Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep # 154 Reversing The Weight Loss Script
A surgery date on the calendar. A lifetime of diets that never stuck. And then a small, defiant experiment: two weeks of low carb that changed everything. Amy joins us to share how she lost 220 pounds, reversed worrying lab markers, and rebuilt her life with a science-first, patient-centered approach that challenged decades of advice.
We dig into the mechanics of metabolic health—why constant hunger and cravings sabotage willpower, how a ketogenic or low-carb pattern can quiet the noise, and what happens when lab results and lived experience don’t fit a familiar script. Amy talks candidly about canceling bariatric surgery, finding a physician who actually listened, and discovering that sustainable weight loss is less about punishment and more about alignment between biology, habits, and support.
We also walk through the Toward Health model: direct primary care, intensive medical weight loss, and programs designed to deprescribe when possible—without leaving patients on their own. You’ll hear how continuous glucose monitors, real-time messaging, and thoughtful adjustments make adherence easier. We unpack heart health screenings that reveal risk beyond standard cholesterol panels and explain why so many heart attacks occur in people without high cholesterol. Plus, we address hormone therapy for men and women, rejecting gaslighting and focusing on symptom-driven, evidence-based care.
If you’re tired of “eat less, move more” and ready for a plan that respects your reality, this conversation offers tools, context, and a path forward—whether you’re local or remote. Subscribe for more stories that put people first, share this with someone who needs a hopeful nudge, and leave a review to help others find the show.
Toward Health
Amy Eiges
Senior Vice President, Corporate Wellness
toward.health
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and voters come together. Here's your host, Doug Drohan.
Doug Drohan:Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast. I am your host, Doug Drohan. I'm the owner of the Bergen Neighbors Media Group. And today we are joined by Amy Igis. Amy is a coach work. Well, we're going to get into a coach. She's not a basketball coach or uh or softball coach. Well, we're going to get into that, but Amy works with Toward Health. I'm excuse my uh my voice here. I have a bit of a cold, but yeah, we could talk about that. Um Amy is gonna share with her with us her incredible journey of going through um what she calls a hopelessly broken system, uh, I guess in the medical field of trying to uh feel better and lose weight. So uh Amy, welcome to the show.
Amy Eiges:Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Doug Drohan:Oh yeah, um thanks for joining on a cold and wintry day um here in northern New Jersey and Rockland County and New York. And uh you're joining us from New York City today. And I know you guys got some snow as well. We probably got a little bit more than you. We got about six inches.
Amy Eiges:I think so.
Doug Drohan:Yeah. So tell us a little bit about you know um this journey that I that I kind of alluded to.
Amy Eiges:Sure, sure. So I I work with Toward Health. I am uh health coach, I'm also a senior vice president of corporate wellness, which means is a fancy way of saying that I work with companies to bring health to their employees in a way that is affordable and you know helps people reclaim their lives and helps the companies save money. Um, but before that, I was a uh a patient at Toured Health. It was it was called Dr. Tro's medical weight loss at that point, but I was a patient and I would come up from Manhattan every week. Um, this is before we did, you know, we we do a lot of of appointments now virtually, almost, you know, it could be exclusively virtually if you want, but if you're local, you can come in. And um, yeah, so I was, I should back up a little bit and just say, you know, for most of my adult life, uh I was morbidly obese uh at points over 400 pounds. And I woke up every day thinking, what am I gonna do today to lose weight? Um I it was not for lack of trying, I just could not figure out how to do this. Uh and I went, you know, my parents took me to every expert, you know, I went to took myself to every expert. And it wasn't until I discovered um a different way of doing things, basically through um what I learned from Dr. Trow and Toward Health, uh, that I was actually able to really reclaim my health and go on to lose and keep off, most importantly, keep off over 200 pounds. Um and so now I uh I work with the practice. Again, I work both as a health coach and I work with a companies to help them uh bring health to their employees. Um I've just really changed my life and my career to help spread the word that um that change is possible, that weight loss is possible. Because I really didn't believe it was until it was.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, you know, I used to be a personal trainer and it was always calories in, calories out. You might always wait, just burn more than you intake. You know, it's that simple. Um and I have to say, you know, I was I was a typical um trainer in that I would get annoyed with my clients who didn't do what I told them, or you know, I worked with them once or twice a week and then they complained they weren't losing weight or whatever. And I'm like, well, what are you doing? You know, how what are you eating? You know, it's um and I don't think there was any way we could ever work out enough. Um, first of all, you unless you're gonna hire a trainer five days a week, which is pretty expensive and unrealistic to think you're gonna work out five days a week. Um it's really not sustainable, you know, those biggest loser shows. I know there's been a lot of press recently about you know people that lost a lot of weight for the show but then gained it all back or and the incredible toll it took on their health. Yeah. Um, so what is, you know, what was the moment where you thought, okay, I've tried you know the Weight Watchers and all these things. Like what what did you do to help you lose 170 pounds?
