sluggish any more and I’ll say "let’s walk here" rather than drive, because I’ve got more energy.
"I think of it as I’m not putting diesel into a petrol car anymore, it all just makes sense.
"It’s counting the chemicals, not the calories, in food and eating for health. I still have the things I like, because otherwise it’s not sustainable, but I’m not rewarding myself with food like I used to do."
After four months, Siobhan could feel that her clothes were getting looser. And, by Christmas, she had to start buying new clothes and was stunned to find she was fitting into size 10s and 12s.
"I didn’t want to keep weighing myself because I had spent my whole life obsessed with the scales and I didn’t want to do that anymore," she says. "But after four months I felt like I had more energy, I started to notice my clothes were a little bit looser, I was more interested in going out for a night out with my friends because I didn’t hate as much what I saw in the mirror.
“By eight to nine months after we started, I started to notice that I don’t hate my photos. I remember it was Christmas 2021, I’d obviously lost a significant amount of weight by then, I don’t know how much I weighed, but I had a tight black dress on and had gone out for a drink with my sister and I said “take a picture of me”. I’d never have said that before, I always hated having my photo taken."
"I remember buying size 22 jeans that wouldn’t fasten, whereas now I’m a 10-12 and it still feels very weird to me going buying a 10, my brain hasn’t caught up yet because I’ve spent 30 years of my life being unhappy about how I look.
"I’ve yo-yoed my whole life. Now I’ve lost just over seven stone, and I’ve kept it off - I've never maintained for a year and not slipped back into old habits. It’s because I’m not restricting myself at all, my brain doesn’t want the same things, I’m just allowing myself foods I want to eat."
Siobhan can now see that she had a problem with binge eating in the past. She said: "I’m very all or nothing, in the past I’d lose half a stone but then reward myself with a takeaway and naughty food, I don’t know why I was rewarding myself with something that isn’t nourishing me.
"Now I reward myself by thinking I can wear that dress now and I feel good in it, I feel nice. But before I was rewarding myself with something that was actually a punishment."
Coach Rachel, from Henbury, Macclesfield, has had her own incredible weight loss journey after years of yo-yo dieting, and now uses her experiences to help other people. She recently launched her own podcast "How I thought myself thin" talking about how she lost 7 stone and has kept it off.
She offers bespoke 12 week programmes that start from £1500, and also offers 14 day online video sessions which give an introduction to the programme for £35, but these are not one-to-one.
Rachel says: "No one ever weighs, I never tell people to have a certain amount of calories, it’s a whole journey of discovering people’s best health.
"I feel like I equip people with a rucksack of tools, so that when they’re no longer working with me they have that rucksack on their back and they know just what to do.”
For Siobhan, her transformation has been life-changing. She says: "Before, I felt judged all the time. I spent my life making everyone else look and feel gorgeous but didn’t really care about myself.
"I was always conscious meeting a new client, worrying they’d think 'she’s not going to be very good at it' because they’d judge me for the way I looked. Now I walk into any room with my head held high."
