A woman has shared her advice for weight loss and fitness after sharing her incredible transformation online.
Laura Bury, who is originally from Wicklow but now living in Clonroche, Co. Wexford, posted her before and after pictures on social media. She went from 16-and-a-half stone to 12 stone
Speaking to WicklowNews.Net about her transformation, the 22-year-old said: “You don’t actually realise until you look back at them, you know, you can look at yourself each day and say ‘I haven’t lost anything’ but when you look back at pictures you realise ‘wow I actually have!’”
She said nasty comments in secondary school is one of the factors for motivating her weight loss.
“I was always a big child and when you’re in secondary school you’re called names and one day it just hit me and I thought ‘I just can’t take this anymore’ so that’s what started it,” Laura recalled. “As the years went on I kept getting bigger and I just said to myself ‘I need to lose this weight’.”
Laura said her transformation has taken approximately five years as she said there’s no point in losing weight so fast as you may end up rebounding and gaining the weight back.
“I took a while because obviously at the start I had no idea what I was doing because I was young, but as I got older I got more informed on it. I’m studying sports in college so that helps too.”
Ms Bury said she doesn’t believe in the quick fix weight loss diets, including diet pills and shakes.
“I don’t believe in them to be honest you have certain shakes with protein and that’s a different story altogether and they are OK to take but the ones advertised on the TV, in the chemist or online don’t work. It’s a money-grabbing thing really.”
Laura said she feels happier now and said her parents, her mother Nicola and her dad, who is known in the Garden County as musician ‘The Wicklow Man’, have been very supportive and proud of her.
“People have said to me you look smaller but others have actually said ‘oh you look so much happier’. I wouldn’t say I was depressed but I was definitely sad because I was carrying this around with me everyday,” Laura said.
We asked Laura for advice for anyone wishing to kickstart a new healthy lifestyle and how they should approach it, and she said: “You need to find your starting point, you can’t just try and do it all in the one go. You need to ask yourself what you want to achieve, do you want to be healthier, fitter or do you want to look different.
“Then you need to figure it out. The food is important, because the gym is only about 5 per cent of your day. Food is the most important part. You have to get that balance.”
Laura says you need to view the changes as a lifestyle change, rather than thinking you are on a diet.
