I’m getting back into dresses I haven’t worn in 30 years!
This time last year, leading actress Mary McEvoy was a size 18-20... now she’s enjoying a much lighter life after losing four stone...
ACTRESS Mary McEvoy has lost four stone in less than a year, plummeting from a dress size 18-20 to a 10-12. Instantly recognisable when she walks into Dublin’s Merrion Hotel — it’s like a glamorous version of Glenroe’s Biddy teleported directly from the 1990s — the weight loss has taken years off the 64-year-old.
She orders a skinny cappuccino with no chocolate on top and tells her extraordinary story.
‘I was 14st 5lbs last May and I’m only 5’2,’ she says. ‘I’m 10st 5lbs now.’
Mary looks svelte and glamorous in a Vneck floral dress and boots, and has been
enjoying ‘shopping’ in her own wardrobe.
‘This was my holy grail, to get back down to the weight I was when I was 30. I’m getting back into dresses I haven’t worn in 30 years. It’s that sense of getting yourself back,’ she says.
How has she lost almost 30 per cent of her body weight in just ten months? Mary swears by a clinic called LighterLife in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, just down the road from her home in Delvin, where she lives on a 120-acre farm with her partner Garvan Gallagher. You can also find LighterLife, a British franchise, in Navan, Longford, Maynooth, Waterford and Athlone, with two more coming soon to Mayo and Limerick.
‘I’m not dissing any other diet or weight loss group because there’s something for everyone,’ she says. ‘But this is the only thing that has ever worked for me.’
LighterLife provides healthy meal replacements for around €2.85 each but at the core of their philosophy is something more psychological, as Mullingar franchisee Katrina Tansley explains: ‘Nobody else is really asking clients, “Why do you overeat?” With LighterLife it’s very much about changing attitudes, behaviours and thinking around food through cognitive behavioural therapy.’
Katrina is the woman Mary phoned after a long night of the soul last May.
‘I was doing a mental health evening for Leitrim County Council with Mary Kennedy,’ the actress begins, having opened up about her own depression some years ago to raise awareness and reduce stigma.
‘Harry Barry, the doctor who does CBT, was talking. I had a great chat with him. I noticed there were all these nibbles on the table. They had a couple of nibbles and kept talking but I was reaching for the nibbles and reaching for the nibbles again and I was going, “How do they do that?”
‘Harry Barry took out a side plate and said, “That’s the secret to weight loss — you fill that and that’s all you need. Your brain can’t detect that’s not a huge plate. That’s how you lose weight”. I got pizza on the way home and got ice-cream, took out a hanky and turned in on myself.’
Next came a series of coincidences, or what Mary calls synchronicity. On the way home she had seen a sign for LighterLife and thought, ‘That’s that crowd, I’m not going to them.’ That’s the humour I was in.
‘The next morning I got up and I was miserable about the weight and lo and behold who’s on the television but Denise Welch, who I always thought was a very fine actress and she happens to be a LighterLife ambassador.’
So Mary picked up the phone to Katrina and was ‘extremely grumpy because I just thought, ‘this is another hiding to nothing, Mary.’
She even tried to talk herself out of it while on the phone, saying she and Garvan were heading to France to visit friends in a couple of weeks, so there ‘probably wasn’t any point starting the diet now. Katrina said, “Are you going to France to see your friend, to get the sun on your back, to swim, to see new places? Or are you going to France to stuff your faces and drink wine?” It hit me like a tonne of bricks. And I said, “You’ve made me feel so uncomfortable, I have to start”. And I went in to her that day and I never looked back.’
LighterLife focuses on changing attitudes, behaviours and thinking around food — they call it a mindset change programme — along with providing nutritious meals and snacks for sale.
Aside from her meal replacements Mary had 20-minute counselling sessions once a week to explore what triggered her binge eating.
‘Food was my drug of choice,’ she says, with typical candour. ‘Therefore I had to confront that. Food is still my drug of choice. I don’t think it’s ever going to change. Because, if I was upset I wouldn’t go out and buy a bottle of wine, I’d go out and buy ice-cream and sugar and stuff my face so I’d have something else to feel horrible about rather than face what was making me upset.’
‘If you had a fight with your friend or you didn’t get the job or whatever, you go out and buy an apple tart and custard and put the whole thing together and into your face,’ says Mary.
‘Now you’re fed up because you ate the apple tart and you’re fatter and you’re not upset about the real thing any more. You’re ignoring what’s really going on. You’re using it as a coping mechanism,’ she explains. ‘I mean you have the menopause on top of that which is part of the weight gain.’
LighterLife franchisees are not psychotherapists but have been trained in CBT and transactional analysis. By exploring the clients’ thinking and behaviour, these therapies try to neutralise triggers for emotional eating, cutting them off at the pass.
