My plant-based diet helped me lose two stone

It started with tears, but a wellbeing coach’s plan has changed life

The old me would not like the new me. I had long believed that a healthy diet was a balanced diet and vegans were deficient in important food groups (and fun). Yoga was for stick insects with no boobs and what’s the point of dry January if you get smashed for the other 11 months of the year?

But my secret food behaviours were far from balanced.

I rarely ate a proper meal and was constantly tired, hungry and in a mad rush. I would pick at the kids’ food while preparing meals for the rest of the family, keeping no real track of what I was consuming.

I lurched between intentionally starving myself and grazing for energy. I was malnourished, my metabolism was rock bottom and then it dawned on me: at 40, three lots of baby weight had now just become weight.

At the start of the year, I did something out of desperation and out of character – I cancelled my gym membership and hired wellbeing coach Anna Anderson, based in my home town, Haslemere.

The first time she called me I cried and then she made me weigh myself. I cried again. I was two stone heavier than I had imagined and four stone heavier than my ideal weight.

For years I had avoided full-length photographs, videos and applied make-up in a hand-held mirror. As a result, the real me was very different from the image I held in my mind. A long, hard look at myself, and into myself, was overdue.

At the end of January, I embarked on an entirely plant-based 12-week

Anna White’s