The Strictly star who dares reveal the great taboo about weight loss
Lisa Riley shed 12st but still hated her body. Here, with unflinching honesty, she explains why...
FORMER Strictly star Lisa Riley describes herself as ‘a Russian doll of love’. Or at least, that’s what she is to her boyfriend of three years, Al. ‘He’s had the before me, the middle me and the after me,’ she says.
The ‘before’ Lisa was a vocal cheerleader for the big-is-beautiful brigade, who, at her heftiest, was a dress size 28 and swore blind she was happy as a pig in clover. Until two years ago, when she finally confronted the health risks of morbid obesity.
Out went the bottle-and-a-half of wine a night, the crisps, the sweets, the cheese toasties and the rest, for Lisa to emerge as a size 12 ‘middle me’.
Again, she said she felt ‘absolutely wonderful’, but privately she was filled with self-loathing.
For this dramatic weight loss — almost 12st in 18 months — left her with unsightly rolls of loose skin on her stomach, groin, thighs and underarms. So much so that when she exercised, the saggy flesh rubbed red raw.
‘It revolted me to the core,’ she says. ‘I used to lie in the bath pulling at it. I wanted to rip it off. I was so angry.
‘I was getting so mentally tortured because wherever I went — to work, to the supermarket, to see my family, to the shops — people were like: “Oh my God, look at you, you look amazing!”
I’d say: “Oh, thanks.” But inside I was thinking: No I don’t. I hate myself.
‘I’d exercise and be really hurting with all this skin flapping about and dragging. I began to wish I was massive again.
When I was a size 28, I was like this huge ball but everything was tight. Then I’d worked really hard to get the weight off but I’d been left with this huge bundle of… of…’ she stops. Shakes her head.
On Tuesday, viewers will be able to see that huge bundle on ITV1’s Lisa Riley’s Baggy Body Club, which follows the actress and Loose Women presenter through surgery to remove more than a stone of loose skin.
The hour-long documentary is not for the fainthearted, showing, as it does in graphic detail, the two lengthy operations during which consultant plastic surgeon Rob Winterton slices off enough flesh to feed a small village.
WHICH takes us to the ‘after’ Lisa who is sitting before me.
‘ I’m as rock- solid as Serena Williams,’ she says, tapping her thighs. ‘ Finally, I’m sexually confident. I’m at my peak. I’m 41 years old. But this wasn’t vanity for me — it was a necessity.
‘I’ve never once said it’s cosmetic surgery. It’s not. It’s corrective surgery. I couldn’t have carried on without it.’
Lisa is not alone. There are thousands of people in the UK who, having shed large amounts of weight, face the same problem.
She agreed to take part in the documentary in the hope that raising awareness will encourage the Government to make the operation, which costs between £5,000 and £8,000, available on the NHS.
‘The NHS wants people to lose weight for their health. But once they do, they’re on their own, and left with this whole problem of horrid sagging skin,’ says Lisa.
‘I used to tuck all the rolls of skin into my tights and underwear, but it was reaching the stage where it was hard to clean between the folds. It was vile.
‘I’m so lucky I could afford this myself. When you go onto the crowd- funding sites on social media you see the enormity — excuse the pun — of the number of people who need this. When I get out of the shower, I don’t wobble any more. Look.’ She scrolls through the photographs on her iPhone to a picture of the flesh the surgeon removed.
‘That’s my stomach. That’s my trophy. It makes me really proud. Look at all of that he chopped off. There’s so much of it. And look, that’s my breast being rebuilt [ after more saggy skin was removed].
‘These are my golden tickets. I want to keep reminding myself what I’ve done — what I’ve been through — to get to where I am now.
‘This is for always. It’s who I am. I don’t recognise the fat, bubbly Lisa any more. She’s dead in my eyes, and long may that last.’
Indeed, today Lisa is much changed from the bouncy funseeker who endeared herself to so many viewers in the 2012 series of Strictly Come Dancing, partnering Robin Windsor.
Few of those watching knew that just two months before filming began, her much- loved but indulgent mum Cath had died of cancer. Lisa, one of two children born and raised in Bury, Lancashire, who found fame at 19 as Mandy Dingle in ITV’s Emmerdale, nursed Cath through her last months of life.
‘Mum got breast cancer when she was 51 and it came back to the pancreas five years later,’ says Lisa. ‘Those two years and four months to her passing I was living on takeaways. I can show you photograph after photograph of how enormous I was. Look.’ Again she scrolls through her iPhone.
‘How did I get like that? Who is that person? It’s like when you play Monopoly and people say: “Why do you get £200 when you pass Go?” There is no answer. Fame, perhaps, at such a young age. Mum. Living the high life.
‘When she got really ill I stopped working in the February and set up the Cath Riley wing at my house. If she had a week or ten weeks left, I had to be there. My mum was my everything and then some.
‘She passed on July 29. Even now when I walk into Superdrug and see the yellow Dove deodorant — the one she used — it can make me cry. It really can. It’s the smell. I want my mum.’
There are tears now. She wipes her eyes. Collects herself.
‘Strictly took the pain away. Robin was the best Calpol. It was giddy the whole time and I loved it.