Amy Eiges:Yeah, so uh no, two uh 220 pounds.
Doug Drohan:Oh, 220 pounds. Yeah.
Amy Eiges:Um so I was didn't think it was the right decision for me, but I was about to have bariatric surgery because I just thought I I was so desperate, you know. And I but I knew in my heart of hearts that it was not gonna, that wasn't gonna be the right answer for me. And I just did a random Google search and I came across a low carb diet. And you know, I grew up in the generation that was told, you know, don't eat, you know, eat like as little fat as possible. Um, you know, just uh um just that was the only thing to worry about is calories and fat, right? Just don't eat fat. And I started to look a little bit more at at low carb. And you know, again, I had never tried it because I was told that you know it was the worst way to do it, and it was, you know, Atkins was a a kook and you'll have a heart attack from eating all that um that steak. And and um, but I looked at it because I was desperate to avoid the surgery that I knew was the raw, the worst possible call for me. Uh, and I thought, all right, I had two weeks before I was gonna go to the surgeon, and I um I just gave it a try. I did it for two weeks, and I certainly didn't lose 220 pounds in that first two weeks, but I I could feel a shift in what it felt different to me than any other quote unquote diet that I had tried. And I could feel that it was different, and I lost so much inflammation in those first couple of weeks, and I and my cravings were down and my hunger was down in a way that I had never experienced. I think I calculated I had joined Weight Watchers over 35, 40 times in my lifetime. And I could tell in that two weeks that this was different than anything that I had tried before. Um, and then you know, I went on to just I canceled the surgery, I went on to, you know, I kept going. I just kept going.
Doug Drohan:And how many years ago was this?
Amy Eiges:Uh that was in 2017.
Doug Drohan:Wow, okay.
Amy Eiges:That was the early seven 20. Uh yeah. Well, yeah, it was early 2017.
Doug Drohan:And then through that experience, you decided to then um, you know, become a uh a health coach and then or were you already like what was your your uh career before that?
Amy Eiges:Yeah, no, no, I worked in the Garmin Center in uh in New York for many years. Um I had my own business for many years, and then um I went on to become a patient at Toward Health because I just eventually I needed to go to a doctor and I didn't want to get lectured. You know, I didn't want my doctor to sort of lecture me about you know the evils of low carb when I had you know reversed my A1C from pre-diabetic range to normal range. I had like every one of my health markers improved, and then I would go to my regular doctor and they'd say, Oh, you know, that that diet's gonna kill you. That's a direct quote, right? I was like, well, I've lost 200 pounds. Like that, you know, that how what is gonna kill me here, you know?
Speaker 2:Right, right.
Amy Eiges:Um, and so I I found a doctor who, you know, is local to uh Blauveld and Bergen County where um, you know, that that had himself lost 150 pounds through low carb and understood the nuances in cholesterol, where a statin is effective and where it's not, and wasn't gonna lecture me about you know eating meat and um you know, and and really understood metabolic health in a way that honestly most most doctors really just don't.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, yeah.
Amy Eiges:And understood nutrition too.
Doug Drohan:Right, right, yeah. So was it hard going on a on a keto, like low carb keto? And keto just means more protein. Is that what a keto lifestyle is?
Amy Eiges:Keto means basically eating in a way that your body uh efficiently burns fat for fuel. So it means eating low enough carbs that your body creates something called ketones to burn the food that you're eating versus um I to create energy for your body from the food you eat from ketones versus sugar.
Speaker 2:Right.
Amy Eiges:So it just means a very low carb diet. Um, and was it hard? Um, it was the easiest way that I have of the thousands of millions of ways that I've tried to lose weight. It was it easy every day? Absolutely not. And I still struggle, but it was certainly easier to do than you know the millions of times that I tried Weight Watchers or calorie count or all the other things, right? Um easier, I should say, but not you know, it's I still, you know, I had to lose 200 pounds. That was hard. Yeah, but it's easier.
Doug Drohan:But you know what it gives you now as a corporate, you know, corporate health um, you know, advisor, I guess you could say, it gives you that kind of um, you know, the credentials to say, hey, you know, I'm not just saying this. Like I think when I was a personal trainer, it was easy for me to say move more, eat less, calories in, calories out, you know, a pound of uh fat is X amount of calories and and all this because I was always fit and I never had a weight problem. So it was easy for me to say it. Um, and now that I'm older and it's not as easy, I I get it, you know. But um, you know, but when you are in that field, that's what you're taught. You know, you take nutrition classes, you take, you know, this, that, and the other thing. And I was not a doctor by any means, but um, you know, say, hey, this is what works for me, you know, and then that's how you get hired too. People look at you and say, Oh, yeah, this guy must know what he's doing. Meanwhile, most of it is just luck, you know.
