Every woman thinks she knows how to diet. And every woman fails at dieting. Coincidence?
You've been handed children's tools for an adult problem.
Your Instincts Are Right
You're drawn to diets because deep down, you know they work. You've always known there's a link between your relationship with food and how you feel about your life. You just don't know how to make dieting stick or why you keep slipping every single day.
Your slim self is in there, screaming for air. You feel her banging inside your rib cage to escape. And you know, as well as she does, that once she's free and you're out of this food hell, you, your life, it all changes.
No woman alive would rather be wanted by a bowl of spaghetti than by her version of Johnny Castle. You just don't believe that man, those feelings, that chemistry, that life is available to you.
When your food life improves, your whole life improves. The confidence. The body. The desire. The chance at the moments and experiences you actually want.
You don't need to "heal your relationship with food." What you need is to trade places with your slim self, like two actresses changing at the side of the stage, so she's out front. So she can stand between you and bad food, shut down the whispers of chocolate, and remind you that your life means more than what's in the pantry.
That's how you get food out of your mind and put it in its place. That's how you thrive as a woman. For your people. For your roles. For yourself.
And for those jeans folded at the back of your wardrobe for the last twenty years.
TOOLS: The Adult Solution
The TOOLS Program is for women who ache to stop choosing food over themselves and the life they could and should be living…and were ready yesterday to be slim again.
Take The Reins: To pull you and your slim self out of food hell, commit to your diet as much as you commit to eating. Right now, there's a double standard. You're fierce when it comes to eating, no excuse stops you. But flimsy with your diet, any excuse will do. It's like the alcoholic who can't go to a meeting because it's cold out…but they'll drink whether it's pouring, freezing, or 3 a.m. Until you're as committed to sticking to your plan as you are to getting food, you'll keep eating everything in sight "one last time" before you "diet tomorrow." That tipping point, when you’d rather be slim than go to the fridge, is where the battle ends and your lifestyle begins.
Outline The Rules: No one teaches you how dieting actually works. The real rules of the game. Most programs hand you meal plans or therapy sessions. But if you don't understand the objective, the threats, how to actually win, you'll lose before you begin. Hunger, cravings, triggers, those aren’t side issues. Your food history, preferences, and schedule, they’re part of the game too. But most coaches skip all that. They take your money, hand you calorie counting in disguise, and when it all falls apart, tell you to get bloods. I show you how the game actually works: how to spot the traps, fix the weak spots, and use your own patterns to win.
Optimise Your Plate: Most women swing between bland diet food that feels like punishment and favourite foods that hijack their minds. The sweet spot? Foods you can handle, but won't lose yourself in. When my kids were little, we'd visit the ice-cream shop. Sixty flavours, lines out the door, but not one behind vanilla. Yet if there's vanilla in the freezer at home? Gone. Scoffed. Why? Because it's on hand and the best on offer, but it doesn't send your brain into orbit. Otherwise you'd line up for it at the parlour too. Your personal "vanilla ice cream" foods are your best friends. Not meals you hate. Not foods that mess with your head. Just good stuff you actually like, enough to enjoy, not enough to lose the plot. So you can eat, move on, and get on with your life.
Locate What’s Missing: You didn’t binge because you were hungry. You were lonely. Ashamed. Bored. Food stood in for a man. A dream. A sense of peace. A chocolate biscuit might feel like love to a five-year-old, but no fifty-year-old woman wants it to be her lover. You want a sweaty bicep to hold onto. You want connection. Desire. Aliveness. When you diet and face what's missing, you're not fighting this battle alone or empty-handed anymore. You're not "avoiding cake," you're going after what you actually needed that made cake seem like the answer. And when you start filling that part of you, it turns the false need off, and fights with you against everything food throws at you: the physical pulls, the emotional hooks, the memory traps, the false promises.
Subdue Your Eating Demons: If you want that slim body more than anything, and you are done having food win again and again, and you’re sick of feeling like a binge waiting to happen, know this: you've got two opponents to beat. There's Ms. O, the part of you obsessed with chewing, swallowing, volume. She doesn't care about your goals! Then there's the part that gave her heart to food, her white knight in shining armour. Most women try to shut them down with willpower. It's madness to think that works. We teach you how to spot them, separate from them, and overpower them. You'll know exactly what to do when they strike. What to feed them instead of food.
Your Adult Toolkit
Two Ways To Take TOOLS
Both are designed to walk you out of food hell so your slim self can reemerge and take over.
Private Coaching (One-on-One)
This is the most direct, most supported path. Just you and me, twelve weeks or six, facing your eating, your patterns, and the fight you've wanted to have but could never quite start.
We walk through the TOOLS process step by step. Not theory. Not group work. Your food, your emotions, your life.
You choose the pace:
6 weeks (2 sessions per week)
12 weeks (1 session per week)
We build your diet, your boundaries with food, and your new normal around how you actually live. I stay close the whole way. I track what you're eating. I notice when something's off. I help you untangle it before it unravels.
This is the real fight. You'll be without the foods you've leaned on, and there'll be moments where everything inside you wants to run back. I don't let you. Not because I push, but because I stay. When cravings hit, when tears come, when you feel like you can't do it, I'm not watching from the side. I'm in it with you.
Together, we build the system that holds your eating steady, clears the path for your slim self to reemerge, and keeps her in place. And this time for good.
