Jessie Allen

After my daughter was born I gained a lot of weight. A lot of my new Mum
friends were shedding their baby weight after 6 months, but after two and
a half years, I still hadn’t lost it. I was a size 12 before I got pregnant and
ballooned to a size 16.

My old clothes didn’t fit and it was just really depressing to try to shoe-horn
myself into them or to have to go to the shop and buy a size 16 when before
I was really proud of my figure. I had an hour glass figure with curves in
all the right places and a nice, tiny cinched waist. And that wasn’t coming
back and it was just depressing.

When you become a mother or a parent, you go through an intense period of questioning your identity and who you are. Having a kid is such a big change in your life. And having the extra weight didn’t help; I felt dowdy, unglamorous, unsexy and that combined with the self-doubt just didn’t help. Now that I’m slimmer thanks to Cho-Yung, I feel a lot more confident about myself and I am who I was before – but better.

I didn’t have a bad diet before. I ate properly and regularly and know a fair amount about good nutrition. But I did, and do, have a really big sweet tooth and I like to bake so that didn’t help at all! That’s been my big down fall, especially at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I get a massive sugar craving and can’t think of anything else. My problem isn’t so much what I eat, but how much I eat.

The first day I started taking Cho-Yung tea, I noticed a difference straight away. It’s the taste of the tea that really makes it work for me. It’s so light and refreshing and clean and makes me feel that way inside, so I don’t want to pollute that feeling with naughty things like chocolate and chips and biscuits. In terms of the weight loss, I would say in about a week or two that I noticed a difference, especially with a reduction in bloating.

I’m involved with a charity called Women for Women International which helps women survivors of war in places like Iraq, South Sudan, Kosovo and Afghanistan rebuild their lives through mentoring and a business training programme so they can become self-sufficient. I introduced the charity to Cho-Yung and they have adopted it as their Charity of The Year!

As part of it’s fund raising, the charity got involved with a woman called Sue Harper Todd who is one of only 5 British women to reach the summit of Everest. She was donating her time and expertise to lead a group of 10 women to Everest Base Camp to help raise money and awareness of the charity. I was massively interested in going, being completely naïve about what the trek itself would involve!