Dolly Martinez, who appeared on Season 10 of TLC’s My 600-lb Life and shared some of the most raw and difficult television moments the show had seen in years, has died at age 30.
Her sister Lindsey Cooper announced the news on Facebook on Saturday, April 12, National Siblings Day, the day after she had posted that Dolly was hospitalized and fighting for her life.
No cause of death has been made public.
“It is with a heavy heart that I share the passing of my beautiful sister, Dolly,” Cooper wrote. She continued:
“Dolly had the brightest personality she could light up any room with her laughter, her kindness, and her loving spirit. She had a way of making everyone feel special, and her warmth will stay with us forever. While our hearts are broken here, I find comfort in knowing she is now reunited with our dad in heaven. I can only imagine the joy of that reunion. Rest peacefully, Dolly. You will always be loved, always be missed, and never forgotten.”
The day before the announcement, Cooper had written:
“Today is national siblings day and it for sure was a hard one. I haven’t made any post or let many people know but my sister Dolly is in the hospital and is fighting for her life. At this time I ask for prayers and privacy as we as a family navigate through this hard time.”
She was 25 years old when her episode aired. She was 30 when she died.
The five years in between were not a story with a clean ending, and nobody who watched her episode would pretend otherwise.
Who Was Dolly Martinez?
Dolly Martinez was from Fort Worth, Texas. She came to the attention of My 600-lb Life’s producers through the kind of circumstances that the show has made familiar over its more than a decade on the air, a life shaped by trauma.
Martinez had an eating disorder that had grown from a coping mechanism into a medical emergency, and a family situation complicated enough that a one-hour summary could barely scratch the surface.
She had been heavy since childhood. By age 7, she weighed 120 pounds. By the time she was 25 and arrived at Dr. Now’s Houston office for the first time, she weighed 593.2 pounds.
She wore supplemental oxygen as a nasal cannula during her waking hours and slept with a CPAP machine. She had congestive heart failure.
She had a large lymphedema mass on her stomach. She could barely walk and could not stand for extended periods. Her mother, Staci, was her primary caregiver and helped her with basic daily tasks.
One of the most memorable things about Dolly’s episode was how clearly and honestly she explained what food meant to her. She did not dress it up.
She did not pretend she was struggling with something she didn’t understand.
“The only thing powerful enough to distract me from darker thoughts is food,” she said on the show. “Food is my go-to drug that takes my pain away. Food is more than just a pleasure. It’s my reason for existing.”
That kind of directness was Dolly. Whether it was working in her favor or against her, she was rarely unclear about what was happening.
What Did Martinez’s Episode Show?
Season 10, Episode 12 of My 600-lb Life, titled “Dolly’s Journey,” aired in January 2022 and quickly became one of the more talked-about episodes of the season.
A viewer on Reddit later described it as feeling like “five years of drama in two hours.” That is not an exaggeration.
The episode documented approximately 10 months of Dolly’s attempt to qualify for bariatric surgery under Dr. Now’s program.
What viewers saw was a woman fighting a battle on multiple fronts simultaneously, her weight, her mental health, her relationships, her housing, and the absence of her daughter, while trying to demonstrate the stability that the surgery required.
Her relationship with her husband Ricky was one of the episode’s most difficult threads. He was described as abusive, and her mother Staci said he had told her directly that he wanted to feed Dolly fried food and watch her get bigger.
Staci described him as having taken “complete advantage” of her daughter and “killed her soul and spirit.”
During filming, Dolly left the abusive relationship, then returned to it, then left again after the abuse continued. She eventually moved into a homeless shelter.
Her daughter Trinity had been removed by Child Protective Services when she was only six days old, as Dolly and Ricky were unable to care for her.
A year later, a court awarded Staci permanent custody of Trinity. That loss, the separation from her daughter almost from birth, sat at the center of much of what Dolly was carrying.
At the homeless shelter, she met a man named Philip. They got engaged after approximately six weeks.
They continued living in a hotel, technically homeless, together. Dr. Now’s view of this development was direct: he called her self-destructive and said she was choosing dysfunction so she could continue overeating.
Her weigh-ins through the episode told the story of someone who made some progress but not enough. She started at 593 pounds.
By month four she had lost 30 pounds. By month six, still 30 pounds — no progress in two months. Dr. Now had asked for 50 pounds lost before he would consider her for surgery.
At month ten, the final weigh-in of her episode, she reached 552 pounds, a total loss of 40 pounds across nearly a year.