Amy Eiges:Well, they yeah, you're absolutely right. And you know, nobody really questions, well, you know, when when a diet doesn't work, right? When when it's when we have difficulty adhering to a program, nobody ever says the system is flawed, nobody ever tells their doctor, oh, you don't know what you're talking about. We always internalize that. The patient, the the client in your case, internalizes that failure, quote unquote failure, and says, Oh, this is all my fault. And and you're absolutely right. Like the fact that I have lost and kept off this weight, the fact that Tro, Dr. Tro has kept off 150 pounds, himself a doctor, like educated, you know, highly educated, surrounded by the best and the brightest doctors. He worked, he was chief resident in the Yale system in Greenwich Hospital. And, you know, he himself couldn't figure out why he couldn't figure it out. And then so it does give us street cred, but it also um, you know, no, it it helps people to say, like, you know, uh, you know, what I was saying before, is like, you know, you internalize that failure and you're like, oh, this is my fault. And nobody ever questions the system in which we all buy into, which is that maybe doctors, most doctors don't know everything. And maybe, you know, the patient does know something about their own experience. And that's, I think, what Toward Health does so incredibly effectively is like, you know, when a patient comes to the practice with a long list of questions, um, the doctors love it. They love it, they love to like dig down every, go down every rabbit hole, look at every study, you know, kind of really troubleshoot what the patient brings to the table, not just what they are, the dogma they were taught in medical school. And I think that is it's so hard to find out there. It really is.
Doug Drohan:So why don't we talk a little bit more about, you know, toward health and Dr. Tro, you know, his previous name of his company, going from just weight loss um and now being more toward, you know, overall health.
Amy Eiges:Yeah.
Doug Drohan:Um, so tell me a little bit more about the practice.
Amy Eiges:Sure. Well, the practice is local in Blauveld, and um, but we also meet with people remotely if they um if that's preferred, because you know, certainly this time of year it's cold and wintry, and you know, sometimes people don't want to leave their cozy houses or offices. And um, so we are a medical practice. We have a direct primary care program, we have an intensive medical weight loss program, we have a GLP off-ramp program for those who want to transition off of medications. Um, it is a fully licensed medical practice in nearly 50 states. Um, we also are offering a couple of new things now. Uh in the new year, we'll be doing heart health screenings um that are really incredibly valuable and really being done at um at a you know kind of very, very low rate. So you you can go for labs and you can go for labs remotely. You can go for a heart health screen, which is literally like a 10-minute non-invasive screen, and it tells you uh exactly what is going on on your um on your coronary arteries. Um, you know, 80% of people that um have heart attacks don't even know that they have heart disease. Um, and I'm sorry, 80% of people with heart attacks, it happened in people without high cholesterol, right? And and we're always told, you know, cholesterol is the big, bad evil. And so, you know, these scans are incredibly affordable and incredibly helpful. Um, and so you know, we have a number of programs, a number of ways to to kind of support people. Our flagship program is our medical weight loss and metabolic health program, which is reversing type 2 diabetes, reversing obesity, reversing um cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure, and helping people as much as possible get off of medications. It is a medical program. So if medications are needed, they are prescribed. Um, but it's consolidating medications, avoiding eliminate or eliminating unnecessary ones. And so um, yeah, we are we walk the walk and we talk the talk.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, yeah. So um there's also um so you you touched on medical weight loss, you touched on heart scans and labs. Um, you know, one of the things that seems to be uh gaining popularity is hormone therapy. Call it hormone replacement therapy that I think was mostly relegated towards women. But I think there's a growing um, I'm gonna say, market for home hormone replacement therapy for men. And I guess when you think about hormones for men, you mostly think about testosterone. Obviously, there's a lot of commercials out there talking about low tea and things like that. But um, you know, can you touch uh a little bit, talk a bit on your hormone replacement therapy uh part of the practice?
Amy Eiges:Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, it's very difficult with hormone replacement to get um to get a an opinion that you trust, right? Most people will tell you, oh, that's not FDA approved, or that, you know, it's that's not that's not advised, and and really kind of don't understand the nuances of that and just incredibly uh how important that can be and how sort of detrimental it can be to your day-to-day quality of life. Um, and you know, I know certainly for myself as a woman, it was difficult to get any doctor, any two doctors or medical professionals to agree, right? Everybody said, don't do that, that's crazy, or you're, you know, you'll you'll be fine, or you're and and you know, you get gaslit by doctors very often for telling them how you feel. And you are never gonna get that from us, right? You're our doctors are trained in hormones and in um both men and women's hormones, and you're never gonna get gaslit. You're never gonna be told your symptoms are just all in your head, or just you know, white knuckle it and suffer through it. Um there's no, you know, our our doctors will go down every rabbit hole and we'll kind of experiment with you in real time if that's what you want. Try this if you are stuff struggling with this, try this and you know, text me at X time to tell me how you're feeling. Like you get actual like day-to-day support. Um, it's really what medicine I think was meant to be and what maybe was at some point when house calls were, you know, more the norm than now. And and you get actual, you can text our office and our doctors in real time. Uh and it's incredibly, and sometimes, you know, with certainly with hormones and and with some medications, like, you know, for type 2 diabetes or for high blood pressure, your medication does have to be managed in real time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Amy Eiges:And you know, calling on answering service and leaving a message till you know 10 o'clock the next morning when the front desk gets in is not gonna work. And that's not what you're gonna get with us.
