Episode 4: 70-pound weightloss part 1 (when your body is struggling)

In episode four of The Jamerrill Show, Jamerrill begins part one of her 70-pound weight-loss story by intentionally starting before the visible results. This episode isn’t about a transformation. It’s about a decade-long health journey marked by pregnancy, postpartum seasons, chronic stress, hormone disruption, illness, grief, and rebuilding in the middle of real life. She walks listeners through how her body began quietly struggling in her late 30s, even when she didn’t yet have the language or lab work to explain it. From discovering Trim Healthy Mama as a supportive framework, to navigating long stretches of stalled progress, to enduring severe illness, traumatic birth, and overwhelming stress, Jamerrill shares the messy beginning and middle of a journey that required patience, simplicity, and self-advocacy. The heart of the episode is permission to start where you are, to keep things simple, and to care for yourself even when you don’t have answers yet. This episode sets the foundation for the rest of the series by reminding listeners that consistency over time matters, seasons change, and rebuilding can happen alongside very hard things.

Listen on your favorite platform

You can watch the full video episodes on my second YouTube channel, and the audio is available on Spotify, Amazon, and other podcast platforms. Apple Podcasts is pending and will be added as soon as it’s approved.

Key Takeaways

This was never a quick weight-loss story. It was a long health story.
What eventually looked like a 70-pound loss was actually the result of nearly ten years of listening to her body, navigating hormonal shifts, illness, pregnancy, grief, and stress, and making slow, steady choices across many seasons.

Your body can be struggling long before you have symptoms or language.
Looking back, there were many signs: high stress, hormonal disruption, missing cycles, stalled weight, and exhaustion. But without the perspective she has now, it was hard to recognize what her body was communicating at the time.

Keeping things simple made consistency possible.
Returning again and again to one familiar, supportive framework (Trim Healthy Mama, especially the Starter book) allowed her to care for herself even when everything else felt overwhelming. Simplicity wasn’t a shortcut, it was a lifeline.

Progress still counts during the “messy middle.”
Years of slow loss, plateaus, setbacks, illness, and grief were not wasted time. Even when she didn’t fully understand what was happening in her body, showing up consistently still mattered and laid the groundwork for future healing.

You don’t need all the answers to begin caring for yourself.
One of the most important messages of this episode is permission: permission to start where you are, to do what you can in this season, and to advocate for yourself even when you’re still learning. Caring for yourself is allowed especially when life is heavy.

Transcript

Welcome back again today, friends. This is episode four of The Jamerrill Show about trying to hold it all together when your body is struggling. And this is part one of my 70-pound weight loss journey. And there should be several episodes covering this topic for us. This is the topic so many women ask me about the most. This is not a quick transformation story; this is my long and complicated health journey. In particular, if I’m thinking through my ages and stages, this really came to light for me at age 37, and I’m 46 and a half. So, this has been an almost 10-year journey that I’ve been on.

So, before I talk about my noticeable weight loss, which became apparent in late 2023, I need to go back many years before to where the story started noticeably for me on this health-correcting and also weight loss journey. So, I didn’t know that my body was struggling. Looking back now, bird’s eye view from the future, I can see many key points where my body was giving me that information. I had had four babies in my 20s and then four more babies in my 30s, and one baby in my early 40s. After my first six babies, I did not see any major health changes besides regular birth weight gain and postpartum weight gain. I breastfed for over 20 years, and usually, I would breastfeed for at least two years and then I was pregnant again at some point. So, even though I don’t have the lab data for it, based on what I know now, my cortisol would have been high for many of those years, but I was not seeing any symptoms in my body. And that’s what youth had going for me at that point.

