How I lost eight stone by Strictly star Lisa
And don’t ask if it’s a gastric band or she’ll knock your block off!
‘I’ve always been a party girl but I don’t miss booze’
‘I’m struggling to come to terms with the new me’
LISA RILEY is still getting used to the fact she takes up a lot less space than she used to. ‘I have little reminders all the time,’ she says. ‘I just went to Italy for the weekend and not having to ask for an extension for my seatbelt on the plane was wonderful.
‘Not only that, I’ve got fabric to spare. Sitting on a train, even in the big chairs in first-class used to mean my boobs would be resting on the table. Now I sit there and look at this gap where my body used to be.’
That gap replaces what 39-year-old Lisa would be the first to admit was a very big body. For most of her adult life, the actress and former Strictly star has been vastly overweight — at her heaviest, a dress size 30.
At the time she was a vocal cheerleader for the big-is-beautiful brigade, making it clear she brooked no pity and was entirely comfortable in her skin.
Which makes her dramatic weight loss — more than eight stone — all the more mesmerising. Now a trim size 16, and with more weight dropping off by the week, Lisa’s new look is so striking that when she recently arrived at ITV’s studios to appear on the panel show Loose Women, several of her old friends walked past her having failed to recognise her.
Her subsequent appearance on the show sparked a social media storm, with some speculating she must have had a gastric band fitted — a suggestion that infuriates her.
‘If one more person asks me about a gastric band then I swear I will be tempted to cut myself open and show people there’s nothing there,’ she says.
‘I’ve had it all: the gastric band; the “oh, she’s obviously done a faddy diet”. And it does upset me, because it feels as if people are calling me a liar when I’m a really honest person. The honest truth is that this is all me.’ The ‘all me’, she insists, has been a simple change in lifestyle and consumption. Lisa has stopped drinking alcohol, doesn’t snack and eats three healthy, reasonably sized meals a day. Then there’s exercise — nothing fancy, just a bit of yoga, a dance class and running up the stairs here and there. The key, she says, is psychology. ‘You have to be ready to do it and commit to it fully. If you’re not, it won’t work.’
Her focus on a healthier lifestyle has also been driven by losing her mother and three other members of her family to cancer, and seeing her father diagnosed with diabetes.
What’s more, while she insists she was always happy, she admits she is much happier now. ‘I feel absolutely fantastic,’ she says.
The results are certainly impressive in the flesh. These days, Lisa has a waist, her legs are toned and the ‘shelf boobs’ so common to bigger girls — where the bust sticks out so far that it resembles a shelf — are gone, replaced by just a hint of cleavage.
In knee-high black boots and a smart jacket, she looks sexy and healthy. ‘I feel absolutely wonderful,’ she says.
That begs the question: why did she not do it years ago? It’s a simple question with a complex answer: like many overweight people, it has taken a sequence of events in recent years for Lisa to confront her size.
Born and raised in Bury, Lancashire, to dad Terry and mum Cath, Lisa was one of two children. Her mother worked in the complaints department for Airtours holidays, and her father was in the graphic printing business.
Her family, she says, were all on the large side and she was a big girl from childhood, but always encouraged to feel good about herself by her adoring mother.
Though never slim, she was bursting with self-confidence and attended theatre school in Oldham, where her contemporaries included Doctor Foster star Suranne Jones and Marcella star Anna Friel.
Lisa found small screen success aged 19 in Emmerdale, where she played Mandy Dingle for six years. Roles in the dramas Fat Friends and Waterloo Road followed, as well as a presenter stint on You’ve Been Framed.
But it was her appearance in the 2012 series of Strictly Come Dancing, partnering Robin Windsor, which endeared her to the nation.
Initially written off by critics as the comedy contestant, she won over the audience with her skill in the cha cha and tango and made it to the semi-final.
When I interviewed her at the time, she claimed her size was no barrier to success: ‘I genuinely love being different.’ Now she says: ‘There was no pressure on me to lose weight. And no matter what anyone else said I was always fit.
‘I hate the idea that because you’re fat you just sit there eating chips and gravy and can’t move. I know some people are like that, but that was never me. I always exercised.’
Despite her protestations, her size did often make her anxious. She recalls waiting at airport carousels, panicking that her suitcase wouldn’t arrive. ‘If I was flying to a wedding, what on earth would I do if it didn’t turn up?’ she says. ‘You can’t just find a plus size shop down every alley.’
Though she professes to having always loved fashion, she admits that for many years it wasn’t easy. One time, when her suitcases didn’t arrive, she spent days in a man’s XXL shirt. ‘That doesn’t feel nice,’ she says.
Then there were the whispered insults — the ‘fat cow’ as she walked down the street, the knowing smirks as she bit into a burger in a restaurant. While she insists she let it roll off her, I wonder if, after so many years, she had, in fact, written herself off? ‘Maybe I had,’ she says quietly. Then in 2012, came a bombshell. What few people knew when Lisa was appearing in Strictly was that just two months before she started filming her mum Cath had died following a 12-year battle with breast cancer that had spread to other parts of her body.
