Wellington woman loses 53kg in seven months

Inspiration for weight loss can be sparked at any place and at any time, but for Lizzie Satherley it was when she became an anaesthetic technician at Wellington Hospital.

Here, Satherley, 30, saw up close the health dangers of obesity as patients came in for gastric bands or serious operations due to complications from diabetes.

"When your doctor warns you about what obesity is doing to you body it's so easy just to dismiss it," Satherley told Stuff. "But when I started working in healthcare, what I saw was pretty confronting."

Perhaps even more confronting considering Satherley then weighed 137 kilograms. "I'd been in denial for so long, but my new job meant my mind had been opened," she says.

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For Satherley, the weight had crept on slowly. She gained it during two pregnancies, but then continued to make unhealthy food choices throughout her 20s.

She confesses that, at her heaviest, her diet was heavy in foods that were beige in colour and dense in carbohydrates.

"I'd eat lots of bread, pasta and potatoes," the single, mum-of-two explains. "I'd go to the bakery and eat caramel slices. I'd snack on chocolate bars.

"And because I had such low energy, I'd drink energy drinks to try and give myself a boost. I was also drinking six hot chocolates a day."

And carrying 137kg of weight on her 5.4ft body meant Satherley always felt tired, short of breath, battled with daily headaches and was struggling to walk because of serious joint pain. At times, she felt she was at death's door.

"It makes me sad to think that my weight actually impacted on the boys," Satherley says. "I couldn't be the mum who ran around the playground with them. I started to shy away from going out. And we were getting lazy as a family."

But in August 2018, Satherley decided it was time to bite the bullet and find a health plan that worked for her. A colleague mentioned a meal-replacement plan. 

"I felt I had nothing to lose, well except for 70 kilos, and I was so desperate to find something that worked, so I thought I'd give it a go. It took me three weeks to mentally prepare myself to even start it and I ate all my favourite foods in that time."

For 12 weeks, Satherley followed the plan, swapping her meals for special milkshakes. Every three weeks she did a weigh-in with her work colleagues, who were her support team. After three months, she had lost 25kg.

"Losing that weight was like freeing my body from a prison of fat. And, during that time, I really thought about my eating habits. I was able to identify why I was over-eating and making bad choices," Satherley says.

"I could see that because I grew up in poverty with no food security, I would just want to eat and eat. And I'll have to be very conscious of that behaviour to stockpile for the rest of my life."

However, nutritionist Jess Campbell, from Body Balance Nutrition, warns that replacing meals with shakes isn't advised as it only really offers short-term weight loss instead of looking at the problem as a whole.

"Weight regain is certain in the long term and the rate seems to be related to how fast it's lost and how much restriction was in place to begin with," she says. 

"If we replace our opportunity to eat with shakes, we aren't addressing or promoting any health behaviours – the stuff that matters. The shakes can't continue forever, what happens then?"

But it's something that Lizzie was aware of and since then she has been eating a balanced diet of whole foods and is most surprised by her new love of vegetables. "I actually enjoy eating them over pizza," she says.

Her diet currently consists of a breakfast of two boiled eggs, chicken and salad for lunch and then a meal high in protein and vegetables for dinner. And Satherley has also started running, doing an hour of cardio every day in the field behind her home in Wellington.

The result? A total weight loss of 53kg.

But the biggest change is now embracing outdoor activities with her two boys, Olly, nine, and Johnny, seven.

"It's such a simple thing but being able to go down the slide at the park with them brings me such joy," she says. 

And she admits that without those daily trips to the bakery and the dairy, she has saved $60 a week. That's a total of $1890 since September 2018.

"I still have a way to go yet. I want to lose another 15kg before the year is up. But I think there's so many Kiwis out there who probably feel helpless and blame themselves like I did.

"My advice is to find a great support team. I couldn't have done it without my colleagues. And once you have that, it really does make it all feel achievable."