Dr. Harita Raja has spent two decades helping women through some of the hardest moments of their lives. Postpartum. Infertility. Menopause. She built a thriving psychiatry practice in Bethesda, Maryland. She raised two kids. She knew, clinically, everything there was to know about the mind-body connection.
And then her 10-year-old son asked her what was going to happen when she wasn’t around anymore.
“I want to control the things I can control. I want to be around, and I want to be around in a healthy way for him.”
That was April 2025. Harita was 76.1kg. She’d never followed a structured plan in her life.
Nine months later, she was 59.7kg.
But the weight is the least interesting part of the story.
Start: 28 April 2025 - 76.1kg
Checkpoint: 20 January 2026 - 59.7kg
The Woman Who Knew Everything Except How to Help Herself
Harita is a women’s psychiatrist. She specialises in mental health through every stage of a woman’s life: pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, beyond. She has the certification to prescribe hormones. She runs workshops. She speaks at conferences. She is, by any measure, someone who understands what it means to take care of yourself.
She just wasn’t doing it.
“The system doesn’t really teach you how to take care of yourself while you’re taking care of others. You just show up. You work all those hours, sleep may be compromised, you may not be eating well, but you just show up and you take care of other people. That’s what you do.”
It was how she was trained. And as an Indian woman, it ran deeper than that. Sacrifice was the expectation. You eat last. You serve first. She’d had her first child, a daughter now 13, during her first year of medical school. She went back to work with an infection so severe her teeth were chattering. Septic. Fever of 104. She stayed at the clinic because she didn’t want to let anyone down.
A friend sent her to the hospital. She was admitted for four days.
“I think back to that because it’s a pivotal moment in which I realised I have to practise what I preach.”
And then life took over again. Her second child arrived. The practice grew. COVID hit and the weight started climbing. She knew it, but she also didn’t fully see it. There was a kind of body image distortion at work, she says. She looked in the mirror and saw herself roughly as she’d always been. It was only in photographs that she’d catch herself off guard.
“When I took pictures, I’d be like, who is that?”
She looked up South Asian women’s health data. What she found didn’t comfort her. Higher rates of visceral fat. Higher cardiac risk. Higher diabetes risk. The fat you can’t see is often the most dangerous kind, and South Asian women carry a disproportionate amount of it.
She’d told patients this for years. Now she had to hear it about herself.
The Conversation That Changed Everything
The moment that moved her wasn’t a scan or a diagnosis. It was her son.
He was 10. He’d been having thoughts about the future, about loss, about what happens when the people you love aren’t there anymore. They talked about it honestly, the way Harita and her husband tried to talk about everything. But something in that conversation settled differently for her.
“I thought to myself, if not now, when?”
She’d actually booked a call with RNT two years earlier, in May 2022. Cancelled it. Booked another in January 2023. Didn’t follow through. The reason, she says, was fear of failure.
“If I do this and I don’t get the results, what does that say about me? I didn’t want to know.”
She’d made other attempts over the years. Not formal diets exactly, more like intentions. Eating more edamame for a few days. Switching to oatmeal for a week. One structured programme that ran for a few months, where she lost some weight and then gained it back. Her husband had quietly filed all of this under “phases.”
But after that conversation with her son, something had shifted. She spoke to a close friend who was already working with a coach. She weighed up GLP-1 medication against committing to a full programme with nutrition, training, and accountability.
She chose RNT.
“I gave myself six months. If I don’t see any benefit, I will think about medication. And I made the call and signed up that day.”
Having a Plan for the First Time
In the first few days, Harita thought it wasn’t possible.
The portions were different. The foods were unfamiliar. She’d spent years thinking she ate healthily. Whole milk three times a day because it was good for her. Fruit yogurt as a virtuous snack. All of it adding up in ways she hadn’t tracked. She knew she had gaps in her nutrition knowledge. She just didn’t know how big they were.
“I’m a physician, but I really had no idea where to start this journey for myself in a healthy way.”
What changed the equation wasn’t discipline. It was the plan itself.
Within two to three weeks, the food noise that had followed her around for years dropped by roughly 80%. The constant low-level hum of what am I going to eat, what should I be eating, what can I have. Gone. She describes it in the same terms patients on GLP-1 medication use when they talk about appetite suppression, except she’d found it through structure alone.
