I lost 5st in a year and kept it off with five unconventional rules

Naomi Holbrook, 50, remembers creeping down the stairs of her childhood home in Devon while everyone was sleeping to raid the kitchen cupboards. ‘Mum was a brilliant home baker so there were always tins of flapjacks, sausage rolls and cheese straws that I couldn’t resist. Both my parents were big on entertaining and if they’d had a dinner party, I’d also be in the fridge before breakfast helping myself to the ‘naughty’ leftovers. By the time I was eight years old my complex relationship with food had already begun.’

A pupil at a ‘competitive girl’s school’ where everyone else was ‘slimmer and sportier’, Naomi ‘always felt like the big girl’.

'Food was my last thought at night and my first in the morning,' she says. 'I gave into crisps, chocolate, biscuits and sweets and felt like I didn’t have an "off" switch. I labelled food in my head as "good" and "bad", and when I had foods that I deemed to be bad I would just spiral out of control and keep wanting more.’

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