Vitamin queen Jessica Sepel on her secret struggles
When vitamin queen Jessica Sepel heard about the death of Jaimi Kenny, it brought back memories of her own battle, which affects so many young women.
Wentworth Courier
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Jessica Sepel beams in every photograph. On Instagram she smiles in her home kitchen, she glows happily on the cover of her many books and her long golden hair radiates with tumbling perfection on her websites. The JS Girls (yes, Sepel is so popular her fans even have their own name) follow her devotedly in the hope of looking this healthy themselves.
However, Sepel isn’t just another online influencer with a perfect image and a book deal. She is one of the few wellness bloggers to have also found impressive commercial success. What started out as a heartfelt blog at university about her own health struggles has grown into a global business now estimated to be valued in the hundreds of millions. Alongside the books she has launched a range of supplements, an eight-week program and an app. The buy-in for her lifestyle transformation doesn’t come cheap and a bottle of her most popular supplement, Hair and Energy, is $44.99.
I catch up with Sepel on the phone as she’s staying in Gaia, the luxury health retreat nestled in the Byron Bay hinterland. She’s incredibly friendly and chatty, much like her Instagram posts. The trip to the resort is a much-needed break and she tells me there’s yoga, meditation and meals cooked from the on-site organic garden. It sounds just the kind of place where a wellness star would be spotted relaxing by the pool with a vegan superfood salad and green smoothie.
“A lot of people come here when they are burned out,” Sepel says.
“It’s one of the most healing and rejuvenating spots … I’ve been coming here the last 10 years.”
Sepel is very open about her own path to healing. An obsession with dieting began as a young teenager after migrating from South Africa to Australia with her family and continued into her early 20s. It was a cycle of binge eating, overeating, deprivation and restriction, all with the misdirected aim of controlling the change in her life. Name a diet and she can guarantee she has tried it. (She even gave the extreme lemon detox a go).
Panic attacks in university lectures were the catalyst for change. In the fourth term of her health degree she started learning about food and freaked out when she realised what she was doing to her body. She started a blog that instantly connected with women struggling with the same body image issues and after graduation built a successful career as a nutritionist on her message of healthy eating and body positivity. ‘Give up dieting, throw out the scales and find balance with food’ became her rallying call.
When Jaimi Kenny, the daughter of former Olympians Lisa Curry and Grant Kenny, died aged 33 earlier this month, it is understood she too had endured a long battle with an eating disorder.
Looking at Kenny’s photographs online Sepel was heartbroken.
“It’s very sad. She is so beautiful,” she says.
“It is too tragic for words. We are losing the most incredible people to mental health.
“I feel hopeless because I don’t know how we are going to change everything.”
Everyday Sepel receives messages from women around the world sharing their struggles with eating disorders, anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges. These young women feel under incredible pressure and it is a silent struggle. She hopes that by sharing her own mental health challenges she can encourage them to also get medical help.
“How are we as women going to overcome these feelings of pressure?,” Sepel asks.
“I hope I can help women to guide them to take care of their mind.”
Kenny’s death at such a young age brought back Sepel’s memories of sadness and loss from an event that changed her life at the end of 2018.
Her popularity had been soaring and with it came a book deal and media appearances. She started expanding her brand into the US and landed her big break as the in-house nutritionist for NBC’s hugely popular Today show. Then everything changed. Her best friend died by suicide and Sepel fell into a spiral of anxiety and PTSD.
“She was my soul sister,” she says. “I was living overseas at the time when she started becoming unwell. I never saw the breakdown really and when you hear the news of that, and I’d seen her two days prior, you just crumble.
“It’s been the hardest (time) of my life.”
Sepel was so traumatised by her friend’s death she had to walk away from her TV deal and considered giving up her business. She was broken. On her return to Australia she moved into her mum’s house to recover and was put on a course of medication. The leap from practising holistic wellness to taking Valium, SSRIs and sleeping pills was a huge mind adjustment for her and she initially felt ashamed. But she now shares this experience to break down the stigma attached to medication and help her followers who are going through similar challenges.
“When I talk about the stigma attached to medicine to my community, they get so relieved hearing from a nutritionist,” she says.
“I don’t care what anyone says, it’s still a shameful subject. People are just not open about it.
