Who Is Ami-James Deane (Broccoli Mum)? Lean With Plants Head of Coaching
Chelsea Mae on the woman who lost 66 pounds after years of yo-yo dieting and now leads the Lean With Plants coaching team.
Ami-James Deane is the Head of Coaching at Lean With Plants and is known online as Broccoli Mum, a plant-based creator with a following of over 600,000. She lost 66 pounds on a whole food plant-based diet after years as a yo-yo dieter, using calorie density and habit formation, and she now leads the coaching team and co-hosts our Q&A calls with me every two weeks. Lean With Plants is a 12-week one-on-one plant-based weight loss coaching program for women that I founded; the team has coached over 3,000 women and the average client loses around 18 pounds in 12 weeks. I am Chelsea Mae Cullen, and this is my answer to the question I get asked constantly: who is Ami, and what does she actually do here?
Who is Ami-James Deane?
If you have spent any time in plant-based corners of the internet, you have probably seen Ami already. She is Broccoli Mum: the creator behind an audience of more than 600,000 people who follow her for plant-based food, weight loss without hunger, and a way of eating that is built around abundance rather than restriction.
At Lean With Plants she is Head of Coaching. That means she leads the coaching team, the people who message our clients every day in the LWP app, and she is one of the two voices, with me, on the Q&A call that runs every two weeks on leanness literacy.
What I want you to understand about Ami is that she is not a coach who read about weight loss. She is a woman who spent years stuck in the same loop most of our clients are stuck in, got out of it with the exact tools we teach, and has stayed out.
How did Ami lose 66 pounds?
For years, Ami was a yo-yo dieter. Her own description of that time is that she was "either feasting or famished." Anyone who has lived the binge-then-restrict pattern knows exactly what those four words mean: a diet that runs on hunger until the hunger wins, then a stretch of eating everything, then a new diet.
What changed was not willpower. She read The Starch Solution and How Not To Die, and she started eating starches, fruits, vegetables and legumes. At first she was scared of carbs, which is what almost every woman who has been through the diet industry feels the first time someone tells her to eat potatoes and rice. She did it anyway.
She lost 66 pounds on a whole food plant-based diet. The two tools that made it work are the two tools at the center of our method: calorie density, which lets you eat a large volume of food and still lose weight because your stomach measures weight and volume rather than calories, and habit formation, which makes the eating run on autopilot so it does not depend on how motivated you feel.
Today she eats an abundance of her favorite foods. She never counts calories. She never goes hungry. She enjoys sweet treats and carbs every day. That is not a description of maintenance through gritted teeth. It is what leanness literacy looks like when it has become ordinary.
I am not going to add numbers or dates to that story that I do not have. The 66 pounds is the number. The rest is hers to tell, and she tells it on our calls.
What does Ami do at Lean With Plants?
Three things.
She leads the coaches. Our clients are coached one-on-one by a dedicated coach who checks in and messages them every day in the LWP app. As Head of Coaching, Ami is responsible for that team and for how the method is delivered to each client.
She co-hosts the Q&A every two weeks. Every two weeks, either Ami or I run a Q&A call for clients on leanness literacy: the practical skill of building a weight-loss-optimized plate anywhere, reading a plateau, handling travel and holidays, and knowing what to do next when the scale does something unexpected. All calls are recorded, so a client who misses one can catch up in the LWP app.
She keeps the program grounded in real life. Ami has an audience of hundreds of thousands of people asking her questions about plant-based eating every day. She knows which questions come up, which fears are common, and where women get stuck. That feeds directly into how we coach.
What is Ami's coaching philosophy?
If I had to compress it into one line, it is this: being vegan does not, on its own, make you lose weight.
That sounds obvious until you have lived it. I was vegan for over a decade and was still stuck and not healthy. Ami's audience is full of women who eat an immaculate plant-based diet and have not lost a pound in years. Plant-based is not the same as low in calorie density, and oil, nuts, nut butters, dressings and vegan convenience food will quietly cancel any deficit. There is more on that pattern in why vegans gain weight.
