About Marina

After vertical sleeve gastrectomy in 2015, Marina James went from 289 pounds to 146 pounds in one year.

“I lost half of me. But that is where I started to find myself.”

What followed became much more than a weight-loss journey. Marina went on to build a career in psychology and behavioral health, become a Board-Certified Bariatric Counselor, and make long-term bariatric success the focus of her doctoral research.

Today, she brings together lived experience, professional expertise, and research through Bariatric Success, with a bigger purpose in mind: helping people make weight loss part of a larger life, rather than making weight loss the rest of their life.

I grew up in the former Soviet Union, where the world around me at times felt very gray.

I had one magazine from another country filled with beautiful places, colors, foods, and things I had never seen before. I remember looking at those pages and wondering what else was out there.

I wanted to see it. Taste it. Experience it.

When my family immigrated to America, I was 15 years old, and suddenly that bigger world was all around me.

And what a world it was.

I still remember discovering all the delicious foods that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. I did not even know what a calorie was.

I started gaining weight, slowly at first, and then life happened.

I got married. I became a mother. In my 20s, I gave birth to five children and eventually spent close to two decades homeschooling. We fostered teenagers and later adopted four teens from Ukraine. I founded Marina's Kids, a nonprofit created to help children and young people who needed support, opportunities, and someone in their corner. My life also included work with orphans and adoptive families, refugee resettlement, humanitarian work, and mission trips to Ukraine.

Taking care of people has always come naturally to me.

Learning how to take care of myself took much longer.

My weight continued to climb. I tried diet after diet. I lost weight, regained it, and tried again.

Then, in 2015, someone took a picture of me with my one-year-old grandson.

When I looked at myself next to that small child, I could hardly believe the woman in the picture was me.

I weighed 289 pounds.

And I decided: never again. Never again would I be this heavy, with so little energy and feeling like my health was slipping away from me.

In December 2015, I had vertical sleeve gastrectomy (VSG). In one year, I went from 289 pounds to 146, losing 100% of my excess body weight!

I lost half of me. But that is where I started to find myself.

With the weight loss came energy, freedom, and possibilities I hadn't experienced in years.

And something I hadn't expected: depression.

I didn't quite know what to do with myself now. So much of who I had been was changing. Losing the weight had changed my body dramatically, but it didn't automatically tell me who I was going to become or how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

At 20, I had become a college dropout. More than two decades later, at 42, I went back.

Education became part of my transformation too.

I earned my bachelor's degree in psychology from Regent University and then my Master of Science in Psychology from Capella University. I became a behavioral health therapist, built my own private practice, and continued my education in General Psychology at Grand Canyon University, where my doctoral research eventually focused on long-term bariatric success.

At the same time, I was learning how to care for myself while still caring for many others.

I didn't do it by becoming perfect.

I learned by living. By trying things. By paying attention to what worked and what didn't. By changing when something stopped working. By learning to understand myself differently and eventually building a different relationship with food, my body, my health, my family, and my life.

And somewhere along the way, one question became increasingly important to me:

What makes some people successful long after bariatric surgery?

Not simply successful at losing weight. Bariatric surgery can be an incredibly powerful tool for that.

I wanted to understand the people who had maintained significant weight loss for years. How did they live? What did they learn? What changed? What did they do when life changed around them?

So I made long-term bariatric success the focus of my doctoral research.

I studied people who were at least five years beyond bariatric surgery and had successfully maintained the majority of their weight loss for years. What I learned reinforced something my own life had already been teaching me: long-term success isn't built through one perfect plan.

People learn. They adapt. They develop skills. They understand themselves differently. And over time, what once required tremendous effort can become part of how they live.

Along the way, I became a Board-Certified Bariatric Counselor through the American Association of Bariatric Counselors (AABC). Today, I also serve on AABC's Academic Committee, where I help update its professional certification courses.

And that is how Bariatric Success came to be.

It grew from the intersection of my own bariatric journey, psychology, behavioral health, coaching, research, education, motherhood, and a lifetime of caring for others.

But underneath all of that is something even more important to me.

I don't want weight loss to become the rest of your life. I want it to help you live more of your life.

Maybe that goes all the way back to that girl looking at magazines in the Soviet Union and wondering what else was out there.

There is a big world to experience. There are places to go, people to love, things to learn, careers to build, adventures to have, relationships to deepen, and possibilities you may not even be able to imagine yet.

Your healthy weight matters.

But ultimately, I believe it matters because of what it can make possible.

When I look back, my own life certainly hasn't followed a straight line. I've immigrated to a new country, raised a large family, homeschooled, fostered and adopted, built a nonprofit, returned to school in my 40s, changed careers, lost half of my body weight, found parts of myself I didn't know were there, rebuilt parts of my life, and started over more than once.

Maybe that's why I don't believe very much in perfect plans.

I believe in learning.

I believe in adapting.

I believe we can change at almost any stage of life.

And I believe that sometimes learning to take care of yourself is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you've spent much of your life taking care of everyone else.

I'm still learning too.

And if there is one thing my own journey, my work, and my research have taught me, it is this:

Where you are today does not have to determine where you go from here.