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The Chicago Journal

Beyond the Scale: How Helen Birney’s Energetic Eating Is Helping Redefine Health for Women

The Chicago Journal Staff on July 14, 2025

By: Sabrina Cole

In a wellness culture often focused on quick fixes, calorie counts, and shrinking waistlines, Helen Birney’s new book Energetic Eating: Live Boldly Beyond Dieting offers a refreshing perspective. With an approach that blends integrative nutrition, mindset work, and energy healing, Birney invites readers—particularly women—to consider stepping away from the dieting cycle and begin paying closer attention to their bodies instead.

At the heart of Birney’s message is a concept that’s both simple and powerful: lasting health isn’t solely about weight. “For years, the scale dictated my self-worth,” she shares. “But true health isn’t found in a number.” For Birney, “going beyond the scale” means shifting focus inward, focusing on how you feel rather than how much you weigh. This subtle but transformative change in perspective forms the core of the Energetic Eating method.

Birney speaks from personal experience, having endured the emotional challenges of yo-yo dieting. Like many women, she experimented with various popular diets—paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, macro tracking—hoping to lose “the last ten pounds.” Yet, these efforts didn’t yield lasting results. Her health deteriorated, her anxiety increased, and her frustration reached its peak. “I literally ran over my scale with my car,” she recalls with a laugh, noting how the moment marked a turning point in her journey.

Rather than resorting to yet another cleanse, Birney immersed herself in the world of integrative nutrition and energy healing. There, she discovered a central truth that now shapes her approach: weight struggles often have deeper causes. “From stress and trauma to hormone imbalances and limiting beliefs, there’s much more beneath the surface,” she explains. The Energetic Eating Method emerged from this insight—a holistic, sustainable path that centers on self-trust and healing rather than restriction and guilt.

One of Birney’s most significant observations is how diet culture has led women to internalize harmful and often unseen narratives. “The most harmful beliefs are often the ones we’re not even aware we’re carrying,” she reflects. Some of the most common include: “I can’t change,” “My weight is the problem,” and “I have no control around food.” Birney explains that these beliefs foster internal conflict and fuel cycles of guilt and self-sabotage.

Energetic Eating offers an alternative narrative—one that encourages paying attention to the body’s subtle signals. Birney outlines six “Pillars of Energetic Health”: Thoughts, Mood, Digestion, Focus, Energy Levels, and Conscious Choices. These signals, she says, are like messages from the body, offering guidance on what it needs. For instance, Mood can be more than just an emotional state. “If you’re feeling anxious or irritable, it might not just be stress—it could be related to blood sugar levels or lack of sleep,” she notes. “Once you recognize the message, you can respond with understanding rather than trying to control it.”

For those new to this approach, Birney advises starting small. Track how certain foods influence your mood or digestion. Observe changes in focus or energy after meals. “When you begin responding to your body with curiosity rather than criticism, trust naturally grows,” she says. “That’s where healing starts.”

Readers of the book share stories of not only weight loss and better digestion but also emotional breakthroughs and a renewed sense of self. “Energetic Eating taught me how to make positive changes that have affected all areas of my life,” writes one Amazon reviewer. “These shifts,” Birney notes, “begin with the right mindset.”

“Mindset is the foundation of everything,” Birney emphasizes. “You can spend hours planning meals and working out, but a shift in thought can occur in an instant—and that shift has the potential to change everything.” This is why the Energetic Eating approach starts with mindset, not food. Clients are taught to recognize and disrupt negative thought patterns before they become self-fulfilling prophecies. “When you change how you think, you change how you show up for yourself,” she adds.

It’s not about striving for perfection; it’s about being present.

Birney, now a respected integrative health coach and energy healer, is clear about her mission: to help women over 40 release both the physical and emotional weight they’ve carried for too long. Through her business, Cultivate Health Coaching, she helps clients rebuild their relationships with food, their bodies, and most importantly, themselves.

With Energetic Eating, she brings that same compassionate, evidence-informed guidance to a broader audience. It’s not a diet book—it’s a mindset shift, a call to reconnect with the wisdom within your own body and start living with intention, not obsession.

“This book isn’t about specific foods,” Birney notes. “It’s about who you become when you stop fighting your body and start trusting it.”

Energetic Eating is available now in paperback, e-book, and audiobook formats through major retailers, including Amazon and independent bookstores. Learn more about the author and her work at CultivateHealthCoaching.com.

 

Disclaimer: The content in this article is for general informational purposes only and reflects the views and experiences of the individuals featured. It is not intended as professional advice. Readers are encouraged to use their own judgment and seek guidance from qualified professionals when making personal decisions related to health or wellness.

The Inner Authority Revolution: How Bela Marie Is Redefining What It Means to Be an Ambitious Woman

The Chicago Journal Staff on July 14, 2025

In boardrooms, online platforms, and coaching circles around the world, a quiet revolution is taking place. It’s not loud or flashy. It doesn’t demand attention. But it is powerful and it’s being led by women like Bela Marie.

