Make-up artist and nail technician Siobhan McDonald has spent her life helping other women look glamorous, while secretly hating how she looked herself. The Cheshire mum-of-two would constantly worry what others thought about her weight when she was at her heaviest at 18 stone.
But a dramatic health scare in hospital made her address for the first time her unhealthy relationship with food. She realised she needed to eat for the health and nourishment of her body, rather than simply for the goal of losing weight.
It sparked a change in Siobhan's mindset that would see her ditch her scales once and for all. After years doing weekly weigh-ins at slimming clubs or trying the latest fad diets she took a fresh approach based on healthy choices.
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Now, instead of calorie counting, she counts chemicals - choosing natural foods wherever possible in her daily diet and ditching processed foods.
Siobhan's healthy transformation was sparked by a conversation with one of her make-up and nail clients, Rachel Williams, in 2021. Rachel had just trained as a weight loss coach and asked if she could help her.
Rachel encouraged Siobhan to harness the power of positive thinking, while addressing the root causes of her overeating and self-doubt with weekly chats.
Incredibly, Siobhan went on to lose over 7 stone in weight over the course of the following year.
She has dropped from her top size of 22 to a size 10-12, but, most importantly for Siobhan, she finally feels in control of her health and well-being. She has maintained the weight loss for the past year.
She no longer weighs herself - as she established that was a trigger for her previous "all or nothing" dieting mindset and years of weekly weigh-ins.
She only discovered the full extent of her weight loss transformation when she was weighed by her doctor at a health appointment and was stunned to see she was just under 11 stone - 7 stone lighter than her top weight.
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's hospital drama would be the spark for her health transformation over the past two years. She caught Covid in early 2021, but became so unwell she 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 vividly recalls receiving a voicenote from friend Rachel while she was in hospital about 'mind over matter', and the thought stuck with her. She was determined to get well and, when she left hospital, began to tackle her relationship with food by working with Rachel on her 12-week coaching programme.
Working with Rachel, she began to address her issues with food, and saw for the first time how unhealthy her attitude to dieting had become. Siobhan is mum to 20-year-old son Wesley and 8-year-old daughter Wesley and lives with her husband Ross in Mobberley.
Siobhan says: "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."
Typical daily diet before
No breakfast - just Diet Coke or a coffee.
Lunch - McDonald’s or sausage cheese and coleslaw sandwich from a local bakery, sausage roll, and chocolate bar.
Dinner - Takeaway if working late, like Chinese or fish and chips.
Typical daily diet now
Breakfast - small piece of sourdough toast with smashed avocado, home-made salsa with tomato and sweetcorn, olive oil and salt and pepper.
3pm - Greek yoghurt with chia seeds, walnuts and hazelnuts and a bit of honey, blueberries and raspberries.
Dinner - Homemade chilli with cheese, fresh guacamole, fresh sour cream or yoghurt served with small portion of nachos.
Snacks - Bowl of popcorn with fruit and a couple of dark chocolate buttons.
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