Photo: TLC
She stars on TLC’s riveting docuseries 1,000-Lb Sisters.
By Nadine Courtney — Written on Apr 29, 2020
Previously best known for her quirky and hilarious YouTube videos, Amy Slaton, 32, stars on TLC’s recent docuseries 1,000-Lb Sisters alongside her older sister Tammy Slaton, 33.
The show, which debuted on New Year’s Day 2020, chronicled the Kentucky-based Slaton sisters’ journey of weight loss as they tried to lose enough weight to qualify for bariatric surgery.
Over the course of six emotional episodes, Amy and Tammy navigated doctor appointments, the challenge of healthy eating, and personal dramas, leading up to the big reveal: whether or not Amy and Tammy have qualified for surgery.
Who is Amy Slaton?
She weighed 406 pounds at one point.
At the start of her journey, Slaton tipped the scales at 406 pounds. (Her sister Tammy, meanwhile, weighed 605 pounds — hence the show’s catchy name.)
Amy said she was a normal weight while younger and she only started to gain weight after her grandmother died when she was around age 10. "My mom worked two to three jobs at a time, and my grandma was basically our mom," Amy said. "When she died, our whole world changed."
Left to their own devices, and with their mother working and siblings gone, Amy and Tammy didn’t know how to cook and began eating packaged meals such as frozen pizza and ramen noodles, setting up a cycle of unhealthy eating that got worse over the years.
"It's what we ate to survive, and that stuff is not good for you," her sister Tammy said. "Depression and just trying to live all kind of caught up with us."
She’s married and hopes to start a family.
As we learn in the docu-series, Amy met her husband, Michael Halterman, in high school in Dixon, Kentucky, and the two dated for years before marrying in 2019 in Nashville. Their desire to have a baby together was one of her biggest motivators for trying to lose weight.
In episode two, Slaton tells Atlanta-based weight-loss doc Dr. Charles Procter, “I got asthma, I got thyroid, I got diabetes. I want to have a baby and I think my weight is affecting me not to have a baby.”
“So that’s your motivation, is you want to have a baby. You want to get pregnant,” Dr. Procter says.
She admits that she also is afraid of ending up like her sister, pointing at her while speaking: “That and I just wanna be healthy and not like her to tell you the truth. I ain’t gonna lie to you.”
She had two weddings.
Despite marrying Halterman last year, their first wedding was an elopement, so Slaton and Halterman decided to have a second wedding for TLC, with the show depicting Amy going wedding dress shopping.
“I’m really scared to try on this wedding dress right now,” she said on the show. “The other day I went wedding-dress shopping, and it was kind of discouraging that none of the dresses fit me. So I decided to order a wedding dress online but I’m scared, because you don’t even know if it’s going to fit you.”
She’s a YouTube star.
With more than 175,000 YouTube subscribers hanging on her every word, Slaton has racked up an impressive follower count over the years.
She started her channel six years ago and has posted hundreds of compelling videos, ranging from no-fuss makeup tutorials to charming personal videos featuring her on the phone with her sister Tammy, who has nearly 65,000 subscribers herself.
Slaton’s most popular video, a tutorial called The Power of Makeup, was posted three years ago and had more than 7.3 million views.
The sisters went viral doing the “chubby bunny” challenge in 2014, when they added marshmallow after marshmallow to their mouths while trying to say “chubby bunny”— no chewing or swallowing allowed. Fans loved it and a new YouTube sensation was born.
As far as social media goes, Slaton’s not only on YouTube; she also has a public Instagram account and a Twitter account full of selfies and musings.
She was arrested in 2010.
In a video published to her YouTube channel in 2017, Amy revealed to her fans that she was previously arrested. “You know, I did stupid things when I was younger,” she says, adding, “Please do not do the dumb things that I done in life.”
She explains that she shoplifted during a difficult time in her life. “I had recently quit my job. My grandpa died and everything like that, so everything was going bad for me. And I really wanted this book, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna try to steal it,’” she said. “So I put it in my purse, and when I walked out the door at Walmart it beeped.”
“The person came over to me. He [said] ‘Did you steal anything?’ And I’m, like, ‘No. You can check my bag, blah, blah’… So he checked, and he was, like, ‘There’s a book right here. Did you pay for it?’
After checking the security footage, the cops were called and Slaton was not only fined $400, but also banned from Walmart for two years.
“I don’t think that my past should be an issue,” she said, adding, “I wasn’t trying to hide it from people or anything like that. I always learned from my mistakes, and this was a big mistake. I never will do it again.”
She cut out sugar to lose weight — but healthy eating remains a struggle for her.
In order to reach her weight loss goals, Slaton cut sugar out of her diet, choosing low-carb, high-protein meals alongside exercises like dancing and long walks outside with Mike. However, both Amy and Tammy have been quoted as saying healthy eating is more expensive, so therefore much more difficult.
"It's still a battle," Tammy said. "I do wish that restaurants would have more options that are healthier, and it would help if the healthier foods were cheaper."
"Yeah, it's pretty bad," Amy added. "You go to McDonald's and you can get a cheeseburger for a dollar, but a salad costs like five."
The season finale was a heartbreaker.
On the sixth episode and season finale of 1,000-Lb Sisters, after months of dieting and healthier choices, Amy finds out that she qualifies for weight loss surgery... but her sister Tammy does not.
“This was our final weigh-in and I got approved so my surgery’s in two days, but Tammy didn’t get approved,” Amy said. “Now that I’m approved and she’s not, I feel like she’s kind of upset with me about it. Most of the time I feel like I’m walking on eggshells around Tammy. You never know what’s going to set her off and after this appointment with Dr. Procter, she’s a ticking time bomb.”
By the end of the show, Amy had dropped more than 100 pounds. Luckily, her sister Tammy’s life has also improved: she’s been posting selfies on her Twitter, and also has a new (if married and controversial) boyfriend.
Whatever the future holds for the sisters, one thing is certain: their weight-loss journey has bonded them even further.
“I think this has brought us closer together in a sense that we know what the other one is going through,” said Tammy. “But we just know that the other one is going through the same thing.”
Nadine Jolie Courtney is an entertainment and travel writer based in Santa Monica, California. Her work has appeared in Oprah Mag, Angeleno, Town & Country, Reader's Digest, and countless other outlets.
Editor's Note: This article was originally posted on February 20, 2020 and was updated with the latest information.