And then in my mid-30s, right around the time I was pregnant with baby number seven, and then even when I was postpartum with him, that is when the first Trim Healthy Mama book entered. It was about as thick as a phone book. I got that, I read it like it was my best friend, and even during pregnancy, I was able to implement many healthy-for-me strategies that I read about in that book. And the way that I understood the plan and the way that it was explained and laid out, it was really the first nutrition-style book I had ever read. And it taught me about taking sugar out of my diet, taking out white flour, and eating meals that were higher fat and lower carb. And those are their ‘S’ meals. This isn’t a whole Trim Healthy Mama dissertation. I’ve shared a lot about it, though, over the years; I call it my Trim Healthy Mama love fest. And then they also shared about ‘E’ meals, which was a medium level healthy carb and lower fat, and ‘Crossovers,’ which is a little bit of both. And that’s how they encouraged pregnant and nursing mothers to have more Crossovers.

And in general, even during pregnancy, taking sugar out, taking flour out, making their little sugar-free brownie—this is me holding a coffee mug. They have this little ‘muffin in a mug’ recipe, and I know there’s so many of those online, but it’s just a little chocolate mug recipe. And I started out by just having their on-plan breakfast, which was very much protein-focused. And at 35, that was a nice little hobby for myself.

For the video portion of the podcast, and if you’re listening on audio, you can come over to my second YouTube channel—it’s just Youtube.com/@jamerrill —and see. But this is the original Trim Healthy Mama book that I read mid-2013, 2014, and it has so many chapters. And, let’s see, it has 43 chapters, and I just read it like a novel. I absolutely loved it. That was a time in my life where I had built my very popular free homeschool deals blog after doing hobby blogging. I had built that into a massive full-time business that ended up providing 100% for my family, and all of that is great. And that was while pregnant with my sixth baby. And that meant my other five children were ages 12 and under. So, I had six kids from newborn to 12, a full-time online business that I built, and all the large family mom homeschool life things. Meaning, this book, this was my hobby, and this was the little thing that I found some enjoyment in. It was really my first time in looking for and finding a little hobby for myself outside of all of my other responsibilities.

And from mid-2013, [I] had baby number seven late 2014, moved to the Forest House if you followed my adventures. Early 2016, within those years, I had gently lost 40 pounds by following this Trim Healthy Mama book. And within that time, again, thank you, youth, right? So mid-30s is youthful still. I was not doing any kind of additional movement; I sat a lot. I read to my children two to four hours most afternoons. We had the big stack of read-aloud books and the tubs of Legos. Now, we were at that point on two acres in the country. We did have some chickens; we did have a nice, fun pond. I would take my little herd of kids. And at this point, four of my children were ages five and under. So, that’s a lot of little kids: I had a newborn, a one-and-a-half-year-old, an almost four-year-old, and a five-year-old. And then the kids after that were 7, 9, and 12. So again, a big household, spinning the plates by myself, ages newborn through 12.

And so my physical movement would look like: the kids would go out to play. I would sit in the field and watch them and nurse the baby, take care of the younger children. Many times later in the afternoon, me and four of those younger kids, we would walk our back field. But I was still only getting in about 3,000 to 4,000 steps a day. I was doing no extra movement; I just changed the way that I was eating, and that worked very well for me.

And in 2016, we had a move over an hour away. Moving in general is stressful. And after that move, I had extra, additional life stress that I was juggling. And additionally, I was making entrepreneur mom business moves. I will at least say the birth of my eighth baby was my best birthing experience ever. I just could tell after I had him, something had shifted in my body in a different way. The postpartum baby weight didn’t budge. And also, my YouTube channel had grown a lot, which, even though those are great things, it still added a lot more stress points to my life.

And in 2018, I did the work to sell my popular blog, which was just like selling a house. And I took that equity, meaning I sold most of my income streams. I had very little money coming in at that point, but I sold it for a profit, and that gave me the capital I needed at that time, meaning the money to still pay myself a paycheck for a while and go all in on my main YouTube channel. So that was a big, another big responsibility that I created. Now I’m glad that I sold that blog because I had built it and I got my sweat equity out of it, and that gave me the freedom to go full in on my YouTube channel, which then from about 2018 to 2020—so within two years—then my main YouTube channel produced multiple more times income than my popular blog ever did, which was already providing full-time for my large household.

