A mum told how she dropped six dress sizes after avoiding looking at herself in the mirror for years.
Carmel Healey, from Crosby, ballooned to 17 stone at her heaviest and was a size 22 in clothes. The 59-year-old said she started piling on the pounds in the last few years of her career as an Associate Director of Nursing for the NHS, during which time she would often skip lunch, grab junk food on the go and order takeaways when she got home.
Carmel made the decision to take early retirement in 2017 after working for the NHS for 38 years as a nurse and a midwife, following the death of a family member. It was after taking retirement that Carmel bought a treadmill and decided to start exercising, but she soon had another setback when she suffered from a knee injury which left her needing physiotherapy.
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Carmel said: "I was getting fatter because I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything. I didn't want to go anywhere, I didn't want people to see me and of course that was compounded then when we went into the first lockdown because obviously I wasn't doing anything.
"My son was cooking all the time - every day we were baking because what else could you do at the time? I was just so uncomfortable in my body. I couldn’t walk anywhere, my knees were killing me.
"I was literally falling over all the time. My weight was making it difficult to walk properly, because my knee was bad as well it made it worse. I have a walled wardrobe - it’s mirrored; I never looked in it which is pretty difficult when it’s on the wall and if I did get out of bed and look I would never take in what I could see."
