Who Is Chelsea Mae? The Story Behind Lean With Plants
The founder of Lean With Plants, the 12-week plant-based weight loss coaching program for women.
Chelsea Mae Cullen is the founder of Lean With Plants, a 12-week one-on-one plant-based weight loss coaching program for women. In 2018, at her heaviest after having a baby, she was eating a whole food plant-based diet and still not losing weight. She figured out what was missing, lost 40 pounds, and has kept it off for around seven years without counting calories. She hosts the Lean With Plants podcast, and the coaching team at Lean With Plants has now worked with over 3,000 women.
That is the short version. Here is the longer one, because the details are the part that actually matters if you are trying to decide whether this woman knows what she is talking about.
Who is Chelsea Mae, in one paragraph
Chelsea Mae Cullen is the founder of Lean With Plants, a plant-based weight loss coaching program for women built around calorie density, movement, and habit change. She lost 40 pounds herself in 2018 and has maintained it for around seven years. She did not count calories to do it, and the program she built does not ask clients to count calories either.
Note the spelling: it is Chelsea Mae, with an E. It gets typed wrong constantly, including by people looking for her on purpose.
The problem that started all of it
By 2018, Chelsea was already eating the way most people would call ideal. Whole food, plant-based. No animal products. Cooking at home.
She was also at her heaviest, after having a baby.
If you have been there, you know the specific frustration of that position. It is not the frustration of someone who knows she is eating badly. It is the frustration of someone doing everything the books said to do and watching the scale refuse to move. You start to wonder whether the problem is your body, your age, your hormones, or just you.
She is very clear that it was none of those things. It was the approach. The full account of what happened next is in her weight loss story, and it is worth reading if you are in the same spot right now.
What she figured out
The thing that changed was not willpower and it was not a stricter diet. It was calorie density: how many calories are packed into a pound of food.
Here is the comparison that reframes the whole thing:
| Food | Approximate calories per pound |
|---|---|
| Oil | 4,000 |
| Nuts and nut butters | very high |
| Non-starchy vegetables | 100 |
That is roughly a 40x difference between oil and vegetables. Which means two plates of food that look similar, and are both technically plant-based, can be wildly different in calories.
The oil in the pan. The handful of cashews. The dressing. The vegan convenience food in the freezer aisle. None of that is bad food in a moral sense, but it is dense food, and dense food is how a genuinely healthy eater stays stuck for years.
Once she shifted the ratio, she lost 40 pounds. She has kept it off for around seven years. She did it without counting a single calorie, because when the food itself is less dense, you can eat a larger physical volume, feel full, and still be in a deficit. We go deeper on that mechanism in calorie density explained and in why some vegans gain weight.
From one woman's fix to a coaching program
The problem she ran into is not a rare one. It is the single most common message women send us: I eat like this too and I am still stuck.
Lean With Plants is the program built to solve it. It is a 12-week one-on-one coaching program for women, built on three pillars:
- Nutrition, organized around calorie density rather than counting or weighing.
- Fitness and movement, scaled to the body you have right now.
- Accountability and habits, delivered through the STACK Method.
That third pillar is the one Chelsea talks about most, and it is the one that separates the program from a meal plan. Knowing what to eat has never been the bottleneck for most women over forty. Doing it on a Tuesday in November when work is hard and nobody is watching is the bottleneck.
You can read the full breakdown of how the three pillars fit together on the method page.
Who she actually works with
Most Lean With Plants clients are in their forties, fifties and sixties. Some are in their seventies. The average client loses around 18 pounds in 12 weeks.
The women who come to LWP tend to share a profile:
- They already eat better than most people they know.
- They have tried a lot of things, some of which worked briefly.
- They are suspicious of anything that sounds like a diet, because they have done that and it ended the way it always ends.
- They do not need more information. They need a structure and someone paying attention.
The one-on-one work is done by the coaching team, with Ami as head coach, alongside Abbie, Heidi and Jordan. They are trained in the LWP method, and each client gets a dedicated coach for the length of the program.
What she believes, and why it sounds different
If you listen to Chelsea for more than ten minutes you will hear a version of this sentence: the approach failed you, you did not fail.
That is not a comfort line. It is the actual operating principle, and it changes what the coaching looks like in practice. If the assumption is that you lack discipline, the solution is more rules and more restriction. If the assumption is that the method was wrong, the solution is a better method.
So the guidance tends to run against what you have been told:
- Eat more food, not less. Volume is the tool, not the enemy.
- Stop counting. Counting works until the day you stop counting.
- Build habits, not motivation. Motivation is a weather pattern. Habits survive bad weather.
- Design the environment. Willpower is not a character trait you can top up.
Her full philosophy is laid out in Chelsea Mae's approach to weight loss, and she works through it week after week on the Lean With Plants podcast.
Where you can find the method for free
Three places, none of which cost anything:
- The Lean With Plants podcast, which Chelsea hosts and where the method and the mindset side both get covered.
- The blog, which covers the same ground in writing.
- The free live training, which is the main entry point for anyone who is not ready to apply for coaching yet.
One more detail worth knowing: she has two daughters. It comes up because nothing in Lean With Plants assumes you have unlimited time, a quiet kitchen, or a body that behaves the way it did at twenty-five.
The skeptical read
Fair question: is this just another founder story built to sell a program?
Reasonable thing to ask. A few things worth weighing.
The first is duration. A 40-pound loss is not rare. A 40-pound loss maintained for around seven years is a different claim, and maintenance is the part almost every program in this category quietly skips.
The second is the shape of the client base. Over 3,000 women, mostly in their forties through sixties, is not a demographic that tolerates hype for long. You can read through client results and reviews and judge the pattern yourself.
The third is what the program refuses to do. No meal replacements, no supplements to buy, no calorie app, no points. Those are all easier businesses to run than one-on-one coaching. The program is harder to deliver precisely because it is built around a coach who knows your name.
Frequently asked questions
How is Chelsea Mae's name spelled? Her full name is Chelsea Mae Cullen, and the middle name is spelled Mae with an E. She is the founder of Lean With Plants.
How much weight did Chelsea Mae lose? She lost 40 pounds and has kept it off for around seven years. She did it without counting calories, by changing the calorie density of what she ate and building habits that held afterward.
Does Chelsea Mae coach clients personally? The one-on-one coaching inside the program is delivered by the Lean With Plants coaching team, led by head coach Ami. Chelsea built the method the coaches are trained in and continues to lead the program.
What is Lean With Plants? Lean With Plants is a 12-week one-on-one plant-based weight loss coaching program for women, founded by Chelsea Mae Cullen. A full overview is in what is Lean With Plants.
Do you have to be vegan to work with her? No. Plenty of clients arrive eating meat and dairy. The question we care about is whether you are willing to shift the center of your plate, not what you ate last week. More on that in do you have to be vegan.
Where can I read Chelsea's story in her own words? Her story page covers it directly, and the podcast goes into more detail across episodes.
If her story sounds like yours
The reason this story travels is that so many women recognize themselves in the first half of it. Eating well. Doing the work. Not losing weight. Quietly deciding the problem must be them.
If that is where you are, the useful next step is a conversation with someone who has seen the pattern a few thousand times. You can apply here and book a free strategy call to talk through your situation and find out whether coaching makes sense for you right now. If it does not, we will tell you that too.
For the complete timeline, from New Zealand to the podcast to the coaching program, read Chelsea Mae Cullen: the full story.