'My fiancé took T5 diet pills thinking he was fat - hours later he died'

     So happy: Heather Thompson and Chris Wilcock

Every morning Heather Thompson kisses her fiancé Chris and tells him how much she loves him. When she returns from work, she shouts, “I’m home,” as she comes in the door, but she’s met only with silence.

Because Chris is no longer there – all she kisses is his picture.

Chris died in April on the day he took extra-strong slimming pills for the very first time. He had been fed-up with cruel jibes about his weight.

And yet the father of three, who was 5ft 5in, only weighed 12 stone.

Fit and healthy Chris, 45, who worked as a window cleaner, suffered a fatal cardiac arrest just hours after taking a number of T5 fat-burning pills.

Heather says tests on his body showed he had taken the caffeine equivalent of 300 cups of coffee, and she is now calling for the tablets – which are easily available to buy online – to be banned so that no other family has to suffer a similar tragedy.

Tearful Heather, 44, says: “Chris wasn’t even fat – he used to fluctuate between 12 and 13 stone. I used to joke with him and say, ‘You’ll have all the time in the world to lose weight when you are in your box underground’. He has now hasn’t he?

“I loved him whatever. When he was out of work I used to say we could go and live in a tent as long as we had
each other.

“I just want Chris’s death to serve as a warning to other people not to take these pills. They need to be banned. You can buy them anywhere – people have told me you can buy them in sunbed shops and gyms.

“Next time it might be a 13-year-old who takes them and dies.

“I miss him every day. I wake up and say good morning to him, I kiss his picture next to my bed. When I am at work I expect his texts. When I walk in from work I shout that I am home. I go to bed early every evening because I can’t bear to sit in the house without him.”

She adds: “I just feel robbed of the future we had planned together. We used to joke about getting married at Gretna Green and my daughters had entered us for the TV show Don’t Tell The Bride. Now none of that will happen.”

Just two months after his death, Heather still speaks about Chris as if he is still alive, and his presence is everywhere in the cosy home they shared in Darwen, Lancashire.

His toothbrush and razor are still in the bathroom, his T-shirt hangs over the radiator and his work boots are by the door. His smiling face beams down from pictures on every wall in the living room, his arm always draped around Heather’s ­shoulders.

But all Heather has for company now is a tiny kitten bought for her by her daughter that she has named Tigger – her pet name for Chris.

The couple met eight-and-a-half years ago when Heather worked in a Blackburn bar. The chemistry was instant.

Grieving: Heather kisses Chris's photo every day

She says: “A friend of his had done a job for me and had my number so gave it to Chris. He came into my work one night to talk to me and ended up sitting at the end of the bar until closing time.”

The couple became inseparable, running pubs together across Lancashire before settling down to a quieter life.

She says: “He made me laugh. When we ran the pubs he always used to play Il Divo’s Time to Say Goodbye at the end of the night – the customers always knew that was the signal to drink up and go. We were a great team.

“We never spent any time away from each other apart from when he did the Three Peaks to raise money for Help the Heroes – that is how fit he was. Only the day before he died we had been on a big family walk and he had loved it.

“My daughters Emily and Chloe loved him too. He was like a dad to them.”

Heather thought her life was complete when romantic Chris proposed to her on Valentine’s Day 2013. At a party at home, he got down on bended knee, declaring his love for her in front of their friends.

Heather says: “He was my true soulmate, always in my heart and my thoughts. The day I met him, it felt like I had won the lottery.” But their happiness was to be short-lived.

Chris had convinced himself he was fat after mates took the mickey. He had always looked after himself and trained at the gym, but an accident at work meant he could no longer lift weights like he used to.

Heather begged him not to take the T5 pills, saying they could both go on a low-carb diet together to lose weight.

But he ignored her pleas and suffered a cardiac arrest the same day he had taken the tablets for the first time.

Shop assistant Heather says: “He had always looked after himself and went to the gym, and he always looked so smart and loved to put on fake tan too.

“He was a normal, fit bloke, with a good physique, and he had always been like that since I first met him.

“He once fell off a roof at work and hurt his arm. It meant that he couldn’t go to the gym any more, and couldn’t do as much physical work.

“He didn’t eat a lot, but the pair of us would always put on a little bit of weight over winter, but then we would go on a low-carb diet and lose it for summer.

Not even fat: Chris Wilcock on a walking holiday. He only weighed 12st

“He hated the fact that he had put on a bit of weight and that people were teasing him about it. I told him to ignore them and that we would do the low-carb diet like we always did.

“He always drank beer or wine, but had switched to Bacardi and Diet Coke as he said it had less calories. If I was nipping to the shop for some of his favourite M&Ms, he would say he didn’t want any.

“About two weeks before he died, he told me he had bought these pills as he had seen other people take them and lose weight, but I told him not to take them. I said he was fine the way he was – I always loved him whatever.

“But on Easter Monday, he came ­downstairs saying he didn’t feel well. I told him to go and splash some water on his face, which he did. Then he just sat on the edge of the bed.

“I just knew then what he had done – I said to him, ‘You’ve taken some of those stupid tablets haven’t you?’

“I asked him how many, but he was just so out of it. I dialled 111 and they said they were sending an ambulance. By the time the paramedics got here his system was shutting down – he couldn’t even walk.”

Heather says Chris suffered a cardiac arrest in the ambulance and she looked on horrified as the paramedics performed CPR to bring him back.

She says: “I sat in the front of the ­ambulance and when I looked around they were pumping his chest. At hospital, they sent the pills down to the poison lab to see what was in them to see if they could counteract them but it was too late.

“The doctors started to work on him again, trying to bring him back and they told me to talk to him, so I was talking about his grandson and all the things we were going to do together as a family. But then they stopped and I knew then that he was gone.”

Prevention: Heather wants the sale of T5 pills banned to prevent another family suffering similar heartache

At the opening of his inquest last week, coroner Michael Singleton confirmed Chris has died due to caffeine toxicity and he has ordered an investigation into the tablets – which can be bought for as little as 25p each.

Lancashire police have confirmed they are also looking into what is in them and where they came from.

Heather says the pills came in a bottle with no instructions and says Chris had just been told by the person he bought them off to take one a day and avoid alcohol.

She now faces a future without her soulmate, and her only solace is visiting his grave twice a week to lay fresh flowers and talk to him about her day.

But she believes some good is already coming out of her tragic loss as she knows other people have already stopped taking the pills after what happened to Chris.

“I have had a few people come up to me and tell me that they have stopped taking them now. My local MP, Jake Berry, is calling for restrictions on these pills. I just want to see them banned.

“Chris was so fit and healthy, and not on any medication. If these pills can do that to him, they can do it to anyone. If he hadn’t taken them, he would still be here today.”
Hidden dangers of T5 diet pills

T5s are powerful thermogenic fat burning pills with many different brands available.

Originally they contained ephedrine to stimulate the metabolism, caffeine to boost the effect of the ephedrine and aspirin to keep the ephedrine in the system for longer.

But since ephedrine was banned from sale in the UK, some manufacturers replace it with bitter orange extract.

There are concerns over possible side effects from bitter orange, particularly in people with existing heart conditions. These include risk of high blood pressure and heart attack.

Medical expert Dr Tom Smith said: “I’m staggered people are still able to sell these because we have known about the dangers since the 1970s.

"You can lose an awful lot of muscle mass and fat but you can also damage your heart. It can stop suddenly.”