All that to say, side note, by the way, if you’re interested in starting a YouTube channel, I have a free “YouTuber Success Master Class“. You can go to Jamerrill.com/YouTube and sign up for that free training because I’ve learned a lot about making income streams and turning YouTube into a full-time business. And I have a lot to say about that.

But all that to say, all those years added even more stress points. And then, hormonal lactating, menstrual cycling—women talk—after baby number eight. I didn’t get my menstrual cycle back for years, and that was my first experience having trouble with that. It had always been with my babies, and I know this doesn’t work this way for every woman, but for me, as long as I was breastfeeding, it could be six months to a year or so before I would get my menstrual cycle back. I would get it back at some point, and within two to three years—I think my closest babies were 18 months—I would be pregnant again. So, I was used to not having a menstrual cycle consistently, but it was because I was pregnant or breastfeeding.

And as things went on, as baby number eight was a year old and then he was a year and a half, and then even when I weaned him, my menstrual cycle had not come back. So I was 39, he was two years old, and I just didn’t have it anymore. And that was very odd, and I felt like things were not right in my body. But I had increased business demands, household stress, and I was homeschooling a house full of kids. I had the pressure that because I sold that blog, got my equity out, and wanted to go all in on YouTube, I had to make that income happen through YouTube. And then there were a lot of reasons that where we were living ended up not being the best choice hindsight, because we were well over an hour from the cities that we were used to operating out of—going to church, going to groups, going to Costco, those sort of things. And we still ended up in those various cities two to three times a week, so we just ended up on the road more.

And also in 2018, 2019, I couldn’t figure out how to access good care for my hormones. I figured not having a menstrual cycle, and even being later in breastfeeding, or when I had baby number eight weaned, I thought, “Okay, this must be something with my hormones. I need to figure this out”. The only person that I could find, the only practitioner in the Shenandoah Valley area at that time that I could access—and accessing healthcare via Zoom and via medical portals, it wasn’t accessible to me then. If it was a thing, I had no knowledge of it, I had no access. I know there’s so many ways that you can do it in this day and age. I would have loved to have had Function Health to be able to do my labs and connect me with practitioners and give me some help then, but I didn’t. So, I had to drive an hour and a half each way to access the only person that I could find that could help with hormone health.

And I remember feeling very overwhelmed. She did order lab work; I don’t remember now what that was. I remember I purchased the cortisol kit, and I was supposed to do the saliva tubes throughout the day. And I just remember figuring out all the pieces of that puzzle. I still felt very alone, and I didn’t feel like I had the capacity to travel, to make the testing happen, to go back for follow-up appointments. And putting that kind of time into my own self-care. So, caring for myself felt like one more impossible thing.

And many times between age 37 through age 41, I got back on the Trim Healthy Mama plan. I was off it a little bit when we moved and then off it during my pregnancy. It just felt harder to have a little hobby for myself and to do particular things for myself. So, I would have some weeks I would get back on THM, and then I would be off. I had many times during those four years from age 38 through 41-ish where I would also try Keto for different spurts, and just nothing moved the needle, and it was very discouraging.

And then we sold that property, and we moved to this property, and the whole world changed in 2020. And at that point, I had just pretty much given up on my self-care to a point. I mean, I always had hope, right, that in the right season, I’d figure out how to get more movement in. At the Forest House, we had 13 acres and waterfalls and a wonderful dream forest. And of course, the kids and I hiked those trails; we hiked our road. And in 2016 when I got my first Apple Watch, I can look back now at that data, and I was getting 3,000-ish steps a day. So basically at that time, I didn’t have a lot of movement when I was in the house. I was sitting a lot, homeschooling the kids, reading to the kids, doing kitchen activities, and the steps that I got would be on our road and forest hikes. And my steps only decreased more in 2017 when I had baby number eight. 2018, 2019, they were somewhere between 3,000, sometimes 5,000 steps a day.

