I started working with Dr Zaldivar on August 1st (2023) and my results have been amazing. Her perspective and guidance are completely different from anything I have done previously. 

A little background on me. When I was in about fifth grade, I started using food for comfort. By the time I was in seventh grade, I was up to 170 pounds at 5’4”. This was in the 70s when there weren’t that many overweight kids, so I was very self-conscious and tried to control my eating.  I had lost some weight before I started high school through just cutting calories. I’ve always been very active and played sports, but still fought my weight because of my diet. By sophomore year in high school, I gained back the weight I lost plus more. I had also started drinking with friends and found the one thing that made me feel amazing and looked at that as a solution to my problems. When I was a Junior in high school, mom asked me to start a diet with her through the weight loss clinic. It was 500 cal a day! I was very strict in my adherence to the diet and lost a lot of weight. I was also playing volleyball and had a couple of times where I got very dizzy and almost passed out because of the low calories. 

I managed to maintain my weight until college then up it went again. In my second year of college, I discovered bingeing and purging. I thought I invented it!  By that time I was drinking almost every night while going to school every day. 

Fast forward to my early 30s and I was deep into alcohol, drugs that kept me awake to drink more and bulimia. I was thin and thought I was healthy.  Five years and 3 DUIs later i realized I needed  to get clean and sober.

I have years of recovery from alcohol and drugs, but my food addiction has gone through times of abstinence and times of complete loss of control. I listen to lots of podcasts and that is where I heard Dr Zaldivar speak about addiction to food, sugar and the key cause of the lack of dopamine receptors. Work to build your dopamine receptors and lose your cravings and loss of control leading to a binge. It is something different that I had never heard and it just struck me as fact. Of course!  There was a time where I did triathlons and worked out very hard. I had no struggle with food during that time. I was onboard to try it because I have yo-yo dieted for 50 years. 

I started on August 1st and haven’t looked back. I’m doing “hard” things. Weight workouts concentrating on time under tension, and more intense cardio that I can extend for an hour. The first couple of weeks it was actually difficult for me to eat enough because my hunger was suppressed by the workouts. I felt amazing and had so much energy!  I am now over 3 months in and have hit my goal weight and am in the process of reverse dieting for maintenance. I will continue to work with Dr Zaldivar as long as I feel I need her support in determining my maintenance and seeing everything stabilize. 

For me this is a diet of mostly carnivore, including dairy since I tolerate it, with very few vegetables a couple times per week. If you are thinking about working with her and have a history of addiction; whether it is drugs, alcohol, food, gambling or anything else, you really need to work with her. It will change your life. I’ve tried everything else…including talk therapy and other very different weight loss plans. I may make it 2-3 months.  This plan is not a diet. It is a lifestyle. After experiencing the results and learning the truth, I don’t believe I can ever go back to my old ways.

J. Brown