Rebecca Martinez is a down-to-earth, straight-talking, no-nonsense woman from East Los Angeles. She works in the field of information technology and has the kind of razor-sharp mind that makes a career like that possible. But the ability to think rationally proved no defense against eating her way into a health crisis: in her early thirties, she stepped on the scale at the L.A. County Fair and discovered that she had hit a personal high of 347 pounds. She jumped right off before anyone could see.
Rebecca was, in her own words, a fast food bandit. Sometimes, on her way to a destination for a meal, she would stop off for fast food.
Naturally, she experimented with every diet under the sun: Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, and even starvation diets. Because most diets will work for a time, her weight yo-yoed. Her clothes closet featured a rotation of a wide range of different sizes.
Her comeback from obesity began with a 21-day plant-based detox that she signed up for, facilitated by two doctors in Santa Monica. She lost 18 pounds. She committed herself to a vegan diet. The next step in her health journey was to meet Chef AJ and follow her protocol for "Ultimate Weight Loss," which meant removing oils, nuts, and salt from her diet. This got her down to around 200 pounds--a total loss of 147 pounds, or about three-quarters of the weight she needed to lose.
But her weight loss more or less stalled there for a time, as she repeatedly used food as her "drug of choice" while she was in an unhappy marriage. At this point in her journey, she knew perfectly well what foods she should and should not be eating, but she now and again permitted herself to eat self-destructively as an emotional safety blanket. In her words, "I didn't just fall off the wagon, I did a perfectly executed swan dive off the wagon."
It was only after she divorced her husband that Rebecca lost the rest of the weight that she needed to lose. For Rebecca, the emotional side of the equation was as important as an understanding of nutrition and the principles of caloric density. Please watch my interview with Rebecca here, and see if you agree with me that, if a movie of her life is made, Rebecca should be played by Rosie Perez.