And my steps really increased when we moved to this property in 2020. And then again, when the world shut down, I was starting a farm. And so I would have some days here where I would get 15,000 steps, 19,000 steps. It wasn’t daily; it wasn’t even those kind of steps every week, but I would have some 7,000-step days. And I definitely started to think about how good I felt with all that movement on those movement days.

And then also what happened in 2020 is I had another little season of trying Keto again. And it was probably for about eight weeks or so in spring 2020. And for the first time in years, I got my menstrual cycle back. And then in July 2020, I had a positive pregnancy test, and I was pregnant with baby number nine. And I honestly thought that season had gone.

And very quickly with baby number nine, by September 2020, I got lab work back showing that my vitamin D level was seven, which is critically low. And I know now looking back, I just did not feel right. But I’m a forever optimist; I was making the best of it. I knew, “Okay, well, I’m pregnant,” and I had just turned 41, and just maybe I wouldn’t feel that great during that pregnancy.

And then by January 2021, in my third trimester of that pregnancy—and my dates could be off a little bit, it could be that I found out I was pregnant in June 2020, but I remember lab work was in the fall—kind of neither here nor there details, but some people who follow might say, “Jamerrill, these are the correct dates”. But I know for sure in my third trimester, I ended up in the hospital with very high E. coli and a very high E. coli infection. And I was hospitalized for many days on many rounds of IV antibiotics, and they could not do certain scans and testing because of the later stage of my pregnancy. And I went home very sick, and I went home on more antibiotics.

And from January 2021 when I got out of the hospital until the end of March 2021 when I had baby number nine, I parked myself on that blue couch out in the baby kitchen area. You can watch those videos over on my main YouTube channel. And I homeschooled from that couch. I would have the kids set up at the table out there, and I read stories from that couch. And I just had to sit and rest with my feet up most of the time and take multiple courses of antibiotics, go back for multiple testing, and continue to show incredibly high E. coli counts. It was not responding well to the antibiotics.

And so during that time from the couch, I decided two things. I had been reading again in the Trim Healthy Mama Facebook groups, and I was encouraged by what I had read about a new book they had at the time called Trim Healthy Starter. So in January 2021 when I was out of the hospital, and before I had the baby, when I was basically on couch-rot rest, I got the Trim Healthy Starter book that I saw Pearl talk about in one of the Trim Healthy Mama Facebook groups. And what I liked about it, because it had been a couple years since I was continually swinging and swimming within all the plan language and working all their recipes—and basically it had been a few years since the plan had been living in my mind consistently—this book became my new best friend because, even as the little tagline says, “the plan in a nutshell”. And it gave the breakdown of the plan, a nice little nutshell breakdown. And then it went through, I believe this book has roughly 50 recipes. I’m looking quickly. Yes, it says “cheat sheets for easy references and 50 of the best and easiest recipes to get you going and loving your food”.

So, I started eating Trim Healthy Mama again. So sick. And I lived this plan and this book with its 50 recipes all the way through so many life seasons until heavy 2024. And I have the math worked out to, of course, you know, if one recipe is making six to nine muffins, I mean, we’re times-fiving that recipe. I have many of my favorite recipes marked. This book became my new best friend January and winter 2021 all the way through 2024. So, this book was my best friend for several years.

