A young woman who lived on KFC and chocolate lost an incredible nine stone and dropped seven dress sizes in a dramatic weight loss transformation.
Samantha Taylor, 32, ballooned to 25 stone in May 2020 after tucking into a takeaway almost every day, and frequent helpings of chocolate and crisps.
She had also struggle to grieve her mother who died when Samantha was just 19, and this led to a bout of depression.
But when KFC, McDonald's and other fast food restaurants were forced to shut for a few months at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the council worker began cooking her own meals for the first time in years.
And in the 18 months or so since, she's shed more than nine stone and dropped seven dress sizes to around a size 16.
Samantha, from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, said: “I thought that if I didn’t do something, I was going to end up twice the size coming out of lockdown as I did going into it.
"My diet before was KFC, takeaway, chocolate - anything I wanted. Nothing was off limits.
"I was having food delivered pretty much every night. Then everything shut and that was taken away from me.
"When things started opening up again, I realised I quite liked cooking for myself and knowing what was in my food.
"It completely changed my eating habits."
The woman's diet is now a contrast to that before the pandemic as, these days, she regularly has a nutritious protein shake for breakfast, a sandwich or omelette for lunch, a healthy colourful meal for dinner, which will include chicken, fish, vegetables, salad and sweet potato, and she snacks on fruit, hummus and protein bars.
She also works out four times a week and tries to get 10,000 steps in every day.
Even after May 2020 when restrictions started to ease, and Samantha’s old favourites like McDonald’s and KFC were serving up food for takeaway again, the woman stuck rigidly to her new diet.
Samantha was always larger than her peers when she was growing up. She piled on more and more weight though when her mother died.
She continued: “Even as a child, I remember being overweight. I went on a school trip when I was about seven and we did so much walking, I came back and my mum hardly recognised me.
“When I was 19, my mum passed away very suddenly and I became a guardian for my two sisters.
“Eating was just about convenience and as I slid deeper into depression, I ate what I wanted to make myself feel good because nothing else really did.
“No one could tell me what I should and shouldn’t eat because I was an adult, looking after two kids.”
Samantha had tried to lose weight at different points in her life but had never managed to do it in a sustainable way.
She said: “In 2018, one of my best friends got married and I was asked to be a bridesmaid alongside girls who were a size 8. We ordered these dresses online and I got a size 28.
“It arrived and mine was too small to fasten so I took it to a seamstress but she looked at it and looked at me and told me there just wasn’t enough material.
“I searched for a bigger size but it was the biggest they went so I knew the only way I could go to the wedding was to lose weight.
“I went full throttle lost two and a half stone in six weeks and went to the wedding but I did it in a really unsustainable way and I couldn’t keep it up. After the wedding, I went straight back to how I was eating before.
"But now I’m exercising four to five times a week and don’t feel tired. Before I would want to nap all the time and I just didn’t have the energy for little things like cleaning.
“You don’t realise how bad things were until you’re not in it any more.
“I feel like I am the person I always should have been now.”
