By Lucy Dartford
When I think back to my life in 2017, I don’t even recognise the person I was back then. My partner, Tom*, walked out on me 42 days after I gave birth to our baby girl, Zuri, and hours after we registered her birth, but things had been rocky between us for years.
While we were in the registry office, I had insisted that we give our baby a double-barrelled surname, “just in case anything went wrong between us”. As soon as I uttered those words, Tom kicked up such a fuss and that afternoon he decided to end our eight-year relationship.
I felt utterly lost. I knew that he had a history of walking out on women who had his babies – he already had two other children with two different women – but I never believed he would do the same to me. I was shell-shocked.
Battling postnatal depression
After Tom left, my postnatal depression spiralled. I was 34 and felt like a rabbit in the headlights. My hormones were all over the place and I felt terrified of the darkness within me.
Sometimes Zuri would barely sleep for 48 hours and I was so exhausted that I began to hallucinate.
‘I’d always felt uncomfortable in my own skin,’ says Lucy, pictured before her weight loss
I remember walking down a country lane and telling my father that I could see walls surrounding me, but really there was nothing there. I felt so scared, thinking: “I’m really losing the plot here.”
I’d always felt uncomfortable in my own skin – I’d never been truly happy with myself or my body. In my teens, I had an unhealthy relationship with food, at times starving myself and verging on anorexia, then switching to the other extreme and eating lots of cheese, cream and sugar. I developed low self-esteem and began to mix with unsavoury characters.
At one point, when I was about 18, I was hospitalised with depression. I was prescribed antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs but they didn’t suit me at all, and made me feel awful. That meant that when my GP offered medication for my postnatal depression, I refused it.
Drinking too much
I’d led an unhealthy lifestyle throughout my eight-year relationship with Tom, often drinking way too much alcohol. On “Thirsty Thursdays”, Tom and I would binge drink, sometimes each having seven or eight drinks including cocktails, shots and large glasses of wine.
At school, I had excelled at sports. I played hockey and netball competitively and my PE teacher asked me to swim for the county. But as an adult I was all or nothing, going on occasional 60-mile bike rides, then going weeks without doing any exercise. I had no regular routine or structure.
Starving myself, then bingeing
In my 20s, I progressed to a hedonistic lifestyle, going to nightclubs and ended up looking thin and emaciated. I’d live off diet cola and wonder whether an apple was enough for lunch. I was a size eight and weighed only 7st, but obsessed about getting down to a size six.
My vulnerability to depression was always there, leading me to choose unsuitable men. Then, after Tom left me, I turned to comfort eating and alcohol again as a kind of unhealthy coping mechanism. Having already lost most of my baby weight, I began overeating, so I soon piled the pounds back on.
Moving back in with my parents
Lucy soon grew to love the gym and now takes part in athletic competitions
A couple of weeks after the split, I was in such a state that I moved back in with my parents, staying for nearly three years while I attempted to heal and rebuild my life as a single mother. I had shut myself off from most of my friends and felt so alone in the world.
For the next two years, I gorged on fast food, and lived off fried chicken and food delivery services. I felt dreadful – constantly groggy and lethargic – and looked awful, with a bloated face from all the alcohol I’d been drinking to cope with being alone with a new baby.
Once Zuri went to bed, it was wine o’clock. I’d finally let myself relax with a few glasses of red or white wine every night. Then I’d often end up finishing off the whole bottle. My weight gradually crept up to 13st.
To make things worse, Zuri was a sickly baby, and we were in and out of hospitals and ambulances for a year because she struggled to keep any food down. I was trying to keep my life together, being the face of my own PR business, but in reality it was a year of total terror, just trying to survive. I became a shadow of my former self.
A wake-up call
One day, in December 2019, I went shopping for an outfit for a special Christmas event. I’d long ago stopped caring how I looked, so I was still wearing maternity leggings. Whereas once I’d worn body-hugging dresses, now I was wearing sacks to hide my figure. As I flicked through the rails of clothes, it suddenly struck me that I was much bigger than I’d ever been before – I was a size 16 for the first time and, at 5ft 6in, it didn’t suit my small frame at all.
I continued living with my parents because I felt I needed their love and support, but when lockdown started in March 2020, Zuri and I finally moved into a rental flat. We were all feeling anxious about Covid and wanted to keep my parents safe from any infection that Zuri or I might bring home with us.
I was still struggling though. About 18 months after I’d moved out, when I was 36 and my little girl was two, a lovely local mum from my daughter’s nursery noticed how sad I was looking when I dropped her off. Concerned for me, this total stranger came over and asked: “Are you OK?”
I murmured something half-hearted in reply, but she added: “I have a gym down the road, mainly for women. Would you like to come and try it?” Those words changed my entire life.
A new start
I went to Laura’s gym, called Fit & Food in Chiswick, west London, that weekend and at first, I couldn’t even do a press-up. On my first visit, I joined a class called the Saturday Sweat Session. I looked around at all the super-fit people and thought: “Oh god, I don’t belong here!” But even that first class gave me a boost – I felt lighter and more positive.
Laura soon took me under her wing. She nurtured me, coached me on my fitness journey and is now one of my best friends. I’m eternally grateful. As a certified personal trainer specialising in pre- and postnatal fitness, she knew exactly how to help me and in December 2021, I took out a full gym membership.
After that, I threw myself into training, mainly because I wanted to feel better, rather than lose lots of weight. Everyone was so welcoming.
Lucy now exercises for two hours a day (with one rest day per week) and runs 40-50k a week
A breakthrough
From that moment on, my life completely changed. I’d felt so shy when I first walked into the gym, but I soon began to feel a huge sense of relief, just to be showing up and taking the first steps.
At first, I went once or twice a week, then I’d stop for a couple of weeks before the girls gently persuaded me back. Then I began going daily for classes or 45-minute personal training sessions and if I didn’t go, I really missed it.
I started off by doing half press-ups on my knees, as well as bicep curls and squats with very light dumbbells of under 3kg. But within a year, I was lifting heavy weights on barbells, able to do deadlifts, “barbell cleans” (a specific Olympic lifting technique), unassisted pull-ups and chin-ups.
Eighteen months ago, I began intensifying my workout and now I’ve become so obsessed with the gym, I even take part in athletic competitions. I exercise for two hours a day now, with just one rest day a week when I go for a walk or have a massage.
I love the challenge and the camaraderie. I’ve been training with the renowned elite athlete coach Joe Bingham – something I never would have imagined myself doing.
I’ve found the perfect combination of running and weight training. I run 40-50k a week, spread across five or six days, including a mix of fast track runs and two or three longer runs of 15-30k. I’ve gone from 13st to 10st, but that figure is misleading because I’ve built muscle, which weighs more than fat.
I’ve also recently met someone new and am really happy in our relationship. My PR business, We Are Lucy, is thriving, and exercise remains a huge part of my life. I couldn’t be happier.