And some of my very first TikTok videos are also me giving myself the assignment: if I did one thing for myself, I was going to just make sure all of my meals were on the Trim Healthy Mama plan every day. I was in my third trimester of pregnancy. I’ve already said multiple times about how incredibly sick I was. And if I was going to drag myself off of my couch every day, it was going to be to get myself my Trim Healthy Mama meals and special drink recipes they have and snacks. And that is the one thing I did for myself starting in winter 2021. And some of my first TikTok videos are me sautéing my zucchini and frying my eggs. I was probably frying them in butter at that time. I love to fry them in bacon grease these days. But I just very slowly was like, “If I do one thing for myself”—because I just knew I was so sick, and I didn’t know how exactly to heal myself. And the regular medical community, I didn’t feel like I had an advocate. I felt like the urology group that I got in with ended up failing me personally in many big ways. And it just seemed like I was fighting for my health and my life and my baby’s life within modern medicine, and that is not a great place to be. But I could do one thing for myself and my health and my mental health—and I was hoping my physical health—is I could eat on this plan that had worked for me many years before. I could slow down enough because I was forced to slow down to take care of myself by choosing my meals in this way.

And so I had baby number nine in March 2021. It was my last baby. Unfortunately, it was also a traumatic birth that was over 72 hours. So, I also had the added layer to process and grieve that birthing experience. And I remember—I won’t get into all of those details—but I just remember at one point nearing the end feeling like I really just should be sent out. I was at a birthing center, and I was thinking, but I couldn’t advocate for myself. And I had a different doula. The doula that I had with baby number eight was perfection, all my hopes and dreams, and she moved to another state. So here I am getting into my birth story a little bit. But I had another doula that only during the birthing experience I found out she was not a good match for me. She was very strict and militant, where my other doula was very intuitive. And she, the moment she walked in, she let me do what my body needed to do. She gave me a head-to-toe full body massage. Within about 45 minutes, I saw this image of a red balloon come down and pop like in my mind. At that moment, my water broke. Within 15 minutes, I was holding my baby. That was baby number eight.

[The birth] did not go that way with baby number nine. There were many, many factors. But for me, having a birthing experience where I also felt like I had some autonomy amongst everything else that was going on, I ended up feeling very, very alone. And towards the end when I was trying to figure out how to advocate to just be sent to the hospital, I also felt like it might just be easier to leave my body. It was getting that bad. So when I came home, I remember when I met baby number nine, I looked at him and the first thing I said to him is, “Baby, we made it. We made it”. And even today, I’ll look at him and I’ll say, “We made it”.

And then when I came home with him, I was still high E. coli, still on another antibiotic. And then I went through the process of having to advocate and try to get an MRI. It was still very heavy post-COVID times as far as getting access to certain services.

And by May 2021, I finally had the information that I had a 10 mm kidney stone all that time. And that was blocking my right kidney, and it was harboring and growing the bacteria. So that’s where the E. coli was held and growing from, to the best of my knowledge. I had many other life layers going on and still homeschooling and still working full-time and still full-time providing for everything and everyone. And they determined because of the size of the stone, they could not take care of it externally. They would have to go up into my right kidney, break it down with lasers, and then I would need to have a stent in my urethra for over a week.

So during that whole time, though, I continued on controlling what I could control. I couldn’t do a lot even with my movement at that time. I was hopeful one day I’d be able to. I remember having on my little to-do list, you know, “walk the driveway for an hour”. I had those thoughts even then. But I could consistently, every day, meal by meal, eat from this Trim Healthy Starter book.

And I had a lot of other life adventures happening, so multiple layers. And so, arriving about a year and a half or so later—am I doing that right? No, two and a half years later. I got to do my math. So we have January 2021 to 2022 to 2023, and then by June 2023. So two and a half years of eating back on the Trim Healthy Mama plan, primarily using this Trim Healthy Starter cookbook. And I did over that time collect all their other cookbooks because they had many more. And I would dabble and do some recipes in their other books, but this kept it easy for me. This was my base; it wasn’t complicated, and I could do it.