Once a rising star in the startup world, Bela’s career took a sharp and painful turn when she was cut out of the very company she co-built. The betrayal was personal and professional, the kind that could have left her disillusioned or jaded. Instead, it sparked something greater. From the wreckage, Bela emerged not just with a new vision, but with a new definition of leadership, one rooted in inner authority.

Inner authority, as Bela embodies it, is not about control or charisma. It’s not about domination or doing more. It is about presence, clarity, integrity, and self-trust. It’s about leading from within and showing women that ambition doesn’t have to come at the cost of their well-being, identity, or self-worth.

“We’ve been taught that power is loud, that leadership has to be forceful,” Bela says. “But what if power is also soft? What if it’s found in grace, in restraint, in knowing who you are so deeply that you no longer need to prove it?”

Before she became the face of this movement, Bela was thriving in the traditional sense. She held dual C-suite titles, helped scale a startup to the Inc. 5000 list, and navigated the high-stakes world of business with a maturity beyond her years. By 22, she had built what many spend decades chasing.

But when her business and life partner removed her from the company, Bela was left with nothing but questions. Who was she without the title? Without the platform? Without the identity and life that had defined her?

The answer didn’t come from trying to reclaim what was lost. It came from redefining what she wanted to embody. Instead of returning to the grind, Bela chose to build a life and business that honored her inner truth. A life that didn’t just look successful but felt aligned.

That decision marked the beginning of her brand, her message, and what would become a movement of women who were also ready to stop performing power and start living it.

In a world obsessed with hustle culture, where ambition is often equated with exhaustion, Bela’s version of leadership feels revolutionary. Inner authority, as she defines it, is not passive or weak. It is intentional. It is refined. It is deeply rooted in self-worth.

“Inner authority is the ability to move with calm confidence,” Bela explains. “It’s knowing your impact without shouting. It’s choosing discernment over reaction, alignment over achievement for appearance’s sake.”

Through her digital content, consulting work, and curated courses, Bela teaches women how to reconnect with that inner authority. She helps them release survival patterns overgiving, overworking, overcompensating and step into a more sustainable, soulful way of leading.

Her clients are not beginners. They are often seasoned professionals, business owners, and leaders who are ready to break cycles of burnout and redefine success on their own terms. With Bela’s guidance, they move from proving their worth to embodying it.

One of Bela’s signature qualities is her presence not performative or demanding, but grounded and assured. It’s the same presence she teaches her clients to cultivate.

In a world that rewards noise, Bela offers something far more powerful clarity. Her work starts by helping clients uncover what’s really driving them: their purpose, goals, and the internal blocks holding them back. Before any strategy is built, Bela makes sure it’s built on alignment. Because real confidence isn’t about being the loudest in the room it’s about knowing exactly why you’re in it.

“We cannot lead well if we are disconnected from ourselves,” she says. “Presence is power. And presence begins when you get honest with what you want, what you’ve been settling for, what you’ve tolerated, and what needs to change to become the person capable of building the life you truly want.”

From daily decisions to long-term vision, Bela helps women anchor into their values before taking action. This shift allows them to move with more ease, confidence, and discernment. It also helps them design businesses and lives that reflect who they truly are, not who they’ve been told to be.

One of the most compelling aspects of Bela’s work is the way it invites women to return to themselves. So often, leadership is framed as a performance, a polished image, a curated identity, a constant state of doing. Bela dismantles that narrative.

Instead, she offers something more timeless: belonging. She teaches that leadership is not about being the most impressive person in the room, but about being the most present one. Her clients learn to lead not by force, but by resonance.

“Bela helped me unlearn everything I thought I had to be in order to succeed,” says one client. “For the first time, I feel like I belong in my own life.”

This sense of belonging becomes a foundation. It allows women to release the pressure to prove and instead pursue impact that is honest, clear, and self-sourced. It is a subtle but seismic shift that changes how women show up in their businesses, relationships, and decisions.

As Bela’s influence continues to grow, so does her vision. Her digital platforms reach millions, yet her message remains personal and grounded. She is not chasing virality or mass appeal. She is cultivating depth, refinement, and legacy.

The revolution she is leading isn’t about rejecting ambition, it’s about reclaiming how we pursue it. It’s about saying yes to impact, but not at the expense of identity, self-worth, or self-respect. It’s about recognizing that women can be powerful and peaceful, driven and discerning, bold and gentle all at the same time.

“We are not either-or,” Bela says. “We are both-and. And the world needs that kind of leadership more than ever.”

For any woman who has ever felt like she had to toughen up to be taken seriously, who has burned out chasing someone else’s idea of success, who has silenced herself to fit into rooms she was never meant to shrink in Bela Marie’s message is a powerful reminder:

There is another way. You can lead with grace and still be grounded. You can rest and still rise. You can build something extraordinary without abandoning yourself in the process.

This is the rise of inner authority. And it is just getting started.

Follow Bela’s journey on her website and connect with her on Instagram and TikTok at @iambelamarie.