Cancer also claimed the lives of three of Lisa’s grandparents. Cath’s death shook Lisa to her core — the pair spoke up to ten times a day and Lisa freely admits her mum kept her in a protective bubble.
‘I think that was the start of it,’ she says. ‘Mum was my cotton wool. We were so, so close, and she insulated me from so much. I didn’t even learn to drive.
‘All of a sudden that security net wasn’t there any more and these two legs, big as they were, were all I had. Losing her shook me to the core.’
Also a larger lady, Cath had always imbued Lisa with a sense that size didn’t matter. ‘She was my greatest supporter,’ says Lisa.
Perhaps, unwittingly, that protective maternal love had insulated Lisa from confronting her weight.
Either way, in the aftermath of Cath’s death, the physical demands of Strictly meant Lisa shed two stone and four inches round her waist. Two Strictly tours followed, but the exercise was offset by the unhealthy temptations of life on the road.
‘You’re all over the place travelling, you’ve got your buddies with you, you stay up late drinking and get the munchies. Then you get on the tour bus, there’s crisps and sweets and cheese baguettes at 11 o’clock at night,’ she says. ‘No one is eating grapes.’
A typical day would involve a full English breakfast at the hotel, pasta and garlic bread for lunch, then toasties, drinks and snacks after a show.
‘It was endless carbs really, but I never considered the repercussions. I was Queen Bee of the volcano plate — piling stuff high like a volcano just because it was there.’
Then, around two years ago, Lisa decided to take a break from the series of endless arena and theatre tours that had followed her time on Strictly.
‘I loved my work, but I felt as if I
was working myself into the ground, always on the road. all my mum had ever wanted was for me to see the world so I decided to take some time out and that’s what I did.
‘I made a lot of trips to Ethiopia, Kuwait, tanzania, Istanbul, and it just opened my eyes.
‘I suppose in some ways I was shedding layers of the old me, though I didn’t really know it at the time.’
then, last april, her 56-year-old father terry was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, ending up in hospital for several nights covered in tubes and wires.
‘Seeing him there was a real flashback to my mum which was hard enough.
‘then as I sat listening to the other patients on the ward, all with type 2, which is weight related, talking about amputations, it frightened the hell out of me.
‘I realised that what I was doing to my body meant that I could end up on this ward. I knew I didn’t want to be that person.’
It was a final wake-up call. ‘that night I went home, looked long and hard in the mirror and told myself I was going to lose weight.’
out went the snacks in the cupboard — ‘If it’s not there you can’t eat it’ — and in came portion control. ‘Everything the size of a fist,’ she says.
By July she had stopped drinking wine, after reading about its empty calories, replacing it with gin and slimline tonic. By august, she cut out booze altogether. ‘I’ve always been a party girl, so I did worry about it, but honestly it’s been one of the easiest things,’ she says. next to go were the ‘volcano plates’ of mountains of carbs, replaced by granola with fat-free yoghurt and sliced banana, omelettes and salad with salmon or prawns.
today, she is rarely hungry. ‘I feel like I’ve given my body a gastric band without having the op, as I’ve shrunk my stomach by eating smaller portions,’ says Lisa.
‘I feel like a computer that has been rebooted and reprogrammed.’
Little wonder she’s glowing, though there is another reason:
Lisa has found love. It follows a chequered relationship history with, among others, a married actor, nick holly, which ended when he went back to his wife, and a relationship with a care home manager who was later convicted of defrauding elderly residents. But two years ago she met a man she calls her ‘backbone’, but about whom she will say no more for fear of jinxing the relationship. ‘he is very private and I do not want to put our relationship under the spotlight,’ she says. What she will say is that she has decided not to have children of her own, terrified that she will pass on what she calls ‘the cancer gene’ after the disease killed three of her grandparents and her mother. ‘With my family history, I feel it wouldn’t be fair. adoption I will 100 per cent consider.’ there is talk of a book about her weight loss journey. ‘none of this DVD rubbish,’ she says, in a obvious reference to the host of celebrities who have cashed in on their weight loss with a workout video. ‘they are just a quick fix and they make me really mad.’
In the short term, she is still adjusting to life as a much smaller woman.
‘I’m struggling to come to terms with this new person,’ she says. ‘I’m still dealing with my reflection.’
Some of that is the sheer psychological leap of seeing herself as a thinner person — she automatically reaches for a size 20 plus when she’s shopping — but she is also struggling with another consequence of her weight loss, excess skin.
‘the skin side of it is revolting,’ she says. ‘there’s a vast amount of it and everything slaps together.
‘So when I look in the mirror, I can see how tiny I am, but the skin side of it is vile. and that’s difficult.’
So would she consider surgery to get rid of it?
‘I wouldn’t rule it out. I suppose the issue is when do I do it? I never set out with a target weight, so I don’t know where this is going to take me. Whatever I am doing it’s working phenomenally well, but I have no goal.’
What she does know is that she’s not going back to the person she was.
on a recent domestic flight, she found herself across the aisle from a large woman who couldn’t fasten her seatbelt.
‘She couldn’t get it to click and I could feel the tears in my eyes because I felt what she was feeling,’ she says. ‘and I never want to feel that way again.’