I Lost 123 Kg In Five Years

She was so big she needed an industrial scale to weigh herself – then she decided enough was enough!

- Charlea Sieberhagen

HER smile is almost as bright as her shock of pink hair. It’s clear she’s not afraid of being noticed.

Yet there was a time when she was too shy to show her face – or rather her 208-kg body – in public. Marianda Geel couldn’t bear the stares and unkind remarks people made when they saw her large frame.

But now it’s a different story – she’s lost more than half her body weight, a whopping 123 kg, in five years.

The 49-year-old looks confident when she welcomes us into her home in Kuils River, Cape Town.

In the framed family pictures on the wall Marianda’s husband, Sweeney (48), a sales consultant, and their son, Matthys (23), who works at a call centre, frequently appear with a much larger woman, her greying hair pulled tightly away from her face, which bears only the tiniest hint of a smile.

“It’s me!” says Marianda, a nurse, before showing us more pictures on her tablet. This woman is so different to the one in the pictures.

The new Marianda is vibrant, gesturing exuberantly when she speaks, and quick to laugh. Later she even poses in her exercise gear.

“I didn’t care about myself,” she says, looking at the pictures. “I could just as easily have died. When people said things to me I’d think, ‘Whatever – if you don’t want me as I am, stuff you’.”

In the years she was packing on the weight, Sweeney never said anything. The first time he referred to her weight was when he heard they’d won a cruise to Portuguese Island off the coast of Mozambique.

“When my husband put the phone down he said, ‘My love, you’re not going to fit into the seat. See, we have to fly to Durban to board the ship’.”