In today's reflection, I want to talk about what happens when the answer you've been handed stops adding up.
This week's guest is Helene Knoll, and she is also a friend. I met her a year and a half ago in a yoga studio here in Düsseldorf, and I have been quietly admiring her ever since.
She spent most of her career as a mechanical engineer. Six years at the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research, then years running a scanning electron microscopy lab for a steel manufacturer, then technical sales. Today she is a certified nutritionist and naturopathy practitioner with her own YouTube channel and a community she guides through detox programs every year.
Two women in the same room, both a little unsure of how it would go. Helene doesn’t speak English often, and she said yes anyway. When we finished, she told me she couldn’t believe how good it felt.
Neither could I.
What stayed with me
The moment the story stopped adding up. Helene’s company offered a free blood analysis once a year. Her results came back with alarmingly high cholesterol, and the doctor called her in.
When Helene walked through the door, the doctor was visibly surprised. She had been expecting a woman in her sixties, significantly overweight. Instead she got a woman in her forties who exercised three times a week.
The doctor gave her the standard advice. Stop eating eggs. Stop eating butter.
But Helene had already stopped eating those things, because that was what everyone said to do. So the advice didn’t just fail to help. It made no sense at all.
That’s the moment. Not the test result. The moment where the explanation you were given doesn’t match your actual life, and you have to decide whether to accept it anyway or start looking for yourself.
She started looking. It turned out the answer was sugar.
A year earlier she had separated from her partner, moved into a small apartment, and gotten rid of her television. She taught herself to bake instead. Cake every day. Two slices on weekends. She had built a full sugar addiction without ever noticing it happen.
Quitting cold turkey didn't work. One small square did. She stopped sugar overnight and described it as withdrawing from a drug. Her body revolted.
So she changed the approach. She bought good quality 70 percent dark chocolate and allowed herself one small piece, with one rule: she wasn’t allowed to chew it. She had to let it melt and pay full attention to the texture the entire time it took.
She did this for over a year. Eventually the cravings simply weren’t there anymore.
What strikes me isn’t the chocolate. It’s that she replaced restriction with attention. The thing that finally broke the addiction wasn’t willpower. It was presence.
Read until the first bad ingredient. Then put it back. I asked Helene for practical advice and she gave me the simplest possible version.
Never read the front of the package. That side is marketing, always. The ninety-nine percent clean, the bio, the natural. Turn it around.
The ingredients are listed by concentration, most first, least last. So what sits near the beginning is what you are actually buying, and what sits at the end is preservatives and colorants.
And then the part I keep repeating to myself: read until you hit the first questionable ingredient, then stop and put it back on the shelf. You don’t need to finish the list.
I asked about the scanning apps too, the ones where you point your phone at a barcode and get a score out of a hundred. She said no. Every app runs a different algorithm and none of them show you what’s behind the number. She has tested them against products whose labels she can read herself, and the scores didn’t match.
Her line stayed with me. Switch on your brain and take responsibility for your own health, instead of handing that responsibility to an application.
My reflections
There's a version of Helene's story that reads as a career change. Engineer becomes nutritionist. Non linear path, real change and the will to do the reinvention work.
Here is what I think happened. Based on what she told me in our conversation, her scientific brain refused to accept an answer that didn’t fit the evidence, and she followed that refusal all the way into a different life. The reinvention wasn’t the plan. It was the consequence. And I love such a story because reinventions are successful when they are done deliberately.
I keep thinking about how often we accept explanations simply because they came from someone with authority. The doctor said it. The label said it. The app gave it a green score. And most of the time that’s reasonable, because none of us can research everything. And we think to ourselves, who am I to question this?
Helene was 43 when she typed “modern professions” into Google and read the list one by one until she reached the word nutritionist. She was still working full time. She studied in parallel. Nothing about it was dramatic or cinematic. It was just a woman deciding she would rather understand something than be told about it.
And I have to be honest about my own week here, because sitting across from her in the same room taught me a version of the same lesson.
I have recorded every single episode of this podcast through a screen. It works. There was no real reason to change it. But being in the room with someone is different, and I only found that out because I was willing to be a beginner again at something I already know how to do.
The pauses land differently. You catch things a screen would never show you.
A question for you
Where in your life are you accepting an answer that doesn’t quite add up, because someone with more authority than you handed it to you?
I’d love to hear. Reply in the comments or reach out. I’m collecting these stories.
It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!
Until next time, gorgeous: keep moving. Keep questioning. Keep being brave enough to not fit the mold. Your non-linear path isn’t a failure. It’s evidence that you’re paying attention.
And the world needs that.
See you in the next one,
Cris