'I’ve been on a journey this year!’ Love Island’s Shaughna Phillips laughs sitting cross-legged on her bed during our interview. And she’s not wrong, posing in a bikini after losing 5½ stone, her transformation is jaw-dropping.
Shaughna, 30, overhauled her lifestyle at the beginning of last year and, at 5ft 5, has gone from a size 18 to an 8, dropping from 15st 4½lbs to 9st 10lbs. The achievement is astonishing and Shaughna is glowing as she tells us how her weight loss has completely changed her life.
‘I feel so much better for it – my clothes fit better, I feel fitter and my sleep has been transformed. I’m in the best shape of my life! I did dig out some old Love Island clothes recently and was shocked that not only did they fit – some were a bit loose!’’ she beams. ‘I feel like a huge weight has been lifted – and it literally has!’
Shaughna explains that like most of us, she first started to put on weight in lockdown – which happened just three weeks after she left the Love Island villa in February 2020.
‘I remember one day checking my step count and it was 20 – that must be some kind of world record!’ she laughs.
The reality star then fell pregnant with her daughter, Lucia, in 2022 and turned to comfort eating after she was born.
‘I can’t blame this all on baby weight,’ she jokes, ‘Even after Lucia was born, I was just throwing food down my throat. It’s hard being a new mum and I was eating to cheer myself up. The weight just piled on and I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, “How on earth have I let this happen?”’
Shaughna’s wake-up call came when she had a body scan at the beginning of this year, and was horrified to discover that she was carrying a lot of visceral fat (fat around the internal organs that are linked with health concerns such as type two diabetes, heart disease and stroke).
‘I had something ridiculous like 44% body fat,’ she explains. ‘I was working out at the time so they said that actually my muscle definition was good, I just needed to sort out my nutrition.’
Before her transformation, Shaughna was typically having toast with Nutella and two bowls of crunchy nut cereal for breakfast. Lunch would be half a packet of biscuits, and dinner was pasta with chicken, tomato sauce, cheese and garlic bread, followed by ice cream for dessert.
She says, ‘My downfall was definitely biscuits. I love my tea and I was having five or six cups with sugar every day and eating biscuits with them too.’
After her body scan, Shaughna transformed her diet back in March with the help of dietician Jo Travers. She swapped her sugary breakfast for porridge with fruit or two scrambled eggs with grilled tomatoes on toast. Lunch was a tortilla wrap filled with a handful of grated cheese, chicken and vegetables, and dinner was either a 400-calorie ready meal or spaghetti Bolognese.
She says, ‘I felt really satisfied having a cooked breakfast and, by dinner, I felt so full. It was great eating so much food and still losing weight. I always thought you had to starve yourself to lose weight, but you really don’t.’
After getting to grips with the nutrition plan, Shaughna then started adding in movement.
‘I was going for walks to get out and get some fresh air to begin with,’ she explains. ‘Then I started doing a bit of a workout while I was watching Real Housewives. It was just little things like hopping on the spot or skipping gently. Now I do short, boxing-style workouts that I can do at home while Lucia plays or naps.’
Throughout the course of the year, Shaughna found she was steadily losing weight, and she reached her goal at Christmas. And after being inundated with questions about her weight loss on social media, she has launched Shaughna’s Shred-It Plan, a fitness and nutrition website featuring a diet plan and 12-minute boxing-style exercise routines.
She says, ‘I find exercise boring, so I wanted to find something I enjoyed. I’ve always loved boxing because I’m learning a new skill and learning how to protect myself. So the foundation of the plan is combat and boxing. They’re quick workouts, just 12 minutes long, and they fly by because they feel so great.’
The meal plan is family-friendly too. ‘There’s not one thing on there that Lucia doesn’t eat,’ Shaughna says. ‘It’s so much easier if you don’t have to be making the kids chicken nuggets as well as cooking your own food. The recipes are all really quick to make, too.’
With such a dramatic weight loss, Shaughna has been forced to defend herself against accusations that she’s used Ozempic. The weight-loss injection has become widely used over the past two years, with many people – including lots of celebrities – using the appetite suppressant to drop weight.
‘I love my food too much and I’d be terrified of any side effects,’ she says. ‘Ozempic is the new buzz word of the year, but it is what it is. I did it by finding an eating and exercise plan that worked, so no drugs, no gastric band and no quick fixes.’
And despite feeling great in her clothes and less self-conscious, Shaughna explains that after sadly losing her own father to pancreatic cancer when she was just 21, her biggest motivation was staying healthy for her daughter.
She says, ‘Of course you can be overweight and fit, but I was unhealthy. Obesity is one of the biggest risk factors of many cancers, and if I can try to alleviate some of those risks, then I will. I just want to be the best mum for Lucia. She was 100% the reason I did this.’
The star shares her daughter with partner Billy Webb, who was arrested for drug offences when Shaughna was 30 weeks pregnant, and was subsequently given a nine-year jail sentence. While the pair initially split, Billy served just 12 months of his sentence and they got back together during this time. He was released in the autumn and the couple are now raising their daughter together.
Lucia is at a lovely age, according to Shaughna. ‘She is so funny,’ she laughs. ‘I can’t even imagine my life without her now. She is absolutely amazing.’
And while she feels fit and healthy, Shaughna says one of the biggest benefits of her weight loss has been her mindset change, and going into 2025 she says she feels like a new person.
She says, ‘I remember calculating how much I needed to lose and thinking, “How is that even possible?” It felt like the most impossible task. But a year later and I’ve done it. I wish I could go back to that person at the beginning of this year and tell her not to be so hard on herself.’
She adds, ‘My body and my hang-ups clouded my life before, so I’m looking forward to that not being the case this year. I am in such a positive mindset now, I just want to relish every moment with Lucia and enjoy my life – I feel great.’
Shaughna’s Shred-It online fitness platform is available now, priced at £49. Visit shreditplan.com