Actress who plays Mandy Dingle in Emmerdale, has been inundated with messages of support after she marked an important milestone on social media this week
Fans showered soap opera star Lisa Riley with love and support last week as she reached a major personal milestone. Renowned for her long Emmerdale character Mandy Dingle, the actress has been a member of the program since 1995 and continues to be one of its core characters.
Her character Mandy recently married Paddy Kirk, which led to her becoming entangled in an intriguing story. Off-screen, Lisa interacts with her Instagram fans, offering snippets of her life outside of the drama on television.
She just shared with her fans, in an emotional message, that she has been clean for nine years. In her touching caption, she wrote, “9 YEARS SOBER TODAY.”
She went on to describe her sober path, saying, “I filled my cup with anything but booze for nine years.I had no idea how long I would stay sober, and I felt pressure from others to justify my decision. This is the reason, though.I’m so much happier in my life, I feel FANTASTIC, FREE, and I don’t feel fake because I surround myself with positivity instead of diluted nonsense and nonstop drama…I adore you, and I raise a cup of tea to everyone (you know who you are) who has never stopped being there for me.”
Thousands of people liked her disclosure, while actors Karen Blick from Emmerdale and Susanna Reid from Good Morning Britain expressed their support. Her fans quickly agreed with her observations in the comments area.
“Happy soberversary, you ledge!” remarked a fan, Gemma. Jill continued, saying, “Awesome…congratulations, lovely.”
Lisa has already talked about the positive effects that giving up alcohol had on her health; in 2016, she told us about how it helped her astonishing journey to lose a staggering 10 stone. She disclosed: “I gave up alcohol because I realized it contained a lot of empty calories.” It was insane how many calories I would ingest from booze over the course of a week.
“After performing, I used to feel like I needed a drink to decompress, so maybe three bottles a week. There would then be a couple more bottles if I went out on the weekends with friends and perhaps had Sunday lunch with my family. Everything piled up.
Lisa acknowledged that she used alcohol as a “comfort blanket” to deal with the pain after her mother passed away from cancer at the age of just 57, so she made the decision to give up the bottle as part of larger life adjustments.
I doubt that I would ever wear the badge and admit that I was an alcoholic, she said in an interview with the One For The Road podcast. Honestly, I don’t believe I was. I believe that I was really [dependent] on alcohol, and in the same way that other individuals could use alcohol as an antidepressant, I did too.
“It was my comfort blanket and I always say that.”
In addition, her time on the tenth season of Strictly Come Dancing was crucial because, after the program, she changed her diet and started working out regularly, which allowed her to go from a size 28 to a size 14.
Lisa Riley was able to lose weight, but she still had 1.5 stones of extra skin, which required surgery to remove. People tend to forget how enormous I was, she said to the Mirror. I dropped twelve stone and one pound after the skin was removed.
“The surgeon chopped off one stone, four pounds. Since then my weight has more or less stayed the same. Now, for lunch I eat either a bowl of soup or a plain jacket potato.
“I’m never going to be size 28 again. I look at pictures of me back then and think: ‘Who’s that girl?’ She doesn’t exist any more.”
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