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Episode 16 - Kim MacDonald
39-year-old Kim MacDonald from Cambridge, is a 17 stone chocolate lover who’s been shopped to Gillian by her own daughter, Holly. Unlike healthy Holly, her mum tucks into chips, cheese, chocolate, cakes and convenience food. Unbelievably, Kim spends her working days serving wholesome food in a vegetarian restaurant that would make Gillian proud, but she’d look more at home frying burgers than serving lentil stew.
Gillian catches Kim red handed, cramming a chocolate cake into her mouth at the back of the vegetarian restaurant. Appalled Gillian is gob smacked anyone can be tempted by junk surrounded by such delicious nutritious food all day.
Kim’s bad food table is one of the worst Gillian has ever seen. She skips meals in the day, but snacks on cakes and chocolate washed down with 70 lattes each week. Each coffee is made with full fat milk, sugar and laden with 6.6g of saturated fats. After work she binges on pasta, crisps, roast chicken and Chinese food at home. She’s low in confidence and would rather go to bed with a tub of ice cream, than be seen out in public.
Gillian gets to the bottom of her eating habits and finds this bubbly big girl everyone sees is actually a shy, paranoid woman eating to hide the pain. Gillian knows a healthy diet will help her so she prescribes bananas which are high in potassium to boost her serotonin levels and dandelion granules to replace the copious amounts of coffee she drinks. Instead of snacking all day, she’ll eat proper meals of vegetables, fresh fruit and fish.
By the third day, Kim is having mood swings and Holly is suffering the brunt of her irritation. She is missing her sugar fix and takes the bus to work instead of walking as Gillian told her to do, which is crazy, as it actually takes longer on the bus! Gillian catches her out and explains the exercise is important to keep the endorphins pumping around her body to relieve stress.
Gillian takes Kim and a team of swimmers rowing in the river, but she much prefers ‘Boxercise’ with her daughter. The two of them are spending more time together and the weight is just falling off.
After the full eight weeks, Kim cries with joy when she learns she has lost 3 ½ stone: one of the most significant losses of all series of You Are What You Eat. She’s dropped from a size 22 to a 14 and looks like a different woman. Holly is delighted and proud of her mother, as is Gillian. Kim and Holly are now socializing together much more and Kim has newfound confidence to go out, now she looks and feels so fantastic.
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