2. Group Coaching (4 Women)
This is the TOOLS Program delivered in a small setting, just four women per group. We meet once a week for twelve weeks.
Each session has two parts:
First, I guide you through the relevant step of the TOOLS process.
Then, each woman gets time to ask one personal question and receive direct support from me, whether it's about adapting something to your life, figuring out how to actually do it, or just knowing what to do next.
This option gives you the same full program content as private coaching, just in a shared setting, and without private one-on-one calls. These groups are small on purpose: safe, focused, and filled with women who don’t just understand… they live it too.
There’s something powerful about being with others who’ve eaten in secret, held the shame, and are both desperate and terrified to face it. You’ll hear stories that sound familiar. You’ll offer support from your own experience. And you’ll realise the part of you you’ve hidden is also a part of us.
If you’ve been pretending you’re fine, here’s where you can admit you’re not and start working it out. If you want to be with women walking the same path, at the same pace, choose the group option. Groups run seasonally.
Testimonials…
Michelle F., Melbourne
"I’ve spent 30 years trying to lose weight and keep it off. Now, I’ve gone from a size 18 to a size 12, and know I’m never going back. I’ve thrown out all my old clothes. I won’t be needing them again. This is me now."
Kym H., New York
“I thought I wanted him gone. But when he left, I was beside myself. I couldn’t stop eating. I contacted you and everything turned. I cleared out my house, lost 12 lb in six weeks, then another 9. But more than that, I stopped hurting. I saw a future for me. I can’t thank you enough.”
Tracey D., Adelaide
“I started at 94 kg. Now I’m 72 kg and it feels easy. I’ve lost 22 kg and only have 20 to go, but already I feel like a new woman. I’m even sharing your method and my food plan with friends at work. Thank you, Melinda.”
Hi, I’m Melinda Harper,
I used to think I had a food problem. Turns out, I was just skipping the first step.
For two decades, I promised myself every night that I'd diet tomorrow. But by 3pm the next day, I'd switch sides and be at it again "one last time" before starting again the next morning. I was full of self-loathing, shame, and being a failure.
Then I read a line in an Atkins book that changed everything: "People go on and off diets like they do a bus."
It hit me: as soon as we lose the weight, we let go of the very things that helped us lose it and head straight back into the world of food. I thought there might be a finish line to weight loss… but not to being slim.
The diet finish line is artificial. It's always there. And the thinking that got us into trouble in the first place? That's always there too.
If we want to stay out of food hell, we need to be reined in and told what we can and can't eat for as long as we want to stay out. I'd been expecting my diet to do everything: to change my emotions, heal my past, and fix the part of me that ran to food because life always hurt.
I was handing my diet jobs it could never do, and it kept buckling under the pressure. I didn't need more willpower or a better meal plan. I needed to learn the rules of the diet game and share the load. To understand what I was actually up against, what parts were mine to fight, and how to defend myself against it.
That realisation changed everything, and it’s what led to the TOOLS system I created to deal with the real opponents to food escape.
I'm Melinda Harper, a weight loss coach in Melbourne, mum to three teenagers, and someone who knows what it's like to juggle late dinners, Zoom calls, and a thousand to-dos.
I created this work because most weight loss programs give you two options:
Follow a meal plan and grit your way through it, or
Trace back why you fell into emotional eating and hope you pick the right memory.
But there's a third way. We do the pre-diet work so the diet can actually succeed.
We get honest about what food represents in your life while you change how you eat. We build the foundation first, so the diet becomes the easy part.
When you work with me, we start where everyone else skips. We enter the diet arena equipped and ready to fight. You know who and what you're up against: hunger, trigger foods, cravings that feel like they'll take you out.
So when life hits, when you're flat, feel lost at sea, or miss the swirl of chocolate more than life itself, you don't hit the fridge. You respond like someone who's been prepared for this moment.
Dieting doesn’t have to be torture or hit and miss. It just has to be built on solid ground.
Why Women Stay Stuck With Children's Tools
Here’s what few know and no one selling diets will tell you: a diet can’t fix why you need a diet in the first place.
We treat diets like they’re one-dimensional, just follow the rules and it’ll work. Which means, when it doesn’t work, you blame yourself.
But a diet can’t fix a broken marriage. It can’t silence the voice inside your head that hates you. It can’t cut out shitty memories you’ve lived had to live through. It can’t untangle your shame or trauma from your eating.
We expect diets to work like therapy. But they’re not therapists. They don’t heal, no psychological magic tricks there. They manage and restrict. They control portions and tighten your waistline. One thing that no one can argue is that eating less will help you lose weight. Diets work.
But diets don’t fail because they’re broken. They fail because what determines your weight isn’t just food. It’s self-worth. It’s pain. It’s the deep part of you that doesn’t want to be here.
Now hunger and cravings do matter. They’re loud, and they will undo you if you dismiss them. But they’re not strategic. They’re not plotting to ruin you. They just want to be left alone. They’re like bears; if you poke them, they’ll wake and destroy everything in their path.
One of the first things I teach my women is how to stop poking the bear. How to work with hunger. Keep it calm. Stay two steps ahead.
But the real threat? It’s the anger, the shame, the emotions that do care whether you succeed or fail. They want comfort. They want their fill. They want food to do what they know a diet can’t.
If you think trauma won’t show up when you withhold cake, you’ve already lost. It will. But here’s what you have that old wounds don’t: the woman you were always meant to be. She’s still in there. And she’s worth the fight.