Doug Drohan:That's great. That's great. And then on on top of that, there are some different programs. I guess. I mean, what you have a boot camp and you have like what is that? I mean, is there actually a a um a fitness boot camp or what is that?
Amy Eiges:No, it's so there's two the boot camp is really our January sort of get get restarted program. It's um, you know, obviously January comes and the gyms are filled and everybody's big. And and so our whole focus is is sustainability. So we want this is an eight-week program. The boot camp is an eight-week program. It's basically a small group where you have one-on-one coaching with um, you get a one-on-one coaching appointment with your uh boot camp leader. You also get this eight group meetings uh over the course of eight weeks. It's basically like, you know, you know how those gyms are are packed the first week of January, and then by the mid by first week of February, it's they're empty again. We want we this is like an eight-week program to make sure that it you build this these habits and build this lifestyle back into your into your daily routine. And so that you know, come March 1st, you're still very much in it. Um, it includes a continuous glucose monitor, it includes access to the Toured Health app. It includes, you know, a message board, private message board for the group where you can kind of get all the support from your peers. You know, it's it's kind of swimming up, you know, we're all swimming upstream.
Speaker 2:Right.
Amy Eiges:In trying to reclaim our health. And this is a way to like swim upstream with a group of like-minded people.
Doug Drohan:Uh and it really shows how serious you are about making changes. Like if you're not willing to do something that's somewhat has an accountability factor to it, then you know, it's like saying, Yeah, I'm gonna lose weight this year and then go to the gym for three weeks and then you fall off, or I'm on a diet. You know, how many people say, Yeah, I'm starting my diet next week, start my diet after the holidays, because you know, during the holidays it's too hard.
Amy Eiges:Um well, it's a way of um it's a way of, you know, when people say they could they start, you know, January, December 31st, we're all making our list of New Year's resolutions and all the things that we're gonna change this year, and that's all well and good, and you know, but the the thing is what that list doesn't tell you is how you're gonna do it. How am I gonna lose weight this year? How am I gonna quit smoking this year? How am I gonna exercise this year? And that boot camp that we start, you know, one starts January 5th, one starts uh the 8th, I believe, uh whatever that Thursday is. Yeah, I think it's the eighth. Uh, you know, that that those boot camps are the are how you're gonna do it. You're gonna start to build habits, you're gonna make them sustainable, you're gonna not kind of you know hit the ground, kind of you know, killing it, and then you crash and burn by the Second week of the new year, you know. So this is how you're going to sustain it past the first couple of weeks.
Doug Drohan:Right. So how do people contact you? How do they reach you or or toward health to book something like this?
Amy Eiges:So our website is toward.health, t-o-w-ar-r-d.health. Um, anything, any of the programs that I talked about, you can um you can find them there. You can come into the office. Again, we're in Blauveld, or you can meet remotely with any one of our um our members. Um you can um, yeah, we have an app that's free to download, uh, lots of free resources on there. You can find that through Toward.health as well. Um, and yeah, we're we're happy to help in any way.
Doug Drohan:That's great. It's great. And for those that don't know, Blau Velt is just over the border from Bergen County. It's a couple miles up the road from Northvale and Harrington Park. So it's pretty convenient.
Amy Eiges:Yeah, it's about I think six minutes from six minutes you know border of North Vale. Yeah.
Doug Drohan:Right. And if you're doing it virtually, then there's no then just go to your computer. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is great, Amy. I really appreciate you uh sharing with us, sharing your story. Um it's inspiring, you know. I mean, it's uh a struggle that you know a large number of Americans and other people go through.
Amy Eiges:And it's there is a just just if I could just put a fine uh you know a point on it. You know, people, especially people that have type 2 diabetes, they think, oh, I'm just gonna have to have more and more medications and more and more. And that's just normal. People consider that normal. And um it's it doesn't have to be.
Doug Drohan:So yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great.
Amy Eiges:Thank you so much.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, thank you. We're just gonna have Chuck take us out, and you and I will be right back.
unknown:Okay.
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