Amber Martin tried just about everything to lose weight: Keto, Atkins, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, prescription pills, a personal trainer, and eventually, a gastric sleeve procedure she paid for out of pocket. For nearly 30 years, she did everything right and still couldn’t get where she wanted to be.
Today, she’s 140 pounds—down from a high of 299—and working through what she calls the best chapter of her life. But the number on the scale isn’t the part of her story she most wants people to hear.
As a member of the Apex Skin team and a patient in the practice’s Total Body program, Amber has a front-row seat to what a complete transformation actually looks like. And she’s the first to say it’s about a lot more than the weight.
Thirty Years of Trying
Amber’s struggle with weight started after her first pregnancy. It was a gradual change at first, and then not so gradual. By the time her third child was born, she was over 250 pounds. What followed was a decade-long cycle that will sound familiar to a lot of people.
“I tried everything that came out,” she says. “And my personality is very ‘all or nothing’. If I’m on keto and you say 20 grams of carbs, I’m eating 20. Not 21. Not 22. I don’t have a cheat day.”
The results were always the same: lose a little in the beginning, stall, then sometimes gain the weight back. Every time it didn’t work, Amber blamed herself.
“There was no time during this whole cycle that I thought something was wrong with my body,” she shares. “It was me. I wasn’t doing enough. I didn’t try hard enough.”
She describes the mental exhaustion of those years as relentless. Not just the physical effort of dieting, but the constant focus on food, the self-recrimination, the cycle of starting over every Monday.
“I look back during those years and I don’t have a lot of pictures with my family because I didn’t want to be in them.”
The Gastric Sleeve and What Came After
In December 2019, Amber made a decision she’d been building toward for a long time. She paid out of pocket for a gastric sleeve procedure, knowing insurance wouldn’t cover it.
“This was probably the first time in my life I said ‘I deserve to invest in myself,’” she admits. “My family was always the priority. But this was finally going to be the tool.”
She lost 45 pounds, which for some people would be significant progress. But for Amber, who had watched friends lose 100 pounds in a year after the same procedure, it felt like another failure.
“How can I possibly not lose weight at this point? I can’t even eat more than a fistful of food.”
She fluctuated: five pounds up, ten pounds down, but never broke through. At her annual checkup, her doctor told her again what she’d been hearing for years: at this weight, health conditions were coming. She was heading toward pre-diabetes and she needed to do something different.
“I remember crying in the office. Asking myself, what else do I do?”
That’s when her doctor mentioned Ozempic.
The Turning Point: Tirzepatide
Amber didn’t jump in right away. She spent months researching, understanding compounding pharmacies, different medications, and how to find a reputable provider.
Finally in October 2023, she started on semaglutide at a med spa near her work, choosing it over tirzepatide because it was less expensive, and because she needed to convince herself again that investing in her health was worth it.
Semaglutide helped a little. She lost about 10 pounds in three months, but the experience at that practice was a stark contrast to the personalized care she was looking for. There were no conversations about her history, no guidance on what she could do differently, no sense that anyone saw her as more than a number on a scale.
She switched providers, switched medications, and started tirzepatide in January 2024. When she talks about what happened next, she feels emotional.
“Within a couple of weeks, things were changing in my body that I didn’t even know were possible.”
The thing that moved her most wasn’t the weight loss. It was the silence. “The food noise. I didn’t even know that was a thing. All of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about food all day. I would have to remind myself it was time to eat.”
For someone who had spent 30 years in a mental battle with food, identifying every meal either a victory or a failure, that quiet was revelatory. “It was the most empowering thing, even before the weight started falling off.”
The weight came off quickly after that and Amber went from 245 pounds to 140 pounds in about seven months. She went from a size 24 to a size 8. Her A1C dropped to 4.5, her cholesterol normalized and her energy came back.
But the shift she comes back to again and again isn’t any of that. It’s the moment she realized the struggle hadn’t been her fault.
