The Rich Roll Podcast Ultimate Weight Loss Secrets With Chef AJ
Becoming Vegan After Trauma
- Chef AJ became vegetarian at 17 after a traumatic experience cutting salamander heads in vet school and vowed never to eat animals again.
- She remained vegan from 1977 despite later being overweight from refined vegan junk food.
Vegan Junk Food Addiction
- Chef AJ detailed decades of eating candies, cakes, cookies and ice cream despite being vegan, reaching ~200 pounds in her twenties.
- She later recognized this pattern as an addiction to refined foods like sugar and flour.
Hospitalized During Eating Disorder
- At 19 Chef AJ attempted suicide during a period of anorexia and bulimia and was hospitalized on a locked psychiatric ward.
- She describes the episode as a pivotal dark period she hadn't previously shared publicly.
Let's be clear: just because you're vegan doesn't mean you're healthy.
To be sure, for so many reasons, eating animal free is awesome. But it's not a wellness panacea. Oreo cookies and Lay's potato chips are vegan. Unless your diet is liberated from the growing abundance of refined and highly processed processed foods, you're prone to confront the same weight management issues and chronic lifestyle illnesses that plague the average consumer subsisting on the standard American diet.
Just ask Chef AJ. A vegan chef for almost 40 years, she nonetheless struggled mightily with obesity for decades — prisoner to an addiction to processed snacks, refined sugar desserts, and an array of vegan junk foods that left her not only chronically overweight, but seriously unwell.
AJ's salvation came only when she finally became willing to confront her unhealthy relationship with food as a true addiction. It's a journey that required her to completely let go of habits that no longer served her, accept help, and embrace an entirely new relationship with food in the form of a whole foods, plant-based lifestyle.
This is her story — an inspiring tale of triumph and personal transformation that will leave you rethinking your own habits. Enabled with the tools required to achieve and maintain your optimal body weight. And empowered to live your best life.
A former comedian, today Chef AJ is a renown plant-based chef, culinary instructor, public speaker and member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine with a certificate in Plant-Based Nutrition from Cornell University.
An expert in food addiction, emotional eating and creating meals to transform health, AJ is the host of the television series Healthy Living with Chef AJ and has appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman and more. In addition, she is author of Unprocessed: How to Achieve Vibrant Health and Your Ideal Weight*. Her latest book, The Secrets To Ultimate Weight Loss* comes out soon (release date TBA).
Full of life, AJ is one of my favorite health warriors, totally committed to serving others. Picking up where we left off in RRP #56 way back in 2013, this conversation is a must listen for anyone who struggles with food addiction, unhealthy cravings and a fluctuating waistline.
As impactful as it is entertaining, it's an exchange about the often under-addressed emotional aspects of eating. It's about the hows and whys behind empowering a new relationship with food. And it's about the joy, vitality and self-esteem that can be experienced by breaking the chains of food addiction.
I sincerely hope you enjoy this interaction as much as I enjoyed having it.
More importantly, my hope is that you put AJ's insights to work — because if she can do it, you can too.
A reminder that the podcast is also viewable on YouTube here: http://bit.ly/chefajrrp
Enjoy!
Rich