Dr. Ramani isn’t just peddling her wares based on a stack of textbooks and years of education. She lives her message and draws from 20 years of scientific, clinical, and teaching experience. Married for 12 years, raised in a culturally conservative and traditional family, she lived the gospel of duty, expectations and rules, and rarely honored her inner voice. As a result, Dr. Ramani was obese and unhappy. She counseled patients, but she’d never quite figured it all out herself. She was tenured, but felt her academic career was floundering. She wasn’t dancing to her own music.
Today, aside from being 85 pounds lighter and svelte, she’s on top of the world. She’s a reality show maven, a sought after news expert on all things popular culture and mental health. She’s teamed up to blog for Dr. Oz and has appeared on his show discussing food addiction. She writes for WebMD and ShareCare as well. The websites on which she is featured have over 100 million hits per month. Her expertise has been tapped by a long list of national print, online, cable, and broadcast media. She’s appeared in two reality TV shows as well and is currently shooting a pilot of her own for Oxygen. TV loves Dr. Ramani because she avoids the jargon, speaks from the heart and from experience, and resonates with everyone watching.
She has counseled her patients out of hundreds and hundreds of pounds of excess weight. Most of them go to see her to lose weight and end up, after a very short time, realizing, they are there to fix something else—the food and weight is just the portal. What started as a consultation about weight loss becomes a journey into finding love, changing careers, living dreams, and being authentic.
The American Association of University Women awarded Dr. Ramani the Emerging Scholar Award in 2002. It’s given to one woman, nationwide, across all fields annually to recognize one of the most promising young female scholars in the country. California State University of Los Angeles awarded her the Outstanding Woman Award in 2003. Dr. Ramani is also part of the governance of the American Psychological Association, recently completing a term as Chair of the Committee on Psychology and AIDS, and currently a member of the Committee on Women and Psychology. Through her work on this committee she is informing policy on critical issues such as the sexualization of women and girls, and human trafficking.