Before: 226
After: 145
Program used: Weight Watchers

Six months into her pregnancy, 20-year-old Martita Martinez, of Syracuse, N.Y., received devastating news: The baby she was carrying would be born with major arm and leg deformities. “They thought it was some kind of syndrome,” recalls Martita, “and that there could be lots of other things wrong, too,” including brain damage.

Comforting Herself with Food

Martita knew that being a single mom would be tough, but she never anticipated the challenges of raising a child with multiple birth defects. To ease her anxiety about her pregnancy, she turned to food. And more food. After getting up to 247 lbs. — a hefty weight for her 5-foot-4-inch frame — she delivered her daughter, Chelsea, in August 1995.

Chelsea was born missing the front parts of her feet and seven of her fingers, but there was also good news: Nothing else was wrong, and what Martita’s beautiful baby lacked in toes and fingers, she more than made up for in pluck and intelligence.

Martita, who returned to her waitressing job six weeks after giving birth, was relieved to find that “Chelsea didn’t need physical therapy and was walking by age 1.” But single-motherhood proved so all-consuming that Martita’s only other relationship was with pizza, pasta and ice cream.

When watching the video of Chelsea’s second birthday party, Martita was thunderstruck to see what 226 lbs. looked like. That woman with Chelsea “wasn’t me!” she says. “It was a bloated version of me.” Martita resolved to get into shape. She had never dieted in her life, “but I knew from common sense that fat makes you fat.” Her first step was to empty her cupboards and read the label on every box, jar and pouch: “I had no concept that there was so much fat and calories in those things!” She gave all of her Hamburger Helper, mac and cheese and other high-cal foods to a neighbor with three children.

Hello, Willpower!

The new, determined Martita took twice as long in the grocery store because she scanned every label. She didn’t count calories, but if a label indicated “that one portion was one cup, that’s all I had. If I got really hungry at night, I just went to bed so I wouldn’t stay up and eat.”

She also realized that she needed more exercise than pushing a stroller. “I had just really stretched to buy a house, so I sold the house’s leaded-glass windows for $300 and bought a treadmill,” she says. “The windows were beautiful, but I used that treadmill for an hour every single day.”

Then, in 1998, after losing 80 lbs. in 10 months, Martita went out with girlfriends for the first time in three years. At a bar, a construction supervisor named David Richardson struck up a conversation with her. They hit it off, and he asked to see her again. “We took things slowly,” primarily because David worked 80- and sometimes 95-hour weeks, recalls Martita. But when they did get together, they often went out to eat.

Battling Date Weight

Soon she had packed on 41 lbs. of “date weight” from dining out. In 2000, after surging up to 186 lbs., Martita joined Weight Watchers (“It wasn’t working on my own anymore”) and lost 45 lbs. Through it all, she and David grew closer, and in June 2004, Martita Martinez became Martita Richardson. “I felt like a princess. I had a tiara and everything,” says Martita. In May 2005, David adopted Chelsea: “She was already calling him Daddy,” Martita recalls.

Martita’s weight jumped up again when a physician put her on prednisone to treat a skin problem. (One side-effect is weight gain.) But after weaning herself off the steroid in 2005, she trimmed back down to 145 lbs. The moral? Obstacles and setbacks are sometimes inevitable, “but beating yourself up doesn’t do any good,” she notes. “In my mind I’d think, ‘OK. I’ll start fresh tomorrow.’”

“Losing weight has been life-changing,” marvels Martita, who is now 31 and weighs 145 lbs. “I never would have met David if I hadn’t lost weight because I never went anywhere,” she says. “I never would have talked to him, either, because I had no confidence.”

Now, says Martita, “I couldn’t ask for a better situation. Dave helps Chelsea with her homework, goes with her to chorus and takes her to Girl Scouts. David and I really are best friends. Everything is fun, comfortable and easy.”
Sure, there are times when Martita gets discouraged or beats herself up over “that last 10 lbs.” But then she thinks: “You lost almost 100 lbs.! You can do anything!”