TWENTY-TWO KILOS GONE – AND I STILL EAT PIZZA!

After welcoming her first baby, Steph Marriott, 31, from Queensland, weighed 80kg. It was then that she stopped weighing herself.

Steph – now a proud mum to Hugo, five, Hank, three, and Macy, two – freely admits that she used to eat a ‘lot of takeaways’ and that, paired with a dislike of exercise, meant she had struggled with her weight for as long as she could remember.

‘My husband, Shayne, was very fit when we first met and my bad eating habits rubbed off on him over the years,’ Steph tells New Idea. ‘I felt bad that my choices were affecting him.’

But Steph’s attempts to change her ways didn’t stick.

‘After my second baby, I was going to be a bridesmaid and I embarked on a mission to lose weight – living off 1200 calories a day while breastfeeding,’ she says.

While the weight fell off, Steph’s milk supply was affected.

As soon as her bridesmaid’s duties were over she fell back into her old routine – the weight soon piled back on. It was only when she fell pregnant with her third child and a friend started doing The Healthy Mummy program – that Steph was encouraged by the ‘amazing food’ on offer.

She vowed to give it a go and, just one week after Macy was born on Christmas Eve 2015, she signed up.

‘It was so different,’ she says. ‘I was eating 2300 calories a day.’

In addition to a varied meal plan, Steph started exercising in her lounge room to a DVD and going on walks with the pram.

‘I used to wrap Macy up in a carrier on my chest and hold her head while we worked out to the DVD together,’ she says.

‘It was the only way I could really do anything other than just walking with the kids and the pram.’

Continuing this simple routine saw Steph lose up to two kilos a week.

‘I could see my body was changing month by month,’ she says. ‘After 10 months I was down to 58 kilos and had gone from a size 16 to a size eight.’

Steph, who is now a consultant for The Healthy Mummy, supplements her home workouts with gym sessions and credits a healthy pizza recipe – made from Lebanese bread, topped with passata as sauce, fresh oregano, baby spinach, prosciutto and bocconcini cheese – for helping her maintain her 22kg weight loss.

‘I love the fact I can still eat pizza – and it’s a light and healthy version,’ she says. ‘You don’t feel disgusting afterwards, but you still get the pizza hit.’

are all very ‘proud’ of their mum.

‘All of them have grown up seeing me cast spells and run rituals, but to them I’m just their mum,’ she says.

‘Being a witch day-to-day makes life exciting and vibrant,’ she concludes. ‘I’m wiser and it helps me to be a better person.’