I started eating everything I wasn’t allowed, frying everything, like eggs and meat and snacking on crisps and chocolate.”

Instead of being pleased I’d done so well, in my head I’d failed and went off the rails. “Back then, you used to be given a goal weight, which was 9st 6lb for me, but I couldn’t get past 9st 8lb. Paired with a house move and returning to work as a nurse just three months after her daughter’s birth, Christine joined Weight Watchers for the first of many times to try to get a handle on her weight. But it didn’t and I went from 11st to 13st and stayed there.” Four years later, when I had my second daughter, I assumed the baby weight would just disappear again. “Back then, if I put on weight, I just starved myself for a week, eating cereal or eggs, and it went straight back down. I was the slimmest I’d ever been at that point, at about 11st and a size 14. She said: “I had my first daughter just before I turned 21 and the extra weight I gained with that pregnancy just disappeared by the time she was six months old. Every door is open.”Ĭhristine has since met plumber and electrician, Declan McGuckin, 64, with whom she now lives, said she was taken by surprise when she could not shift her baby weight after her youngest girl was born. I said I wouldn’t be fat by 30, wouldn’t be fat by 40, wouldn’t be fat by 50 and finally I have achieved it – before I turn 60 in December! Now 10st 3lb, with a healthy BMI of 24.4, Christine, of Darlington, County Durham, said: “With every decade, I have promised myself to not be fat.

She had flirted with slimming club Weight Watchers, now WW, down the years but, with a body mass index (BMI) of 45.7, compared to the NHS healthy range of 18.5 to 24.9, meaning she was obese, she decided “enough was enough” and went back. When her librarian husband John Burnell died aged 47 in 2007, both her daughters had left home and 5ft 4in Christine was soon comfort eating which, alongside health struggles of her own in her 50s, saw her weight balloon to 19st 2lb by 2019. Weight first became an issue for former nurse Christine Burnell, 59, following the birth of her second daughter in 1987, after which she could not shift her baby weight and went on to yo-yo between a size 14 and an 18 for years. A 19st 2lb size 24 grandma who loves baking and whose 30-year weight struggles peaked after she lost her husband to bone marrow cancer has shed nearly 9st to reach her 10st 6lb size 12 goal just before turning 60.

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