A 28-stone man who feared he would never find love has lost more than half his body weight and says he is now looking forward to his wedding.

Dean Clarkson swapped fizzy drinks and takeaways for a juicing diet and shed 17-stone in less than a year.

The 30-year-old said he lacked confidence and found it difficult to talk to girls until he turned his life around and plucked up the courage to ask out old school friend Andrea Menzies, also 30.

The pair, both from Shildon, are now planning to get married next year and Dean says he couldn’t be happier.

“I did start to wonder if I would ever meet someone. At one point, I got to the realisation that I probably wouldn’t.” He said.

“If I hadn’t lost the weight I would have never asked Andrea out. But now I had the confidence to message her on Facebook and think that she might actually like someone like me.

“My dad and her mum were head boy and head girl together at school and we were born within two days of each other in the same hospital ward. It’s like we were meant to be.”

Marketing executive Dean struggled with his weight from a young age and watched it spiral out of control as he got older.

He added: “At my heaviest I was around 28-stone but as you can imagine at that size, it’s very hard to be weighed and know exactly how big I was.

“I was generally just not caring about what I ate. I was eating too much of the wrong things.”

After watching a documentary about the story of an obese man who drank only juice for 60 days to lose weight Dean started researching the diet.

He said: “I was wondering if it was just a fad, but I had managed to give up fizzy pop and hadn’t touched a drop so I thought, if I can do that I can give this a go.

“Before I knew it, I had lost 15 stones by September.”

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