A 37-year-old mother, Davina Bywater, from Chorley, Lancashire, who had been clinically obese since she was ten has lost more than half her body weight after kicking her addiction to sandwiches.
She works as a council officer and was a self-confessed ‘secret eater’. Now she is a slender size eight after swapping bread for salads. She says that she got into bad eating habits as a child when she would regularly snack on high carb foods.
‘I got into such bad habits during those very formative years and it carried on from there. Before losing weight, I would eat buttery toast or sausage sandwiches, more sandwiches at lunchtime and then bread and cheese as a snack before dinner every night.’ Said Davina.
She denied weight loss surgery and shed an incredible 10st without any professional support.
She said. ‘I knew I had always been big, but I’d been up and down to different degrees of overweight. I wouldn’t have considered myself an obese child.’
Davina suffered kidney damage as a baby and was diagnosed with reflux nephropathy – a condition where urine flows backwards from the bladder into the kidneys.
‘I remember my weight being discussed at the hospital when I had appointments about my kidneys. My mum and dad obviously considered it an issue and had brought it up with the doctor’.
In 2012 when she came to require a kidney transplant, she was too overweight for surgery. After that Davina downloaded a weight loss app and lost more than half of her body weight over the following three years – now weighing just 9st 7lb.
She said. ‘Now I snack on fruit, cereal bars or nuts. I eat a lot of salads and vegetable curries with cauliflower rice. I eat far less carbs, but I will still treat myself to a corned beef sandwich when I fancy one’.
‘I feel a lot healthier now. I know things might get worse in the future, but I just want dialysis to come as late in life as possible, that’s the aim of the game. I don’t know what’s around the corner, but I do my best with the things that I can control.’