SWANSDIKE WOMAN LOSES STONES TO GAIN POUNDS

A Swansdike resident is celebrating her incredible weight loss by becoming a magazine cover girl.

Becky Wade, 31, graces the front page of this month’s Get It Off magazine after losing an astonishing 35 stones in just four months.

And, as the magazine’s slimmer of the year, she also takes away the winner’s cheque for £10,000.

As a former athlete, Becky had maintained a trim figure for most of her life.

But then, in 2003, she entered a sponsored Easter egg eating contest at the suggestion of a friend. It was an experience that was to change her life.

“I became a chronic chocoholic,” confessed Becky, “I was eating anything up to 8 kilos of the stuff a day.”

She realised that she had to take action last December when the engine in her five-year-old Mini exploded.

“My weight had become so great that the strain of moving me got too much for the car,” Becky told the Observer.

“I started it up one morning, put it into gear, released the clutch and then bang! it blew up.”

That evening, Becky asked her husband Peter, a car mechanic at Ride-U-Like, to do the only thing she could think of to break her crippling addiction.

She asked him to weld her jaws closed.

“I know it sounds extreme, but it was the only way I could stop myself eating chocolate,” she said.

“Before I had Pete do the job, I contacted the magazine so that they could monitor my progress.”

For four months, Becky lived on a diet of pure amphetamine sulphate, feeding through a tube inserted into her nose. A notepad and pen were her constant companions, as the limited sounds she could make through clenched teeth were incomprehensible to everyone except Peter.

Finally, at the end of April, she reached her target weight of 10st 2lbs, and Peter chiseled apart the welding.

“I only hope that my experience can give hope to other chocoholics out there," said Becky, “that way, the discomforts of the last few months will not have been in vain.”

Asked what she would do with the prize money, Becky replied: “I don’t know, but I think I might go to the shop and buy myself a walnut whip.”