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Smoking and eating fatty foods made Susan Bogunovic’s weight balloon to 15st. But learning to love fruit and vegetables, she tells Kirstie McCrum, has helped her to shed four stone for good.

As Susan Bogunovic sits down to her lunch of sandwiches and a piece of fruit, she’s reminded of her past eating habits. The 45-year-old from Bridgend has a healthy diet now, but she’s the first to admit that six years ago, a meal wasn’t a meal for her without a bar of chocolate to round it off.

In fact, she’s gone from being someone who never ate fruit and vegetables to being happy snacking on oranges and cooking up some tasty greens for tea.

At 5ft 2in, Susan, who works as a sewing machinist, says that she had been big for more than half her life.

“I was 15st when I married my husband John 25 years ago. I’d always been that size, it never bothered me. I never thought about losing weight before that. I didn’t even have scales in the house,” she remembers.

When her 14-year-old niece Emily was bullied for being big, Susan decided to go with her to a slimming class, and they both joined Slimtone in Bridgend.

“I was a size 22 to 24 and when I started, I didn’t say, ‘I want to lose X amount of stones’, I said I wanted to be a size 14. I didn’t want to be a size 8 or a 10, I wanted to be a 14,” she says.

With the help of the Slimtone classes, Susan learned about what foods she should be eating instead of grazing on chocolate.

“I learned how to eat properly and to choose healthy food for life. I never ate fruit and vegetables – they just weren’t on my shopping list. Going to Slimtone taught me so much, and I still stay every week because there are lots of different tips and recipes – you learn something new every week,” she says.

Susan found that with the new slimming tools she was learning at class, she reached a healthy weight – and her target size.

“I started in the March and I wanted to reach my target by the October because I was 40 then – and I did it. I’m 46 this October, so it’s six years now that I’ve kept off the weight.

“With Slimtone, it’s not dieting, it’s healthy eating, it’s learning to eat healthily. If it was a diet I wouldn’t have kept my weight off all these years. I still eat chocolate – not in the shedloads that I used to eat it, but I still eat it,” she says.

Susan reached her size 14, losing 4st to reach a healthy weight of 11st, and has maintained it throughout.

“I do have more confidence now. I never used to go out anywhere when I was bigger. When you’re a size 22 to 24 you’re restricted in what clothes you can buy, but now I can go to all different shops,” she says.

As she was making healthy changes to her diet, Susan decided to improve her health another way as well.

“I got up one morning and I thought, ‘I’m going to stop smoking’. I didn’t tell anybody because if you fail, it’s worse, but I’ve never looked back. It was four years in April, and now I can save up the money that I would have spent on cigarettes and we go on holidays instead.

“I’ve also started exercising more. I was lazy before, I used to drive everywhere. But I do a lot of walking now. For the last five weeks, we’ve been going to the gym on a Monday for the dance mats and I’ve got a Wii in the house,” she adds.

Thanks to Slimtone and husband John’s support, Susan’s never looked back.

“When I started I was trying all these things which were new to me – I would have automatically said I didn’t like them before, even though I didn’t eat them.

“My husband eats the same as me now. He was marvellous. He doesn’t moan, he will eat whatever I cook for him, which made it easy.”

BEFORE

Breakfast – sausage, toast

Lunch – sandwiches, always with crisps

Dinner – takeaways, but lots of rubbish too. The deep fat fryer was on all the time

Snacks – Chocolate. I’ve have a chocolate bar for breakfast at work, like Mars or Snickers, then again with my sandwiches at dinner time, then more chocolate at home. I didn’t want food because I’d had chocolate – I was having three or four bars a day

AFTER

Breakfast – toast with a banana or cheese

Lunch – sandwiches with Quavers and an orange

Dinner – homecooked things like curries and meals with fewer calories

Susan attends the Slimtone class in the Non Political Club, Ogmore Vale, Mondays from 6pm-7.30pm. For more information on Slimtone, go to www.slimtone.co.uk or call Marie Griffiths on 01656 870339.