“I finally felt empowered. I realized it wasn’t me,” she shares. “My body didn’t know what to do with food because I was insulin resistant. I wasn’t broken.”
What the Scale Didn’t Show
With 100 pounds gone, Amber expected to feel like herself, just smaller. What she didn’t anticipate was how losing the weight quickly would change her face. She had been so focused on the number going down, so accustomed to the same oversized clothes she’d worn through years of yo-yoing, that the changes snuck up on her. At first she chalked it up to aging. Then she started paying closer attention.
“I just felt like I looked like that little droopy dog from the cartoon.”
She had always told herself she would age gracefully with no injections and no fillers. But as she started noticing people who had done those treatments, she realized her biggest fear of looking fake or unlike herself wasn’t what she was seeing. She started with a wrinkle relaxer, convinced at first it would be a one-time thing. But when she looked back at photos, she knew it was something worth continuing.
When she was finally ready to sit down with Halei Stebbins and Nina Montgomery at Apex to talk about filler, she walked in with her hands up. “I don’t know what I need. I know I don’t like my under-eye bags. I know I don’t like what I see. But I don’t know what I need.”
What put her at ease was something she had already witnessed working alongside the team. “Nobody ever said ‘this is messed up on you, you need it changed,'” she says. “It was ‘you are beautiful as you are. If we could naturally enhance something, what would it be?’ And I think they really meant it.”
So she did something that hadn’t always come easily. She trusted the people in front of her to figure it out. The treatment addressed volume loss in her cheeks, jawline, chin, and marionette lines, alongside wrinkle relaxer.
When she saw the result, she thought: “Oh my gosh. I actually have structure to my face now. They knew what they were doing.”
Maintenance: The Chapter Nobody Talks About
Amber is transparent about the part of this journey that doesn’t get discussed enough: what comes after you reach your goal weight.
Recently she tried tapering off tirzepatide. The result was gaining 15 pounds. Now, she’s back on it and never looking back.
“I chose to be on it forever, and that’s okay.” For someone who spent decades internalizing every setback as a personal failure, that kind of peace with a long-term commitment is its own transformation. She frames it the way she would any chronic condition, not as a defeat, but as simply the reality of how her body works.
Day to day, her focus is protein and water, with strength training coming online as she works to preserve muscle mass. But what she keeps returning to is how different this feels from every previous attempt.
“I don’t have to think about it a lot now. It’s not that vicious cycle. It feels seamless.”
She’s also learned to trust fluctuations. For someone who spent decades terrified of the scale going up, that alone has been transformative.
What Apex Made Possible
Amber is an Apex employee, which means she came to this with more access and more context than most patients. But that familiarity is part of what makes her perspective valuable. She saw how the practice operated from the inside before she became a patient.
“I realized that everyone at Apex really cared,” she shares.
“Everybody needs to make revenue. It’s how companies stay in existence. But seeing from this end how they interact with patients, how they have conversations about what they want these programs to be… they don’t just want to bring in revenue. They want to see people feel better about themselves.”
What she values most about the Total Body program isn’t any single service. It’s the continuity. The ability to check in, ask questions, mention something that’s bothering her about the way something looks, and have someone who knows her full picture ready to respond.
“I have access to all of the providers. If I’m in for a regular checkup and I mention I don’t really like the way this is sitting, they’ve got advice to give me. Having a partner—that’s what I look at them as. It’s not me going it alone.”
For anyone who sees themselves in the earlier chapters of Amber’s story, she doesn’t want to oversell the path or undersell the struggle. She just wants them to hear what she wished someone had told her.
“Don’t internalize failure and just keep trying. Find a team to help you. We can’t do this on our own and realizing there are people out there who can help guide you to where you need to be. That’s everything.”
Amber’s story is one example of what the Apex Skin Total Body program can look like with weight management, aesthetic treatments, and the kind of ongoing support that makes the difference between a result and a transformation.