‘The mental support that you get is the crux of what makes it work,’ says Mary, who admits that she was no stranger to psychoanalysis before embarking on this diet.’
If I had all the money that I spent on psychiatrists trying to find out the deep, dark secrets I was eating to mask I’d flipping buy this hotel,’ she complains. ‘Katrina doesn’t let you away with anything. I had loads of lightbulb moments with her.’ Like what? ‘The drama triangle was a good one,’ says Mary, of an exercise that looks at how people in conflict interact and how to extract yourself from these sorts of situations.
‘I’ve extracted myself from a lot of situations now — and gently. Nothing dramatic. It was learning how to step out of other people’s dramas and to step out of the dramas in your head. The stroke tank was another lightbulb moment.’
The stroke tank, another transactional analysis term, apparently refers to our inner reserves of selfesteem. ‘Mine was minus, never mind empty,’ says Mary, who would not even allow herself to feel good after a standing ovation.
Stepping away from upsetting situations and learning to love and
Food is still my drug of choice. I don’t think it’s ever going to change
praise herself was one thing. Sticking to the diet and forgoing sugar, another. But Mary describes herself as ‘dogged’. She bought all of her food from LighterLife, where meals include ‘spaghetti bolognese, shepherd’s pie, shakes, bars, noodles — there’s a huge range, costing her around €60 a week.
‘The first week I lost 5lbs and the second week I lost 2lbs — that was a half stone lost before I went to France. While I was in France, I lost 3lbs. I stuffed my face with salads and didn’t go, “Oh, I’m on a diet”. I enjoyed it thoroughly, as much as if I’d gone out and had the ice-cream.
‘One would think that because it’s a low-calorie eating plan that it’s hard but it’s easy because you see the results really quickly.’
Mary says exercise has never been a problem for her as she is very active. ‘When I stopped eating sugar, the bingeing just stopped,’ she says. ‘There’s a lot of diabetes in my family. I know I’m sensitive to carbs so I can’t eat too much of them because they turn into sugar. This is all the education that I got.’
She kept up the momentum month after month, and some weeks were more successful than others. ‘Katrina gave me a graph and it is literally just like that,’ she says, holding her hand at a right angle.
‘A pound, two pounds a week. Sometimes three, sometimes nothing. I gained half a pound over Christmas!’
And, of course, people began to notice. ‘Every time I go onto the Today Show, Daithi says, “Where are you going, Mary? You’re going away altogether. You’re disappearing!”’
But even though she has hit her 4st target, Mary says her hard work is not done.
‘Every time you lose, if you don’t do the mental work you’re going to gain again and you’re going to gain with interest.
‘Then there’s that whole thing of big is beautiful. I know plenty of people for whom big is beautiful is absolutely true; it wasn’t for me. But I felt that I was almost a traitor to the cause if I wanted to lose weight.’
Even having done the ‘mental work’ this time, Mary recently had a relapse.
‘I’m down now to my weight and one day out of the blue I fell off the wagon and I had a binge. I went into Katrina and said, “I had a binge and now I’m back to the start”.
‘I was very upset. She said, “Pick yourself back up and say, So what? It happened. Try not to let it happen again.” That’s CBT, you choose your response.’
Mary describes herself as ‘a catastrophiser’, who thinks the worst ‘because it’s almost like insurance that the thing we’re dreading won’t happen’. She has been working with Katrina on ‘getting more balanced thinking’.
‘You can make up for your mistakes and get back on plan. You don’t have to fear it. You’re still the same person. You’re still going to have to work at the same things.’
Now an ambassador for the franchise, Mary insists: ‘I’m not being paid to do it. I’m doing it because I believe in it and it’s really worked for me. There’s no contracts with people, it’s not expensive, they’re not trying to get loads of money out of you.
‘I don’t know what it is and I can’t put my finger on it but there’s something about LighterLife that brings the best out in you. And I don’t think it’s specifically Katrina because I met some of the other franchisees. They’re really into helping you and cheering you on.’
Mary is now on tour with Jon Kenny in John B Keane’s The Matchmaker, which comes to the Gaiety on November 4 for a week.
She is doing a show called Fruitcake by Alice Barry in Midleton Arts Centre on May 19. It’s about a woman who can’t stop eating — and now Mary will have to wear padding to play the part. But, of course, she is thrilled with her new-found health and happiness.
‘I got myself back. My knees don’t ache. The first “wahoo” moment I had was when I was in a shoe shop tying my shoes and I just thought, “Oh my God, I can get down and I can tie my shoes and when I come up I’m not going puff, puff, puff ”. Now I can do more in yoga class than I could do when I was 20.
‘It’s a second wind,’ she enthuses. ‘I feel great, I’ve never felt better. My 60s have been my best decade bar none.’