'I was so heavy I couldn't even move around,' admits Ruth Jones as she turns cover girl in stunning new photoshoot

By Sara Nathan


Looking tidy: Gavin and Stacey actress Ruth Jones shows off her sleek new look in a stunning photoshoot for Woman & Home magazine


Posing like a true model, with her skin glowing and her brunette hair swept back, Ruth Jones beams as she shows off her newly-slim figure.

The Gavin & Stacey star told how she was fed-up after tipping the scales at 17-and-a-half stone, and over two years lost a staggering amount of weight by careful calorie counting.

However, now weighing just over 13 stone, Miss Jones still insists that she has three more stone to lose – as she said: ‘I think there’s immense pressure put on women in the public eye.’

She told how she was spurred into action by the simple fact that she could not even ‘move around’, but admitted she it was ‘heartbreaking’ as she cut down her food.

Lessa the Nessa: Ruth Jones went down to 1,200 calories a day over two years to achieve her fabulous figure

The 45-year-old actress, who admitted to the Mail she had tried a wide variety of diets in a desperate bid to slim down, said: ‘Health is really important to me. My uncle had a stroke and died last year, which was a bit of a wake-up call.’

She told Woman & Home magazine: ‘At certain points in life it’s easy not to think about what the consequences might be further down the road.

‘But I made an effort to lose weight because I think the problems of obesity are becoming more known now. I was 17 and a half stone. I stopped drinking five years ago, and I stopped smoking around three years ago, so the weight was the next thing.’

Most famous for playing feisty Welsh lass Nessa Jenkins in the BBC hit comedy she co-created with James Corden, Miss Jones added: ‘I’ve always been big but I just felt that it was getting to a really unhealthy level.

‘People have different attitudes if you’re in the public eye. They can say, ‘Yeah, good for her, she embraces her size,’ and you think, ‘Yeah, but it’s not healthy.’

Regardless of how it looks aesthetically, it’s not healthy to have a BMI as high as I did. I wasn’t able to move around.’

The star, whose new comedy Stella launches on Sky One tonight, told how her husband, TV producer David Peet – with whom she runs Tidy Productions - had also lost weight with her.

She said: ‘I’ve lost four and a half stone. The key thing was acceptance and patience – to accept it was going to take a couple of years.

'It’s not going to happen overnight. I wouldn’t judge anyone on how they lose weight, but the only way I was going to do it was to count calories. So I went down to 1,200-1,500 calories a day.

‘It was heartbreaking. There was literally a moment where I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to eat less food.’ It was more about the portion sizes than anything. I still have blowouts, but I got into the habit of counting calories. If I feel like it, I’ll still eat chocolate, but I’ll be thinking,
‘How many calories am I eating?’

‘I’ve still got a way to go – I’m still two or three stone overweight, according to the charts. I’m in this half-stone zone that I don’t move out of. I’m 13 stone and I’ll go up to 13.7 and back down again. It’s hard to go past it. My husband lost weight with me – again, for health reasons.

Now a size 16, Miss Jones said she did not ‘hide as much’ in baggy clothes.

The best compliment she had received, she said, came was when she was told she was a size 14 by a saleswoman in the Stella McCartney section in department store Selfridges, and laughed: ‘She was wrong, but it felt SO good!’

She said she tried to exercise, and turned to aerobics and running, but in the end realised: ‘walking a bit faster is better than not walking at all.’

To read the feature in full, see the February issue of Woman & Home Magazine on sale now


A shadow of her former self: Ruth Jones in November and as Nessa in 2009 in the hit comedy Gavin and Stacey



source:dailymail