‘Then we went on the Strictly tour. I was drinking really, really heavily: a bottle-and-a-half of Malbec. But you’re in a hotel room, you press room service — “Can I have a cheese toastie and a portion of French fries? Can I wake up and have four hash browns and three veggie sausages?” ’
ONCE again, she is showing me photographs on her phone. This one is of her and Al. She won’t say what he does or how they met, but she lights up like the sequins on a Strictly frock when she speaks about him.
‘Just look how happy we are,’ she says. ‘I deserve that. Before my mum passed I was doing my little two-month relationships. It was like escapism — a time-passer.
‘But after Mum, well, it’s once you stop looking, isn’t it? I never thought for one minute I’d meet my best friend, my soulmate, someone who gets me.
‘I need that sanctuary. I used to fill my world with people. He has made me realise I can go home and be by myself. That’s the part of me I’ve discovered. I’m allowed to be quiet. I don’t have to be everywhere for everybody 24/7 because that’s what I was.’
Then, two years ago, her 58-yearold father Terry was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and ended up in hospital for several nights.
‘That was my lightbulb moment,’ says Lisa. ‘I was sat there with the curtain around me and Dad at midnight as the staff were swapping over. Dad’s bed was near the nurses’ station and I heard too much — about amputees, sight loss. And I heard “fat” too much, all linked to type 2 diabetes.
‘It just hit me that if I didn’t change, that could be me. I
thought: OK, I want to make a change. I really want to. ’
‘Everyone I know thought it was another fad. I’d done Weight Watchers and Slimming World. For three months I’d throw myself into it, then I’d get bored and soon the Pringles were being popped again. But this time I didn’t stop.
‘I suppose it’s when your head and heart are in sync, and all of a sudden I had someone who didn’t pander to me but embraced the word “No”, unlike my mum.
‘With her, if I made whopper mistakes, she’d go: “It’s OK. Tomorrow’s another day.” But Al would be like: “Hold on.” I needed that man — a real bloke.’
For eight days Lisa consumed just 405 calories a day to shock her body. At the same time she ‘trained like a banshee’.
She continues to eat smaller portion sizes, tries not to eat after 6.30pm and exercises daily.
‘A year ago I gave up drinking, because when I was hung over I was eating for six, and not healthy stuff. It was toasties, French fries and crisps. I don’t eat anything like that now.’
The weight fell off her, but not the unsightly skin. Lisa had her first seven-hour operation to remove the rolls of flesh from her stomach, groin and thighs on February 15.
‘I was a wreck the night before,’ she says. ‘I went on Loose Women, got back and saw my dad. Then I started worrying for him and what I was putting him through, as well as my brother Liam and Al. It’s major surgery and I was the only person who had put myself there. I was the one who filled my face with Cadbury Creme Eggs. Only Lisa Riley had done this to herself. Now I had to deal with the consequences and the fact that I might not wake up tomorrow.
‘I was reasoning things out in all sorts of ways in my head, telling myself: “Oh well, I’ll be in Heaven with my mum.”
‘The irony was that, having lost the weight, I was the healthiest I’d ever been in my life.’
Lisa, of course, did wake up. Foolishly, though, she did not follow her doctor’s orders not to do anything strenuous for 16 days. Very soon after her operation, she and Al moved from Manchester to London. She was vacuuming and moving bookshelves.
She developed a seroma — a collection of fluid under the skin — three weeks after her surgery and the skin infection cellulitis.
‘It got deeper and deeper and the smell was just the worst thing. Then the other side got infected.
‘In hospital you have a pain scale of one to ten. This was a 14. I remember that on May 17, around dad’s birthday, I didn’t even go to see him.
‘you think you’re going to be wearing sexy underwear and looking a million dollars, but you don’t — not when you’ve got a colostomy bag swinging from your thigh. That wasn’t what I signed up for. I couldn’t even walk to get a cup of coffee.
‘I thought: What the hell have I done to myself? Again there was no one to blame but me.
‘I’m like Alice in Wonderland. If something says “eat me”, I’ll eat it. If you say “don’t touch the iron” I’ll touch it and then say: “Ouch! That hurts.” ’
Thankfully, Lisa learnt her lesson. Following her second four and a half-hour operation, on June 5, during which the surgeon cut out the cellulitis as well as reshaping her breasts and removing the saggy skin under her arms, she was a model patient.
TODAY, the ‘after’ Lisa is as fit as a flea.
‘ I just feel fantastic,’ she says. ‘I can’t stop looking at myself when I get out of the shower and feeling how rocksolid my body is.
‘I can wear a padded bra. I can wear sexy underwear.
‘I feel a million dollars and it’s coming out of every pore in me how brilliant I feel.
‘When I was younger I always wanted to be Bette Midler. I was there for all big girls and all big men everywhere. That was me. But I’m not that person any more.
‘I realise the reason I drank so much was because I was trying to fit in in Bury, but now I’m no longer being the life and soul of the party. I’m travelling the world and discovering it with Al.
‘I’ve sold my home in Manchester, moved to a flat in London and minimalised everything. I used to like stuff but I don’t need it any more. Everything in my life is light now.
‘do you know the irony of all of this? In Fat Friends [the fourseason ITV drama series, created by Kay Mellor, which began in 2000 and starred James Corden and Alison Steadman] I play Rebecca. Now Kay Mellor’s offering me the thin role in Fat Friends the musical. you couldn’t make it up, could you?’
Indeed, you couldn’t.
Lisa Riley’s Baggy Body Club is on Tuesday at 9pm on iTV1.