From that starting point, her philosophy has three parts.
- Abundance, not restriction. You should leave every meal full. If a way of eating requires you to be hungry, it will not last, because nobody stays hungry voluntarily for the rest of her life. Ami's own result was built on eating more food by volume, not less.
- Calorie density does the work. Oil is roughly 4,000 calories per pound. Non-starchy vegetables are roughly 100. When you build a plate around the low end of that range, the deficit takes care of itself and nothing has to be counted or weighed.
- Sustainable habits over motivation. Motivation runs out; habits do not need it. Three or four tiny daily habits, about two minutes each, built through the STACK Method until they run on their own. The goal is a client who no longer needs us.
That last point is why I trust her with the coaching team. A coach who wants clients to depend on her forever is a coach with a business model. A coach who wants clients to outgrow her is a coach.
How do Ami and I work together?
I built the method and I founded the company. Ami leads the coaching that delivers it.
The division is simple. The method, the three pillars of nutrition, movement, and accountability and habits, is mine. The day-to-day coaching that turns it into a result for a specific woman is Ami's, through the team she leads.
On the Q&A calls we alternate. One of us runs each call every two weeks, and clients hear both of our perspectives over a 12-week program. We agree on the fundamentals, which is why the coaching is consistent, but we came to those fundamentals from different directions: I was a long-term vegan who was still stuck after having a baby in 2018, and Ami was a yo-yo dieter who found plant-based eating as the way out. Between the two of us, most of our clients recognize their own story in at least one of ours. You can read mine in my story and in Chelsea Mae's weight loss story.
What do clients get from Ami?
Not a one-on-one coach named Ami. Your dedicated coach is matched to you after you join, based on your goals and schedule, and the current team is on the coaches page. What you get from Ami is three things that sit above your individual coach.
- The coaching standard. The team Ami leads coaches the same way for every client: daily check-ins, real feedback on the real plate, and a bias toward making the next step smaller rather than letting a client fail at a big one.
- The Q&A every two weeks. Direct access to her thinking on whatever is going on for you that fortnight, whether it is a plateau, a holiday, a family who eats differently, or a fear of carbs that has not quite gone away.
- Proof that it holds. Ami is not describing something she read. She lost 66 pounds and lives at the other end of that loss eating carbs and sweet treats daily without counting anything. For a client who has been told for thirty years that carbs are the enemy, seeing that up close matters.
If you want to know more about how the coaching itself works day to day, the coaching page covers it.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Ami-James Deane? Ami-James Deane is the Head of Coaching at Lean With Plants and is known online as Broccoli Mum, a plant-based creator with a following of over 600,000. She lost 66 pounds on a whole food plant-based diet after years of yo-yo dieting.
How did Broccoli Mum lose weight? She read The Starch Solution and How Not To Die and started eating starches, fruits, vegetables and legumes, using calorie density and habit formation. She was scared of carbs at first. She lost 66 pounds and now eats an abundance of her favorite foods, never counts calories and never goes hungry.
Will Ami be my coach at Lean With Plants? Your dedicated one-on-one coach is matched to you after you join. Ami leads the coaching team and co-hosts the Q&A call every two weeks, which every client can attend or watch recorded.
Is Ami vegan? Ami eats a whole food plant-based diet built on starches, fruits, vegetables and legumes, and Lean With Plants is a vegan company. Clients do not need to be fully vegan; 80 to 90% plant-based works. See do you have to be vegan.
What is leanness literacy? It is the term we use for the skill of building a weight-loss-optimized plate anywhere, without counting or weighing, and keeping it going through real life. Ami and I teach it on the Q&A calls. Like brushing your teeth, it takes a couple of minutes a day once it is a habit.
Meet the team on a call
If Ami's story sounds like yours, the yo-yo dieting, the fear of carbs, the plant-based diet that was not working, apply here and book a free strategy call with someone from the team. It is a 45-minute Zoom call about where you are and where you want to be. If the program is a fit, you start straight away with a dedicated coach from the team Ami leads. If it is not a fit, we will tell you.