Piling on the positives helps with shedding the unwanted pounds

WHEN Helen Turner was 15 she weighed nearly 15 stone.

She wore a size 14 and 16 dress size and although she was teased about her weight, she says she was in denial and so didn’t do anything about it.

“I’d always been bigger than the other children – I was taller and broader than them – but it wasn’t until I went to secondary school and started going out into town at lunch time and eating chips and all the wrong things that I started to really pile on the pounds,” says Helen, now 21, from Wortley.

“It was a combination of things really. I wasn’t doing much exercise and the more weight I put on the more it affected my confidence.”

Living next door to the family off licence didn’t help.

“I have always been surrounded by chocolate, crisps and sweets at home because of living next to an off licence which is not easy. However, it was the freedom of eating unhealthily at high school lunch times that I really started piling on the pounds.”

Her mother tried to point out to Helen that she was putting on weight and needed some help to lose it.

“I just didn’t listen,” says Helen. “I think I was in denial.”

By the age of 15 Helen weighed 14st 10lbs.

Childhood obesity figures now show that nearly 1 in 3 children in the UK are obese. That is one third of the child population. There is a pattern that shows if parents are eating unhealthily then the pattern is likely to be followed by children.

A new report from the National Obesity Forum to coincide with National Obesity Awareness Week, concludes there is a serious risk that half the UK population will be obese in less than 40 years, with a total cost reaching £50 billion.

Eventually Helen’s mum persuaded her to join her at a local slimming club.

Because she was under 16 Helen started on the young member (for ages 11-16) scheme that didn’t encourage weight loss but introduced healthy swaps, such as taking a lunchbox to school instead of buying chips, to help her start a healthier lifestyle.

She did manage to lose an impressive two-and-a-half stone.

But when the family decided to leave the programme and go it alone, Helen piled back on the pounds and even more.

“I turned 18 years old and was starting to fit into size 18 to 20 clothes. My confidence was next to none, I weighed more than I had ever done before and I was starting to have pains in my feet after being on them for too long. I regret leaving originally but thought I could do it myself at home which just didn’t work, I needed the support of my consultant.”

Helen decided to rejoin the slimming club and in the first week Helen lost 5lbs.

“ I knew from there that I was going to be okay and that this time, I wasn’t going anywhere.”

The weight began to fall off after switching to a healthier lifestyle, swapping her many takeaways to homemade, satisfying meals like pasta and chilli. Snacks turned into fruit and yoghurt instead of crisps and chips.

“What I like about it is that it’s like one big family supporting each other. Also it doesn’t stop you having anything. You can still have chocolate and alcohol occasionally, you just learn a whole new lifestyle,” says Helen, who has since lost three-and-a-half stone, although she says she still has two stone to go to reach her target weight. She now fits into a size 12 dress – something she hasn’t done since she was 13.

She was so impressed with the support she got that at the age of 19 she decided to become a consultant for the slimming club that had helped her became the youngest Slimming World consultant in West Yorkshire.

“I just wanted to help other people the same way I had been helped,” says Helen who as well as running the group in Farnley, works part-time at Matalan.

“I feel so much more positive about life now. I’m happier in myself and I feel amazing. Slimming World isn’t about starvation or humiliation. It teaches you how to eat a balanced diet, offers unique support and even allows you to have fish and chips if you so wish.” Helen is particularly keen on helping other young people to live a healthy lifestyle.

“I urge parents who know that their child has a weight problem to talk to them about it, about the changes they need to make to their lifestyle to make them healthier. The problem with a lot of diets is that they focus on the negative things, the things you can’t have. What really helped me was when I was told about the positive effect healthy eating could have on my life. I learnt how to cook healthy meals and it just made so much sense to me,” she adds.

“It might have been that at 18 I was more mature and ready to listen, but I do think being positive really helped.”

Helen is also keen for schools to take more action to encourage pupils to eat healthily.

“I still don’t think the food they offer at school is as healthy as it could be and it is just too easy to go into town at lunchtime and eat chips and other unhealthy foods.”

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), individual responsibility works best when people have access to a healthy lifestyle and are supported to make healthy choices.

This means making exercise and eating well accessible and affordable to everybody - and communicating effectively to get the right messages across, helping remove the barriers that may prevent some people making ‘sensible’ choices.

In recent years, the government launched a “call to action”, urging food and drinks companies to “reformulate” their products, reducing levels of fat, salt and sugar in them – but so far, bar a few exceptions, there hasn’t been significant change, and Tam Fry, a trustee of the National Obesity Forum thinks guidelines like this need to be made law.

“The government needs to stop pussy-footing around,” says Mr Fry. “They’ve got to start saying, ‘You will produce good food, and unless you produce good food we will come down on you like a ton of bricks’ – and that means legislation.”

When it comes to tackling child obesity – and the longer-term problem as a whole – Mr Fry believes the most important challenge is to prevent kids and young people from becoming overweight in the first place.

“The solution, in the long-term, is to get our children properly taught about healthy eating and exercise in their formative years, so that they get that message and keep that message throughout their life.”

• Helen Turner’s Slimming World session is on Thursdays at 7.30pm at Farnley’s Hill Top Community Centre. For more information call 07428 527996.