Forty pounds is not nothing. For someone with congestive heart failure who was on supplemental oxygen, losing 40 pounds represents genuine physical effort.
It was not enough. Dr. Now denied the surgery. His reasoning was twofold. The weight loss was insufficient, and her living situation, homeless, recently engaged to someone she barely knew, was too unstable to safely proceed with a major surgical intervention.
He told her she needed continued therapy, more weight loss, and demonstrated stability before he would reconsider.
She ended her episode at 552 pounds, without surgery approval, engaged to a near-stranger, estranged from her mother, and separated from her daughter.
What Happened After The Show?
After filming concluded, Dolly made a decision that showed she was still trying.
She moved to Houston, the city where Dr. Now’s practice is located, to be closer to the surgeon and to the program. She appeared on social media intermittently and gave her followers updates.
Her Instagram bio identified her by name as the person from My 600-lb Life. She told fans she was no longer homeless, which was a genuine step forward from where the show had left her.
She seemed to be rebuilding her relationship with her mother, whose home and whose custody of Trinity remained central to the family’s story. She wrote about growing closer to her daughter.
The updates were not always encouraging in terms of her weight. Around June 2024, she mentioned in a comment that she had gone from 616 pounds, meaning she had gained weight above her episode starting point at some point, back down to 508.
Whether 508 represented a sustained trend or a temporary milestone in what had been a long and difficult process was unclear.
In December 2022, she posted what would become her final Instagram entry, a close-up filtered photo with the caption, “Me just me.”
She was reportedly set to appear on the spinoff My 600-lb Life: Where Are They Now?, which would have given viewers a more current picture of her life. Whether that episode was filmed, completed, or aired has not been confirmed.
She continued to be active enough online that fans who had connected with her through the show maintained relationships with her.
Multiple people left tributes after her death describing in-person meetings, friendships built over social media, and conversations that stuck with them.
One person said they met her at Great Wolf Lodge in February 2023 and had been friends ever since. Another called being her friend “a gift.” A third wrote, “I was just so hopeful for her. That show did not do her justice.”
Martinez Joins Over A Dozen Co-Stars Who Have Died
Dolly Martinez is not the first person featured on My 600-lb Life to die after their episode aired.
She is, according to multiple sources, among more than two dozen participants who have died following their appearance on the show.
The list is long and, taken together, it raises questions that extend well beyond any individual episode.
Gina Krasley died in 2021 at age 30, the same age as Dolly. Larry Myers Jr. died in 2023 at 48. Latonya Pottain died in 2025 at 40. Pauline Potter, who had become one of the show’s most recognized participants, died in 2025 at 62.
Destinee LaShaee also died in recent years.
Each of them had shared their lives with the cameras for the same reason Dolly did, they needed help, and the show offered a path to visibility and access to care they might not otherwise have had.
The question of what the show provides versus what it takes has followed My 600-lb Life for years.
Participants have sued the production company over what they described as inadequate psychological support and housing.
Some have described feeling abandoned after filming ended. Others have credited the show with giving them a chance they would not have had. The reality is probably both, and it probably varies by participant.
What is not debatable is that the people who appear on this show are in genuine medical crisis.
They are not people who simply need to diet. They have congestive heart failure, lymphedema, respiratory failure, and conditions that would be serious in anyone but become compounded and accelerating in bodies under the strain that extreme obesity places on every organ system.
Dolly had all of those things at 25. She was on oxygen. She was fighting to qualify for a surgery that might have given her a path toward something different.
She was just 30 years old when she died.
Martinez’s Sister’s Loving Words
The most important thing Lindsey Cooper said in her announcement was the simplest.
Not the part about the bright personality, though that clearly was true, based on every account of people who knew Dolly.
Not the part about lighting up rooms, though multiple people said exactly the same thing independently. The most important line was the one she ended with, along with a request.
“In this time of grieving please reach out to me or my wife instead of Staci as she needs peace and privacy.”
The family that shaped and complicated and sustained Dolly Martinez’s life, her mother Staci, her sister Lindsey, her daughter Trinity, is still there. They are grieving privately. They are asking for space.
They gave a public statement because Dolly was a public figure, and because the people who watched her episode and followed her over the years deserved to know.
Behind the statement is a family that lost a daughter and a sister and a mother at 30 years old, and they are asking to be left alone to do that.
Dolly Martinez was 30. No cause of death has been disclosed.
