Plan in advance before starting weight-loss journey
Becoming an influential voice on social media, glamorous Mullingar woman Lauren Egerton tells Eilís Ryan that she has battled both weight and hair loss issues and that you don't need to break the bank to look good
READ ALSO: Determination saw Lauren shed four stone in seven months
READ ALSO: Hair loss story echoed with many
For anyone else starting out on a similar journey, Lauren's advice is to plan ahead, and to create an actual written grocery list rather than just entering a supermarket and picking up items without thinking where they fit in to the overall weight loss plan.
“So I'm a carb girl, I love my carbs and my snacks. So that's why Slimming World suited me down to the ground whereas somebody else might, say, be into the gym and they're looking to, you know, grow muscle so they need a lot more protein.
“You need to decide ‘what's going to suit me? Am I going to go to a trainer or am I going to actually do it myself and calorie count?’ Like what is actually going to work better?
“With the whole kind of diets - and I've been on all of them - if somebody needs that support, there's a lot of things out there that people can actually reach out for. It's just actually determining which is going to suit you.”
Lauren reveals that in her case, when it came to exercise, she chose walking: “I used to be a major gym bunny back in the day,” she says. However, when she was at her heaviest, she couldn’t face the gym: “I felt like, and I think a lot of people feel this way, almost like you have to lose a little bit of weight first before you can even appear in the gym, because there's an awful lot of bodies around you. There's an awful lot of perfect people. So all I did was walk.
“I walked whenever I had the time, and I walked because I wanted to walk. I would put on a podcast or my music and walk for 45 minutes or whatever in the evenings whenever I had the time. I did it because I wanted to do it. And I knew it was good for my head and all that, but I wasn't tracking steps or anything.”
Lauren effectively turned her back on techniques she had employed in the past: “I took every bit of pressure off myself in my mind. I took the pressure of feeling like I had to count calories, I had to weigh everything, I had to get X amount of water into me in one day. I took away the stress of feeling like I had to exercise a certain amount, you know, walk a certain amount of steps. I took it all off me. And all of a sudden I just felt at peace. I'm not putting that stress on myself. And I didn't ever put that stress on myself this time around. And it just felt so easy."