If you’ve ever borrowed another diet book from the library, promised yourself “this time it’ll stick,” and quietly known it wouldn’t — Helen’s story is for you.
Before joining the Naturally Healthy Club, Helen had tried it all: calorie counting, weighing food, goodfood-bad-food rules, follow-this-plan programs.
None of it lasted.
Six months after joining, she’d lost 20 pounds, healed her relationship with her body, and changed the way she talks to her grandchildren about food.
Here’s her story.
What was your relationship with food and your body like before you joined the Naturally Healthy Club (NHC)?
Helen knew she was carrying excess weight — she could feel it in her clothes and her joints, even if she couldn’t bring herself to get on the scale.
Years of diet culture had left her rigid, sorting food into “good” and “bad,” and cycling through calorie counting, food weighing, and plan after plan that never stuck.
The tipping point wasn’t vanity — it was her knees.
“It was impacting my mobility, and I knew that my body was saying, it’s too much, I can’t do this anymore.”
She was ready to try something, but everything she’d tried before had been unsustainable.
What tipped you over from *thinking about* working with me, to *deciding* to work with me?
Helen had followed Stonesoup for a long time before she saw the Naturally Healthy Club.
It’s a six-month program built around learning to listen to your own body, rather than follow someone else’s plan.
“This is so different from anything else I had done in the past.”
What concerns did you have about your ability to get the most from NHC?
Two things nearly threw Helen off in the early days: daily journaling and daily weighing.
Reading back her own reflections, she found herself asking the same question over and over — “Jules,
how is this going to work?”
She couldn’t picture how any of it would translate into weight loss.
And the idea of stepping on the scale every single day made her recoil. But now
“This daily weighing has developed a very intimate and loving relationship with my body”
Where she once related to her body as something separate — “me and it” — she now feels fully integrated with it.
How has NHC changed the way you feel about yourself, your body, and your future?
The number on the scale moved — but that’s almost the smallest part of it.
When Helen had hip surgery in March and spent 15 days in hospital and rehab without access to a scale, she leaned entirely on the intentions she’d learned to set each day.
She came home having not gained a single pound. “Isn’t that amazing?”
She also broke through a lifelong block: finishing everything on her plate. Raised to be a “good little eater,” leaving food behind had always felt wrong.
Through coaching, she reframed it completely — leaving food isn’t pickiness, it’s discernment.
Now she can walk into any social situation with a plan already in place, and eating feels less like willpower and more like harmony:
“It’s like we — myself and my body — are together, navigating social situations.”
The physical changes followed:
“I feel slim, I feel lithe. I’m wearing different clothes. I like what I see in the mirror.”
Even her knees, once a source of pain and frustration, now just feel like part of her — not a problem to be solved.
What surprised you the most about being in the Naturally Healthy Club?
Watching other members in her intake navigate completely different struggles gave Helen something she wasn’t expecting: empathy.
“What was difficult for me is not necessarily difficult or challenging for other people.”
Seeing that range broadened her whole view of food, body image, and weight.
The other surprise showed up in the kitchen with her grandchildren.
Baking together, she now tells them, “There’s no good and bad food — it’s just how much we eat of it.”
She hopes to spare them what she’s lived through:
“I would hate them to have to have this yo-yo relationship with their body weight throughout their life like I’ve had.”
Planting that seed now, she says, “feels like a good legacy to leave them.”
Who would you recommend the Naturally Healthy Club to?
Helen’s answer is simple: someone who’s “experienced the yo-yo effect of putting on weight, losing it, putting on weight, and more,”.
And someone who is really disenchanted with the diet culture and at a loss for how to change their relationship with food or learn to listen to their body.
What she loves most is that NHC is an inner journey — as deep as you want it to be.
“That’s what I love, is that opportunity to really hold the mirror up. If we want to, we don’t have to.”
Whether you’re there to lose 10 pounds or do the deeper work, there’s room for both.
Helen has lost 20 pounds and is still slowly losing more. But the bigger shift is how she talks about herself now:
“I really feel in charge. I’m in charge of what I put into my mouth. No one else does that.”
Ready to be in charge of your weight like Helen?
If you want to get to your goal weight with ease and joy…
By learning to actually listen to your body the Naturally Healthy Club could be your next step.
New groups open in September and March.
Get on the email list to be alerted the moment registration opens.
And grab the free training on three micro-habits to get the scale moving while you wait.
So you can start building momentum today.
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In your corner,
Jules from Stonesoup xx
(Your favourite Australian Food Scientist)
See my bio
ps. Can I ask a favour?
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