Amazing weight loss of woman who lost 69Kg from 133kg to stop people abusing her in the street

Stephanie suffered abuse almost every time she walked out of her front door - but now things couldn't be more different

Small acts of kindness have the strangest effect on Stephanie Roberts. Every time someone holds a door open for her, or smiles at her in the street, she does a double-take. Because it has never happened to her before – even though she is now 37. For most of her life, Stephanie hasn’t been used to strangers being nice to her or treating her like a human being. All because, until 12 months ago, she was very, very fat. Before whittling her body down from 133 Kg to 64kg , all Stephanie got from strangers was mainly cruelty. Every walk down the street was a hostile experience.

“I’ve had people spit at me in broad daylight, tell me I was ‘disgusting’. That was always their favorite word,” says Stephanie. “They thought I should be ashamed for getting that big. People would loudly pass comment on my size and I’d shout back, ‘I’m fat not deaf’.  "But others would just abuse me to my face.” If she wasn’t being bullied by strangers she was being blanked. But now the abuse has stopped.

Since she decided to go on a diet in November last year, losing more than 11st, the world has been a kinder, very different place for 5ft 7ins tall Stephanie. She shakes her head in puzzlement. “Now I’m a normal size, cars stop to let me cross the road. People want to talk to me. Men chat me up. It amazes me,” she says. “But it angers me too. Before I lost the weight, if I wasn’t being sneered at I was being ignored. Invisible. Are appearances that important? "As a size 32, I was a non-person. Now I’m a size 12 I’m suddenly acceptable.

“Yet I’m the same person inside. All I’ve changed is the outside . What does it say about how we treat fat people?”  It’s only now she is slim that she realises just how badly others treated her. Stephanie, from Cardiff, was a picky eater as a child. She only started gaining weight when she reached her teens. “At 14, I was a size 14,” she explains. “At 18, an 18, and then I just got bigger and bigger. By then I was greedy, I suppose. I love food but I am a hopeless cook so I ate out of junky places like petrol stations.  "I ate man-sized portions of food and I never stopped eating.”

She was a confident and intelligent young woman, a tomboy who loved motorbikes and travel. She started a good career working with adults with learning disabilities in the NHS. She had lots of compassion, and faith in herself – but strangers seemed determined to squash that self-esteem. “I remember my first really public humiliation,” she says.

“I was in my 20s and out at a pub with friends and I was feeling good. I knew I was no Kate Moss, I knew I was a big girl, but I loved ¬socialising. A good-looking lad asked me to dance. I was chuffed but as we danced we were surrounded by a group of his jeering mates. They

were pushing a pint glass stuffed with money at him and the penny dropped.  “They’d been playing ‘pull-a-pig’ – a game to see who could pull the ugliest woman in the club and win the kitty. My guy had won. I was the pig.”

Stephanie put on a brave face, shouted the men down, then slipped away home to cry. Every night out after that was fraught with worry. “At parties, I’d hang back and end up going back and forward to the buffet.” But the larger she became, the more abuse her big body attracted. “As I used a cashpoint late one night, a man walked past me, stopped and came past again,” she says.

“He said, ‘you are absolutely disgusting’ and then he spat at me. In the supermarket, people would stare at my trolley to see the ‘revolting, fatty’ things I was buying. "They’d stare at me as I ate in restaurants .  “Once, on holiday in New Zealand, I was eating in a fish restaurant – fish!… healthy – and a woman came up to me, stared at me like I was an exhibit and then said, ‘you’re very fat’. "Did she think I didn’t know?”  Stephanie shot back with the obvious: you’re very rude. But every insult smarted. Her love life was nonexistent. “I went six years without so much as a kiss,” she says. “When a man did spend the night with me, I never saw him again. Men don’t want to be seen with ‘a fat bird’.” And now that she is slim – which society deems ‘normal’ – she can’t forget how it felt to be on the fringes like that. “I’ve lost all the weight I was carrying, and that’s wonderful, but I’m still myself,” she says. “I still see the world the way I always did. What has changed is how the world sees me.”

It was advice from her doctor that provoked Stephanie to try to diet. She signed up with LighterLife . “I’d been having health problems and my GP told me my weight wasn’t helping so I decided to do it and something clicked,” she says.  Out went the supermarket family-sized lasagnes she was using as a dinner for one; the tube of Pringles she’d munch her way through in front of the telly; the petrol station pasties and sausage rolls. The weight began to come off. But there was a lot to lose. For much of the diet she was still very large, so she was still getting stared at, shouted at, ridiculed.

“It really didn’t help,” she says. “I’m an emotional eater. Happy? Eat. Sad? Eat. Lots of people with weight problems are. So if they are being bullied and called names, it makes them want to eat more.” Stephanie’s work with as a behaviour specialist with the disabled makes her think too. “My clients face prejudice because of their learning disabilities – something they can’t change – and it was just the same for me but because of fat,” she says. “It’s illegal to discriminate against disabled people, or against a person’s race or religion. But you can do what you want to a fat person.” “And that’s why it happens, I think. Strangers are rude to big people because they are allowed to be. Can’t everyone see there are feelings underneath all those pounds of excess weight? "And maybe if we were a bit more understanding, overweight people would find it easier to get to a healthier size .”

Stephanie’s life has been transformed. She is happier than she has ever been and wishes all people struggling with their weight could experience it too. She is just back from South Africa where she was a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding , slinky in a size 12, floral dress.  She has started dating, though warily insists it is early days. Being attractive takes some getting used to after the humiliation of pull-a-pig. But, for all the happiness, she will never forget how it felt to be treated with such casual cruelty by people she’d never seen before. “When I was big, I thought people were just rude. Then I got thinner and found it was my weight that had been the problem.

“Their problem? They didn’t know me but they didn’t like me because I was big. I wasn’t even a person to them. I still can’t get my head around that. “If you are fat you are lazy, greedy, out of control, smelly – that’s what some people think. But really what you are is ashamed and sad, and it’s other people who make you feel like that. “People have terrible struggles with weight. I tried to pretend that it didn’t bother me but it did. “We need to be kinder about it. No one should expect abuse every time they walk out their front door.”

Fat file

Weight before : 21st 10lb

Dress size before : 32

Weight now : 10st 12

Dress size now : 12

What she used to eat

Breakfast : Nothing.

Petrol station pit-stop on way to work : Crisps, a pasty, sausage roll, fruit. all-day

Snacks : Endless biscuits or sweets brought by grateful patients.

Lunch : Two packs of shop-bought sandwiches, crisps, chocolate, a sugary drink.

Petrol station on way home : More savoury pastry, more crisps.

Dinner : A family-sized lasagne or cottage pie with wedges.

Snacks in front of the telly : A tube of Pringles, rounds of buttered toast.

What she eats now

Breakfast : Fruit and yoghurt

Lunch : Salad or one round of homemade sandwiches.

Dinner : A home-cooked stir-fry or rice and grilled meat.

Snacking : Now a very occasional treat.