‘Support where it matters most’: Jessie Bye shares the purpose fuelling Your Health Torbay

Reflecting on International Women’s Day 2026, Jessie Bye shares her path into public health and the people at the heart of Your Health Torbay. Now Head of Service, Jessie brings together lived experience, academic grounding and years of hands-on practice to help shape an integrated wellbeing offer for Torbay driven by small, everyday acts of kindness.

How I got here

I started my working life studying zoology at university, thinking I might work in conservation until I realised the day-to-day reality wasn’t quite right for me. After graduating, I took some time to travel, then returned to the UK and worked on the executive team at King’s College London. Being close to the university’s nutrition and dietetics department brought something long-standing into focus for me.

When I was a teenager, I’d had a very disordered relationship with food and with my body. I wasn’t very well. At a time when NHS waiting lists were much shorter, I was very lucky and worked with really kind and supportive staff experienced in dietetics and therapy. I got much better thanks to their care. It was always inspirational to me that they’d chosen a career to help people with their own individual relationship with their health.

Spending time with academics whose work centred on health and behaviour reignited this spark in me. So, I decided to retrain, and applied for a master’s in nutrition. I studied full-time while working full-time in a restaurant to make it possible, graduating just before the pandemic. During lockdown, I delivered online education about food, stress and wellbeing, and took on some private performance-based nutrition work. It was interesting, but I kept coming back to the same feeling. I wanted to work with people who wouldn’t usually have access to that kind of support, but who needed it the most.

When my husband and I moved to the South West, I joined Torbay’s Healthy Lifestyles Team. My role involved speaking with patients at their hospital bedside and helping them understand what local support existed. The stories I heard from the people I spoke to were incredible. People shared a small window into their lives. I met with patients who had achieved amazing things – but also people who’d led difficult lives in challenging circumstances whereby their health had suffered as a result. They needed and wanted support from services like ours, and this was the first time someone had actually sat down and spoken to them about what was available to them locally.

I loved this work at the hospital, but I also wanted to do more, to contribute more. So when the service transferred to ABL, the chance to help build an inhouse Tier 2 weight management programme felt like the opportunity I’d been looking for. To do something meaningful for the community I’d come to care deeply about – to take a holistic and sustainable approach to weight management, helping people to build a better relationship with food, their bodies, and their health in general.

Jessie Bye said,

“I wasn’t going to reach the people who needed me most if I stayed in private work. I wanted to use my skills where they could genuinely make a difference.”

What I do – and why it matters

Your Health Torbay is a broad, integrated wellbeing service. We are a one-stop shop for helping people to improve their health, whatever that looks like – whether it’s to quit smoking, manage their weight, become more active, reduce alcohol, or simply feel more in control of their health. Nothing we do is one-size-fits-all. We start with people’s lives, not a checklist.

Torbay has an ageing population, and loneliness and isolation sit quietly behind a lot of the health challenges we see. That’s part of why our weight management pathway doesn’t stop after 12 weeks. We offer continued monthly sessions for six more months, giving people support, routine and connection. For some, it’s the only time they leave the house. So we really want to be the place where people can feel a sense of belonging. It’s hugely gratifying to see people make lifelong friends on the programme, meeting up outside the group and going on weekly walks together.

Our stop smoking team provides behaviour change support and nicotine replacement therapy, often working with people facing multiple pressures — financial strain, housing instability, caring responsibilities, mental health challenges. Health coaching bridges everything else: people come to us wanting to move more, or because they’re struggling with confidence, or because they need signposting to services they never knew existed. Because we’re so embedded in the community, we can help people navigate what’s available — from carers’ registration to local wellbeing groups — and help them feel less alone in the process.

As Head of Service, I work operationally across all of this: system meetings, partner engagement, safeguarding, relationships with primary and secondary care, making sure our offer is clinically safe and meaningful. I also consider it to be a pleasure and one of the highlights of my job that I continue to be hands-on with clients. I still cover weight management groups, support advisors with complex cases, and stay connected to the reality of what our clients experience. I feel genuinely lucky that the size of our service means I can do both.

What makes our team special isn’t just their qualifications — though we have mental health practitioners, former PTs, exercise-on-referral specialists, people with lived experience, people who’ve worked in addiction, homelessness, learning disabilities, and the NHS for decades. It’s that they care deeply. They meet people at their level, where they are, and partner with them to figure out what’s going to work for them as an individual.

Moments that stay with me

People come to us with a lot going on in their lives — things like grief, caring responsibilities, chronic health issues, stress, money worries or years of shame and low self-worth. Our work matters because we’re often the first people to really listen and help them feel understood, encouraged, and capable of making a change.

A client I worked with had cardiac and chronic health conditions that had overshadowed every aspect of his health for years. Two of his brothers had died from heart-related issues. He had leukaemia, high blood pressure, chronic pain and fatigue, and a history of feeling knocked back by every attempt to improve his health. He knew he needed help but had begun to doubt whether change was possible.

In his first few weeks with our service, he didn’t lose any weight. He said that he would have walked away from previous programmes at that point. But what kept him here was encouragement. We highlighted all of the positive behaviour he’d managed to implement, shifting his attention away from what hadn’t changed and toward what he was already doing well. Over time, things started to shift. He went on to lose more than 20 kilograms, bring his blood pressure down to a much safer level, swim further and with more confidence, reduce alcohol and sugar, and find pride in his appearance for the first time in years. He told the team it felt like the first truly positive health news he’d had in 20 years, and now he can enjoy his family for longer.

Another client I supported early on came into sessions visibly exhausted from her caring role. I remember her so clearly because she fell asleep in her first session. Some weeks she barely spoke, other weeks she struggled to keep her eyes open. A few weeks in, after a longer conversation, I learned she was working very long hours as a personal assistant for a man with complex needs — sometimes driving 12 hours a day — and our group was the only time she’d sat down in days without someone needing something from her. Her weight didn’t change during those first twelve weeks, but the real issue was the level of stress she was under.

We spent time talking about that and encouraging her to speak to her employer about how it was affecting her health. When she came back for her first monthly follow-up after the initial 12-week programme ended, she looked like a different person: rested, smiling, and happy. She’d had a really good conversation with her employer and she was feeling so much more supported. In the six months that followed, she lost nearly 40% of her body weight. As soon as she was free of all that stress, her ability to make the changes she wanted to make had completely transformed.

Jessie Bye added,

“We are commissioned to help people lose weight, but really we’re in the market of helping people to feel good.”

What Give to Gain means to me

Give to Gain, to me, is about where you decide to put your effort. I could have stayed in private work. It was interesting and it paid well – but it removed me from the people who I wanted to support the most. I chose public health because I wanted my training in nutrition to be useful to people who do not get long appointments and who are managing complicated lives. The NHS staff who helped me when I was younger set a standard for calm, patient care. I have tried to hold to that.

In practice, giving looks very ordinary. It is the extra phone call when someone has had a bad week. It is noticing what went well rather than focusing on what did not. It is making space for slow progress and not expecting perfection. What I gain is trust. People keep coming, they let us into their lives, and they try again. It’s not about a number on a scale for us. We help people to feel better – to be happier. Knowing I’ve played even a small part in that is more valuable to me than anything else.

To learn more about our Your Health Torbay lifestyle support, visit https://yourhealthtorbay.co.uk or call 01803 694 528 to speak with a member of our team.