A mum-of-two has lost a whopping nine stone after seeing photos of how she used to look as a chubby school pupil – known as ‘cream cake girl’.
Laura Eastel, 28, was bullied for years as an overweight child and dubbed ‘fatty’ by her class mates.
The taunts only made it worse and Laura turned to junk food for comfort and weighed a whopping 20st 9lb at her heaviest.
But her life turned around in 2014 after she looked at pictures of herself as a young school girl – and decided to finally make a change.
Laura, of Tavistock, Devon, has a husband, Chris, 33, two children, Ashley, 12, and Tori, six, and now works as a consultant at Slimming World.
She said: “I was at my parents’ house when they decided to get out our old family albums.
“Flicking through the pages, we stopped on one of me bulging out of my school uniform, I was horrified.
“Although I made some friends, wearing a uniform meant for a child six years older than me, I felt like such an outsider.”
By the age of 15, Laura weighed 19st and all she could fit into were baggy T-shirts and leggings.
She thought of herself as unlovable, but a year later she met future fiance Chris and in 2005 she became pregnant with their first child – Ashley.
But Laura found herself using pregnancy as an excuse to eat more and more.
Chocolate biscuits and bacon rolls for breakfast, sandwiches and crisps for lunch, pizza and fried chicken takeaways for dinner, and litres of fizzy drinks in between.
She ballooned to 20st 9lb, and Laura found herself struggling to walk up a flight of stairs without being out of breath.
She couldn’t bend down and play with the children at the local play centre, either. The comments got crueler and her insecurities grew.
In 2014 Laura made a promise to herself to make a change – she cleared all her cupboards of junk food and promised herself a new start.
Porridge, salad, lean meat and fruit bars were her new diet.
“Whenever my willpower faltered, I only had to think back to my school days and remember the bullies’ jibes to spur me on,” she said.
Laura joined the local Slimming World group in Yelverton and was so successful she went on to become a Slimming World consultant.
Laura is now a fraction of her former size, having lost 9st 5lbs and shrunk to a size 10.
“Losing weight has changed my appearance completely and when I walked past a girl who used to bully me recently, the look of shock on her face made my day.
“People often do a double take when they see me, they simply don’t recognise me as the chubby girl they used to know.”
