Angela Stokes is half the woman she used to be but she is not complaining about her dramatic transformation.

The 27-year-old has swapped pizza and fry-ups for sunflower seeds and salads and dropped more than half her body weight in the process.

Angela, of Ditchling Road, Brighton, is recommending people follow her example and eat only raw foods after going from a morbidly obsese 21st to a svelte 9st 9lbs.

She is confident she has beaten the bulge for good and can teach other people how to follow her example.

She only eats uncooked foods such as sunflower seeds, seaweed and salads. Her flat has no oven and the thought of a fried chicken or pizza dinner makes her stomach lurch.

She gave up cooked foods in 2002 when a friend gave her a copy of The Raw Family by Igor and Valya Boutenko and she stayed up all night reading it.

The next day she stopped eating cooked foods and within a few weeks she could feel the difference.

She said: "I could almost see the weight coming off me in the first few months. I could see bits of my body that had been hidden for years, like my collarbone.

"In the first year I lost seven and a half stone. I was losing 2lb a week. I was doing a lot of physical jobs at the time and started swimming more often, once or twice a day."

Before losing the weight she had been miserable. An under-active thyroid gland had started her on the road to obesity and medicines to control it had contributed to the problem. By the time she was 21st she had not had a boyfriend for five years and lost control over her eating.

She started the day with two toasted cheese sandwiches, then had a huge pizza or plate of pasta for lunch.

Now she has reached her ideal weight and is running workshops telling people how to cut down on cooked food or stop eating it altogether.

She said the idea was not to put people on a diet they would give up when they lost weight, but to switch them to a lifestyle that would help them stay thin permanently.

She said: "It can be done by anybody and they don't have to take on a fad diet or buy products from a corporation. It's just living on foods you can buy from a greengrocer."

For more information visit www.rawreform.com