“Even now, if you’re like, what are you having for dinner? I already know. I’m not thinking about it. I’m not wondering. It’s a plan.”
She didn’t abandon Indian food. She’d made that clear from the start. Chapati, dal, subzi. Indian food for dinner, every night. She worked tofu for lunch. Oats with protein powder in the mornings. She didn’t need to overhaul her household. She needed to fit the plan around her life, not the other way around.
Before she started, she had conversations she hadn’t expected to have. With her husband. Her mum. Her siblings. Not to ask permission. She was telling them what she was doing and why, and asking for their support.
Her mum, whose love language is food, came over and made her tofu.
“She reported back to my siblings saying, ‘Harita eats a lot. Don’t worry about her.’”
By the time Harita visited her brother and sister, her food was already in their fridges. Her siblings had prepared everything without being asked.
The support she built at the beginning meant she never had to isolate. She brought her food to friends’ houses. Some of her friends stopped drinking because she wasn’t drinking. A few of them joined RNT.
The Messy Middle and What Held
It wasn’t linear.
There were weeks she got too comfortable. Weeks she reached for flexibility before she’d earned it, trying to go out and just wing it, and finding that didn’t work the way planning did. There was a period where getting too close to her goal made her ease off. The adrenaline of the early phase had worn off, and the real work of showing up anyway had begun.
She leaned on her coach, Oliver, heavily.
“I don’t even think he knows how much he’s impacted me. The accountability and the support he’s given me is bar none. He’s not always just saying ‘good job’. It’s constructive. That’s what I pay for.”
When the scale went up on a given day, Oliver told her to look at the weekly average. That one shift in framing stopped her from sabotaging the rest of the week more times than she can count.
Her husband, who had initially watched with gentle scepticism, who’d told her this might be another phase, started to notice. He couldn’t find words for it. He just looked at her and went quiet.
Then she booked a photoshoot.
It started as headshots for her fortieth birthday. She’d never done a photoshoot in her life. But as the date got closer, she thought: if I’m doing headshots anyway, I might as well do this properly. She booked the full shoot. A friend gifted her a family photoshoot on top of it.
When she saw the photos, she wasn’t thinking about how she looked.
“I was like, I’m proud of myself to get to this stage. Knowing the hard work that went into it. Knowing it wasn’t linear.”
Eight weeks in, she wrote this:
76.1kg to 59.7kg and What the Numbers Don’t Capture
16.4kg lost. Back to her college weight. Into post-fat-loss now, building strength, adding a fourth gym session.
The physical result is real. But Harita is a psychiatrist. She knows how to name what’s actually happened.
“I just feel like I don’t have to prove who I am anymore. I show up exactly as I am, and I feel really, really good about that.”
The comparison she’d carried since childhood, against her petite mother, her beautiful sister, the other girls at school, has quieted. Not completely. But enough. She walks into rooms differently. Extended family at her cousin’s fortieth birthday noticed. Professional peers noticed. She became, in her own words, more interesting to people. Not because she was doing more, but because she was showing up differently.
Her Rani Collective, the South Asian women’s group she’d been running for three and a half years, has grown in ways she hadn’t managed before. She held her first women’s circle: a 90-minute experiential workshop on self-worth, postpartum depression, intergenerational trauma, and boundaries. She led it herself, at her house, in person. It filled. Then she ran it again on boundaries. It filled again.
She’s in the process of launching a nonprofit focused on South Asian women’s health. You can follow her work at@drharitaraja.
The things she’d always wanted to do. The platforms she’d always wanted to build. They were always there. She just hadn’t trusted herself enough to step into them.
“As I’ve gone through this, I trust myself. I didn’t trust myself before. I’d said a lot of things and hadn’t been able to do them. Now if I tell you I’m going to do something, I can guarantee it’ll happen.”
The physical was the vehicle. The destination was always this.
Listen to Harita’s full story on RNT Fitness Radio: Ep 490 - Hall of Fame | Dr Harita Raja: No GLP-1s Required: A Transformation They Can’t Believe
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