84 AWW.COM.AUAUGUST 2017
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KRISTINA SOLJO. THIS PAGE: COASTREK PHOTOGRAPH SUPPLIED AND USED WITH PERMISSION.on whatever I wanted. I’d think,
‘I’ll have that cream cake’, and I didn’t
have to share it with anyone.”
As the talented hair and make-up
artist’s career took off, so too did her
weight. She paid a price for long days
in the salon and on photo shoots not
eating properly and picking at food.
By the time she had landed a dream
job in Europe working on glamorous
fashion shoots forVogue,Harper’s
BazaarandMarie Claireher weight
was ballooning. To her A-list clients,
such as Dannii Minogue
and Richard Branson, she
was the bubbly blonde
who always seemed
happy, but in truth,
she was locked into a
depressing cycle of yoyo dieting.
“Probably the worst habit I picked
up in Italy was the ‘coke and smoke’
diet – I lived off cans of Diet Coke and
cigarettes,” Bern admits. “Terrible.
Some people have said that they
assumed I was happy being large,
but I was not.”
Bern’s weight would go up and
down until she became pregnant with
daughter Lilli, now 11, after which
she muses it was “up, up and up”. She
had been feeling increasingly tired and
moody, but when she struggled to bend
over and do up her shoelaces, she
knew it was time to take action.
She booked a check-up with her
GP whose dire warning sparked an
extraordinary weight-loss journey.
“The doctor said, ‘Bern you
are morbidly obese, you’ve got
hypertension, a fatty liver and you’re
pre-diabetic.’ It was like, bam!” she
says, laughing. “She told me straight,
but it was the wake-up call I needed
to take my health seriously.”
The news could have been
depressing for someone who worksalongside waif-like women every day,
but instead, Bern used the situation
to her advantage by tapping into the
expert knowledge of those around her.
On photo shoots, she would quiz
the models about what they ate and
why, and how they kept their weight
off, and wrote pages of notes with
their hints and ideas. Then she would
go home and research their suggestions
in-depth to figure out what would
work for her.
“Many of the girls study nutrition
and they have a deep interest in
their health, so they were veryknowledgeable,” Bern says. “I did
shoots with athletes and trainers,
too. Everyone was happy to answer
my questions. I wanted to lose my
weight as quickly as I could in the
healthiest way. I wanted warp-speed
weight loss!
“When you’re fat, you want the
fat gone, preferably yesterday, and I
wanted the fat to stay off, permanently.”
She condensed all she had learnt
into a series of simple rules to live by,
such as cutting out processed foods
and sugar, reducing her intake of
carbs and not eating after 7pm. She
added a little more physical movement
into each day and, within a fortnight,
she had noticed a difference.
“My clothes fitted a little better.
There was a shift in attitude within
myself. I felt calmer, more in control
of my world, less moody and I just
felt happier within myself,” Bern says.
“I felt like I was on the right track,
which was very motivating.
“I’d tried all sorts of diets before
and my weight has gone up and
down. I knew, this time, I had to
throw out all of the rules of the past
and just stick with something simple
and manageable because I still have to
go to work every day and look after
my family, so it had to fit with my
day-to-day routine. I didn’t go to the
gym and exercise furiously every day
because I simply didn’t have
the time to do that.”
After 30 weeks of
following her basic plan,
Bern had shed a whopping
30 kilos. She loved it when
the other school mums sidled up at
pick-uptime asking for her tips and
she happily shared her advice, often
emailing her notes around or sending
Lilli to school with sticky notes of
information to give to other mothers.
“Every day, someone would say,
‘Bern, you look great – what’s the
secret?’ And that felt so great, but
I knew if these women were looking
for simple answers in a very cluttered
world of diet information, then so
would many others,” she says.
Bern created a pamphlet to share
around, which was so popular that“It was like, bam! The
wake-up call I needed.”
ABOVE: Bernadette taking
part in Melbourne Coastrek
to raise funds for The Fred
Hollows Foundation. LEFT:
How far she has come.