“Especially from a wellness expert or author. You are not going to hear them talk about their mental health struggles. I just want women to know they are not alone.”
In the background to this crisis her company was finding more success than ever before. Her husband Dean Steingold, a successful online entrepreneur, joined JS Health at the start of 2019 as CEO to transform it into a larger e-commerce enterprise. Although the company doesn’t publish any valuation figures, the growth percentages it is willing to release are impressive. Revenue has increased by 1189 per cent in the past 12 months thanks to the success of the supplements line. COVID-19 has also resulted in a major boost for the company as it has seen an increase in demand for stress and anxiety supplements. While JS Health does most of its business through its own website, it is also stocked by a national pharmacy brand and sales within stores increased by 357 per cent in the last financial year. JS Health was also recently ranked 147 in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 in the Asia Pacific region and unsurprisingly investors have tried to buy the company. JS Health has ambitious plans for international expansion in the next 12 months and has opened offices in the UK, US and South Africa, alongside a new base in China.
Sepel cares deeply about the company and the online community she has built around it but she is sincere when she says the numbers are not important to her. After experiencing such loss her whole world has been jolted into perspective and nothing matters to her except her family, loved ones and health. Having financial freedom is nice but the success doesn’t make her happy.
“You could tell me a million times today how much this company JS Health is now worth. We are doing extraordinary numbers and when I say it doesn’t matter it really doesn’t matter,” Sepel says.
“If you spoke to Dean he would say to you we are building this to be a billion dollar company. I’m not as ambitious as he is.
“Where we are now it’s enough, really it’s enough.”
The couple met in South Africa 10 years ago and married in 2015 in Thailand. Sepel, who says she is too much of a people pleaser, struggles being a boss and happily hands over management responsibility to her husband. She focuses on her strengths of marketing and product development. Their separate roles mean they don’t cross paths too much at work, which is good for their marriage.
Steingold wants to grow the company as big as possible around the world and is excited by the international reach available to them through social media. Fans eagerly post before and after photos following a course of JS Health supplements, and this social proof is a huge business driver. For Steingold it’s not about the money; the reward is reaching customers and helping improve their lives.
“I’m very fortunate I have the most amazing business to run. It’s easier when you have an amazing product,” Steingold says. “Ninety per cent of the hard work is done by Jess. I’m just there to grow the rest of the business.
“The drive she has inside of her to help more people is exceptional. She is born with this ability. It’s never enough. She wants to give and give.
“She answers every Instagram DM she gets.”
There’s no escaping the fact that Sepel is the brand. It’s a long scroll down through all the photos of her on Google as alongside her own websites and social media channels, she appears in various media outlets and blogs. With her image so essential to the whole enterprise it is a surprise to hear she is uncomfortable with the attention. Being the face of the entire brand comes with enormous pressure and alongside this she describes herself as naturally very shy. She is not someone who ever craved being the centre of attention. While she has shared a lot about herself online she says she is not a blogger who likes to go on social media and talk about her life. She is private.
“I never wanted to be famous. I hate it. I just don’t like it, it just doesn’t feel natural to me,” she says.
“Sometimes I feel like a bit of a fake because I have to go on. I have to be the cover of a book. I have to be this person with the perfect hair on the website.
“I’m a much more low-key type humble person.”
It is clear from chatting to Sepel that she has worked hard and put herself out there to build her business from scratch. Being a successful social media entrepreneur looks glamorous on the Instagram feed but it’s just as demanding as any other retail or e-commerce business. There’s seven-day work weeks and long days in the office. Despite all this commitment, she struggles with people’s perception of her as the eastern suburbs ex-private schoolgirl. Sepel acknowledges the privileges she has had in her life thanks to her parents: an amazing upbringing and a great education. She has had a lot more security than the average person. But she wants people to know that’s where it stops as her business success didn’t happen easily for her and she didn’t have any financial help. She believes what she achieved in business is possible for anyone.
“I think people have assumed that it’s been easy for me when in fact it’s been very challenging,” she says.
“If you go to my website you will see a blonde eastern suburbs privileged girl. There’s a lot of assumptions around that.
“I’m just a good human being and I’ve worked really hard and I also believe everyone else can have what I have.”