A STUDENT who transformed her life through weight loss hopes to help others get healthier and do what they want to do.

Grace Elliot is hoping to use her journey of weight loss to inspire those people in Bramley who want to shed a few pounds when she launched her new Slimming World group in Bramley.

It was while Grace was at university studying film that she started battling her weight.

She said: “They say the camera adds ten pounds, or in my case triple that! I started to hate getting up in front of my class or the camera - I constantly had a feeling of dread that everyone was watching me.

“I struggled massively being away from home and missing my family, so after my classes I would go back to my room and eat.

“Eating made me happy, which made me forget about the underlying feeling of homesickness. I was having takeaways nearly every night and this started to take its toll.

“Acting for film in my final year, I was finding it difficult to keep up in my dance classes, I hated having to go to the front of the class in fear that people would be judging me for being overweight and out of breath.”

After years of serial dieting, Grace found nothing would work. However, some of her friends were already members of a Slimming World group and so they gave her some recipe books.

Now, having lost four-and-a-half stone, Grace hardly recognises herself as the scared student she once was and cannot wait to venture out into the world of acting as well as training as a consultant for Slimming World.

She added: “If you’d have told me last summer, four and a half stone heavier, that I would be setting up my own Slimming World group, I would’ve laughed, and then probably eaten a whole packet of biscuits.”

Grace’s group starts on September 4 and will be held every Tuesday at Brocas Hall, in Clift Meadow.