I lost 5st without fat jabs by following a retro 1980s diet – and beat my Cherry Coke addiction

Two size 22 friends who lost a combined 10 stone and have kept it off for years have revealed it wasn’t thanks to weight-loss jabs, but a retro diet that was wildly popular in the eighties.

Loren Knight, 35, from Tiptree, Essex, and Abbie Lodge, 34, from Southminster, Essex, were both trapped in cycles of binge eating, having dieted from childhood, and weighing 16st 3lbs and 15st 3lbs respectively at their heaviest.

They wanted to change after becoming mothers – Loren was too embarrassed to pose for photographs with her children. While Abbie was told her weight could have been a contributing factor to her daughter Olivia being born prematurely in 2020.

Loren, who had tried ‘every diet going’, lost six stone in six months in 2016, after discovering The 1:1 Diet – a strict low-calorie plan swapping solid food for shakes and soups that first became a hit 40 years ago. Now she’s an award-winning consultant for the brand (www.one2onediet.com/LorenC).

Abbie contacted Loren on social media in 2021 after seeing a post about the programme, and she went on to lose four stone in 16 weeks. 

The pair both weigh around 10st 3lbs and wear a size 12 – and in 2022, they joined forces as business partners, and are now best friends.

On the tough six-step plan, originally called The Cambridge Diet in 1984, participants restrict calories to as little as 600 a day. It became the go-to again about a decade ago, with celebrities including TOWIE’s Lauren Goodger and actress Jennifer Ellison.

Loren said: ‘The fact this diet has been around for over 40 years says everything about it. In an industry full of quick fixes and fads that come and go, the reason this has stood the test of time is because it works but more importantly, it evolves with the individual. 

‘Our weight-loss journeys aren’t about living on meal replacements forever. It’s about how they gave us temporary structure while we did the deeper work – changing our mindset, our relationship with food, our emotional eating patterns – so that the weight loss actually lasted. The plan was the tool. The mindset was the answer.

‘Crucially, neither of us diet anymore, and we have both maintained our weight loss long term. We now help hundreds of people across the UK to do the same.’

Loren had struggled with her weight since childhood, had been bullied, and had tried fad diets, but nothing worked. 

At 16st 3lbs aged 24 in 2015, her diet consisted of peanut butter on thick buttered bread for breakfast, biscuits throughout the day, a sandwich for lunch with crisps and cake, followed by a large pasta dish with garlic bread for dinner.

And she would secretly eat a daily full-size or sharing-size bar of chocolate.

Loren, a mother-of-two who married husband James in 2017, said: ‘I would buy chocolate on my way home from work that nobody knew about.

‘I would eat it as fast as I could in the car and stuff the wrappers in the glove box. I felt naughty, guilty, sometimes sick. But it didn’t stop me. I knew my husband knew, but we never spoke about it.’

Abbie, a mother-of-two, married to James, would survive on three litres of full-fat Cherry Coke every day, telling herself she was ‘being good’. In the evening, she would binge on takeaways and chocolate, devouring 4,000 calories in one sitting.

‘It was my comfort, my routine. I never questioned it,’ Abbie says. ‘I told myself I was too busy to eat well. I wasn’t eating all day, so in my head I was doing well. I still couldn’t understand why the scales kept going up.’

Neither woman exercised. Loren was too embarrassed as, ‘the gyms are full of people who look perfect’.

For Loren, the turning point came in 2016, after realising there were no photos of her with her children when they were little as she avoided the camera. She once didn’t take her daughter to a birthday party because she was too ashamed of her size.

‘I had dieted my whole life and got nowhere,’ she said. ‘Then I thought “how could I let my children go through the same pain as me?” I needed to end this cycle for them.’

For Abbie, the shift came after giving birth prematurely to Olivia in 2020. The baby had pre-eclampsia, was already prediabetic and hypertensive, and doctors told her that her weight could have been a contributing factor.

‘I felt a massive wave of guilt,’ she says. ‘Like my body had let her down before she’d even had a chance. Sitting there looking at this tiny baby, thinking “have I done this?” That stays with you.’

But that wasn’t enough to change things immediately. The tipping point came after watching a video filmed on Olivia’s first family holiday in 2021.

‘All I could see was how uncomfortable I looked,’ she says. ‘I didn’t feel like me anymore. It stopped being about weight and started being about getting my life back – and making sure my children never went through what I had.’

In 2016, Loren found the programme online and chose a consultant to work with.

Stage one involves eating only 3-4 low-calorie products per day – porridge, shakes, savoury meals – and drinking water, before moving on to stages 2-6, which reintroduce solid food.

The 1:1 Diet traces its origins to research begun in the 1960s by biochemist Dr Alan Howard at Cambridge University, who spent years developing a nutritionally complete formula diet for obese patients at Addenbrooke’s Hospital before launching it commercially in the UK in 1984 as the Cambridge Diet.

Loren said: ‘It was easy to follow, but the first three days were hard and I felt hungry, and everything seems heightened, but come day four, I had so much energy, I no longer felt hungry, and I was just working on my mindset as the cravings were still there.

‘It would be unrealistic to say Abbie and I didn’t have times on the programme where we wanted to quit, but both of us were so desperate to change our lives that we kept on pushing.

‘We ditched our “all or nothing” mindset. So, if there was a meal out, we would go. I truly believe it’s important that life continues or else you resent the programme and quit. That’s not what we want. We want to create sustainable change as that is what worked for both of us.’

Loren saw the weight drop off quickly, losing five stone in five months, then another stone when she became a consultant in 2017. While Abbie’s four stone came off in four months.

Loren added: ‘The weight-loss absolutely kept us going but we also learned to measure success in how we were feeling, how our clothes felt, and the things we could start doing too.’

Today, Loren eats porridge or a protein yoghurt with fruit for breakfast, for lunch it’s a protein salad, boiled eggs with spinach or a quiche. Dinner can be tacos, chicken pasta, fish dishes and curries.

Abbie eats a high-protein yoghurt for breakfast at 11am, an omelette for lunch, then dinner will be whatever the family are having – from pizza to salmon.

Both women admit they no longer diet, count calories or avoid any food. Loren has ditched her secret chocolate habit, while Abbie replaced her Cherry Coke habit with drinking water.

Loren said: ‘I was using chocolate as therapy. It led to binges, weight gain, sugar crashes, and it never solved the original problem. It only ever added another layer of negativity.’

Abbie added: ‘That one swap had a ripple effect on everything. It made me realise how many of my choices were just patterns I had never questioned.’

And they say losing weight has changed their lives. Loren completed a sponsored skydive for Cancer Research in memory of her nan, Moreen, who she lost to cancer in 2018, something she says would have been ‘unthinkable’ before. And she now has many photographs of herself with her children.

Abbie can fit on the swings at the park and go down the slide with Olivia. ‘At my heaviest I worried about what kind of mother I could be,’ she said. 

‘Now it is the small moments that matter. Running around with her. Being there. Not in my head about food or my body. Just being mum.

‘The biggest shift wasn’t what I ate,’ says Abbie. ‘It was how I thought. I stopped relying on willpower and started repairing my relationship with food. The weight loss became a by-product of healing my mindset.’

Loren, who also runs the podcast F*ck The Diet Cycle with Abbie, puts it simply: ‘You do not need to diet for the rest of your life. You are not broken. With the right support, there is another way.’