And so during that two and a half years, I lost about 25 pounds. That was with no additional added steps or exercise. And that was also while healing my body from the E. coli, which did majorly start to clean up after that surgery, but I was still sick for a long time. And I was breastfeeding for about two years of those two and a half years. And some women’s bodies totally hold on to the weight while breastfeeding; it’s absolutely not going to budge. So, I was happy that I had gone from 210 where I started postpartum to around 185. That was a huge loss for me. And again, I was very happy with it. And I really enjoyed this. I enjoyed this Trim Healthy Starter book.

And I do think part of whatever we pick and whatever we do for ourselves, it’s fun to have fun, like Dr. Seuss says, right? I like to have fun; I like to enjoy the things that I’m putting my time into. Like I’m really enjoying doing these podcast videos in 2026 as we’re rolling into it. I’m really enjoying my work and my projects, and I’m enjoying a great many things.

Also, in late June 2023, I found out I was pregnant with my tenth baby, which I thought would probably timeline-wise be my last baby. And then I lost that baby. I was around eight weeks. I lost that baby on July 31st, 2023. And so after the miscarriage, I had probably gained about 10 pounds.

Then my life astronomically imploded by late August 2023, and I was at 195. And I was under the most horrific stress of my whole entire adult life. And I had had a few weeks being loosey-goosey off plan after the miscarriage. And so I again did what I could do. I grabbed this Trim Healthy Starter book. I made sure, starting August 25th—we’ll say 2023—all my meals were 100% on plan. And I very intuitively started to control what I could control. I could make sure everything I put in my mouth lined up with this book that had brought me so much joy and had been with me for several years. And then I also intuitively started my heavy walking journey, which I’ve shared a great deal with you about, and I’ll continue to share more about.

So as I wrap up my story, I really want you to hear this: Doing your best with whatever you have in your current season counts. You’ve heard many times during all of my years of struggle until we get to a season where eventually we’re going to see some results. So many times I dug in and I did the best with what I had to work with. And keeping it simple for myself and something that I enjoyed made a huge difference.

And you’ll also see many parts of my story so far where I didn’t have the answers for what my body was doing. So this episode really is about showing you the messy beginning and the messy middle. And you may have a messy middle years where you’re struggling, where you’re trying different things, when you’re falling down and you’re getting back up. And you may not have the full understanding of even what you’re dealing with in your current season. But that season is still very real, and it still very much matters because it’s part of your story. And even though I’m in a season where I’ve lost 70 pounds and I’ve maintained that weight loss for several years now, I have learned I don’t have to know everything in order to be my own advocate. And even now in my current season, I mean, I’m marching towards 47, so hormones are changing, things are changing, and I have whole new learning lessons in front of me. And that’s the whole point of this podcast.

I didn’t want to wait until I thought I had all the answers, right? I wasn’t going to wait. I’ll wait ten years when I have more—when I have all the answers—because in ten years there’ll be new questions, and there’ll be new seasons I’m working through. But I wanted to start this podcast as a journey of things I’m currently working through and how I’m learning to take the best care of myself as I move forward. And I hope that encourages you in your self-care journey, too. The biggest thing I want you to take from this episode is to give yourself permission to start right where you are. You can begin caring for yourself right where you are. I could do nothing else for myself in January 2021. I could barely get my body off the couch; I was so sick. Except I could get up two to three times a day, go into my original little baby kitchen, and make myself some sort of little meal that followed this plan that made me very happy.

In our next episode, I will pick up where this story leaves off in fall 2023. And again, that’s when my life shifted in many ways. And that’s also when a lot of the moving pieces in my life started to really come together. And I’ll talk about the slow and steady choices I continued to make at that time that has led to the overall 70-pound weight loss. Again, it’s my unique story; it’s not a quick fix story, and it’s not about me getting everything right. It’s what it looked like to rebuild in the middle of very hard things, and how consistency over time can add up even when the rest of life feels very overwhelming. So, I’ll see you in the next episode with the rest of the story. Thank you so much for listening today.

Resources Mentioned

• Trim Healthy Starter
• Function Health
• THM Meal Planning Guides