TWO INCIDENTS PROMPTED Louth woman Bríanán McEnteggart to embark on a weight loss programme – a visit to her GP and an embarrassing incident in her bathroom.

When she was 27 years old, her doctor told her that she was on the verge of a heart attack and might not see her 30th birthday.

Not long after, she describes how she was standing in the bath showering and the bath cracked under her weight.

“My dad tried to fix it to save my blushes, but that was the final push I needed and I joined Slimming World two days later,” she recalls, adding that at the time she was an “unhappy girl” who hated looking in the mirror.

Three years later, she has lost 20st 5lbs, been named Slimming World’s Woman of the Year and “walks everywhere with her head held high”.

“I used to sit at home the whole time. Sitting in, I didn’t want to be out seeing anyone. I just wanted to be at home and be by myself,” she said today.

“I felt I didn’t deserve to be out in the world. I was embarrassed for people to see me the way I was. I was depressed, I was sad.”

When I was overweight, my eyes weren’t smiling. I smiled but it wasn’t a proper smile. It was a fake smile. Now you can see my eyes are smiling. It’s changed my life.

Remembering her childhood as a “big kid”, Bríanán says she was “picked on at school”.

“I put up my defences so no-one would ever know they’d hurt my feelings but when I got home I’d cry. Not much changed as I got older.

“One time I went to a hospital dietician and they said their scales couldn’t weigh me and I had to sit in something called ‘the obesity chair’ – it was mortifying. It’s experiences like that crush your self-confidence bit by bit.”

During her first week on the programme, she lost 11lbs and the first four stone fell off within 12 weeks.

She said she still enjoyed the odd treat like a small bar of chocolate, a bag of crisps or a vodka and diet coke.

She now has upped her cardio training from struggling to walk 600 metres to walking more than three miles every day.

“I began by walking between one lamppost and another and building up slowly. I’m hoping to take up Zumba soon and start shaking my hips a bit.”

Watch more from Bríanán here: