Real life weight loss: How I lost 19kg

Photography Ryan Donnell

Sarah Russello, 31, had vowed to stay at her uni weight after taking a job as a sales rep. But she hit a snag when she met her future husband, Charles, in October 2008.

Her gym workouts fell by the wayside as she spent more time with Charles, a martial-arts master who could easily burn off the kilojoules from their dinners out.

Russello, who matched him bite for bite, wasn’t so lucky. “The weight crept up faster than I realised,” she says.

By March 2010, she carried 18 extra kilos on her 170cm frame.

●●●

The change

That month, a friend tagged Russello in a Facebook photo. She was sitting at a bar in front of a huge plate of mozzarella sticks, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, with her extra kilos hanging over her jeans.

“I didn’t recognise myself,” she says. She knew she had to get her body back.

●●●

The lifestyle

Russello tackled her three-packs-a-week habit first. “I thought, ‘Why bother trying to lose weight if I’ll just gain it back when I stop smoking?’” she says.

Within a few weeks, she had swapped the smokes for gum. “Quitting smoking made me feel like if I could do that, I could do anything,” she says.

Realising that the monster steaks she ate were up to five times the recommended serving size, she gradually scaled back to 150g portions and sipped water instead of sweet tea with her meals.

In June 2010, Russello returned to the gym, where she alternated between strength-training and cardio days. By September she was just 4.5kg shy of her goal, her uni weight, but the scales refused to budge.

For the next two months she changed her workouts every two weeks to rev her metabolism and finally the scales flashed 64kg.

●●●

The weight loss reward

The following June, when Russello married, even the size 12 gown she’d ordered had to be altered. “I thought I was happy before,” she says, “but the way I feel now is 10 times better.”

Russello’s tips

Let him see you sweat
“My husband and I go to the gym together, and it’s great motivation. I know he’s watching me, so I try harder.”

Play with pasta “I mix tofu shirataki noodles ­– which are made with soybeans instead of wheat and have only 84kJ per serving – with tomatoes, tuna, mushrooms and peas. Yum!”

Steak your claim “I love meat and will never give it up, but I eat red meat only once a week now.”