An Irish woman who has lost 96 pounds in less than a year has spoken of the “mean” comments that were thrown at her because she was obese.
Trisha Lewis (30) from Limerick has 12,000 followers on her Instagram page Trisha’s Transformation which she set up after setting a goal of losing 100 pounds (7.1stone).
Last night, she told Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late Show how she experienced “the worst flight” of her life because she was sitting beside someone on an airplane who asked to be moved.
She explained: “I would always get on the flight last because I didn’t want anyone to see me asking for the extension. On one particular flight nobody was sitting beside me and I was delighted, and then two people were approaching and I could see their faces were falling, I was like pasted against the window pane being like ‘I’m tiny, don’t worry about it’. And they asked to be moved, and that was the worst flight of my life.”
“There was a lot of elbowing, and I understand they need a lot of comfort as well, I understand that. And they were kind of huffing and puffing and swapping seats, and like I said before, like I’m not made of stone, I’m made of a lot of stones… I’m a human, I’m a girl.”
“The air hostess came down and when she said ‘I totally understand’, my heart broke… I thought she’d stick up for me which was silly, and then they moved.”
“My friend Colum was on the flight as well. I didn’t tell him any of it. I should have but I didn’t.”
Trisha was 26 stone when she decided to lose weight.
“From 14 to 20 stone, you’d see it, you’d see people staring or you might hear a mutter or something. But when you get to morbidly obese, I think people just think it’s free rein: ‘just go for it’… Passing cars, going into a pizzeria after a night out… and people are like, ‘are you sure you don’t want two whole pizzas’, and I’d be like ‘no, no, no, just two slices. Then I realised what was happening, and I was like ‘oh that’s really mean’. But now I’m over it.”
“It’s only one per cent. I would have said before this it was 99pc of people were horrible… bring back the dinosaurs, they were lovely, but now I realise I was looking at life so negatively.”
“That’s the side of obesity that you don’t realise, that you can’t see things lovely.”
Trisha told Ryan how she eventually realised that she could do something about her weight, and she set herself a target of losing 100 pounds.
“My old teacher used to say you point one finger at you (points to Ryan) and three back at yourself. And when I realised that it was all my fault, I overate, I didn’t do it right, and I just decided to just fight”
Online Editors