How I lost 5st AND GOT MY LIFE BACK

Carolynn Condie on learning to love herself again

People say you’ve got to love yourself first if you want others to love you. But I certainly didn’t love myself when I went to meet Neil for the first time in July 2011.

In fact, my confidence was so low that despite chatting on a dating app for a month first I still didn’t believe he would actually show up in person.

I’d posted an extremely flattering picture of just my head and shoulders on my profile, careful not to include my size-16 body for fear of putting him off.

Miraculously though, he did turn up. And when I walked into the pub that July evening, he was even more gorgeous in the flesh than in his photos.

With his dark brown hair, sparkling eyes, and kind smile, we hit it off instantly and talked until the early hours.

I admitted to him how unhappy I was with my size, explaining how I’d been a super-fit, slim teenager who ran every day. But I said how it had all changed when I’d applied to join the Navy at 19. Failing the running test had really hit my self-confidence.

Afterwards, I’d started a job in a pub and worked long hours, eating chips and drinking cider, and I couldn’t be bothered to exercise. So, of course, the weight had just piled on.

Aged 27 when I met Neil for the first time, my fitness, figure, and confidence were in tatters. I was so big I had to wear men’s shirts to work because the women’s uniform didn’t fit, and despite being the ‘fat funny friend’, on the inside, I was utterly miserable.

Neil, then 32, changed all of that though.

He showered me with compliments and there was no denying the spark between us.