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New Year’s is the time many of us make resolutions, and at the top of most lists is getting healthy and losing weight. With health a major concern now with the pandemic, it’s easy to say health should take priority. Unfortunately, it will be probably just as easy to let those resolutions slide, as they seem to do year after year.
So to get some motivation, along with entertainment and even a dash of drama along the way, consider checking in with Jelayne “Jey” Shelton, who’s been navigating the bumpy road to fitness for the last few years. Since participating in the 2018 Honolulu Marathon at nearly 300 pounds, she’s shed about half those pounds, gaining enough confidence to start her own wellness company.
It’s all out there on the internet for people to see, documented on hundreds of videos she’s created as she goes about her daily life as a social media influencer, pitching products, sharing the ups and downs of her life. With her cheerful voice bidding you “a fantabulous day,” her videos and livestreams might inspire you. They definitely inspire her.
“Without social media, I don’t know if I would have stayed so accountable to my own health journey,” she said. “Having this platform really gave me that boost of like ‘Hey, people are watching.’ It’s kept me going.”
Shelton, now 32, has led a nomadic life, growing up in various towns on Oahu — Wahiawa, Mililani, college in Honolulu and Pearl City. She got married in her early 20s after a whirlwind, two-week romance and moved to Tennessee, where she had the first of her three children. In the midst of separation and eventual divorce, she moved back to the islands in 2012, and when her mother unexpectedly died in 2015, Shelton experienced depression, anxiety and loneliness — a recipe for weight gain and health problems.
Then she learned of Facebook Live, where people can livestream their experiences to their Facebook followers. “My friends were like, ‘If you’re feeling alone or anything, just come on. It’s kind of like a phone call,’” Shelton said, calling Facebook “a safe haven.”
In 2017 she decided to record live product reviews and had a viral smash with just her second review, in which she tested a skin-exfoliating charcoal mask. The hilarious, two-part video is highlighted by her elastic, wide-eyed facial contortions and her pidgin-inflected commentary: “Wax on, wax off!” she says gleefully as she smears the mask on with a rice paddle, before it all goes horribly, painfully wrong. “I know I made a comment earlier about giving birth, yeah, to two kids. I need one epidural for my face!” she exclaims as she tries to scrape it off.
“It was horrible, but people loved it. People love seeing other people in pain,” Shelton said of the video. “I ended up on the mainland news channels and radio stations talking about ‘Did you see that local girl who ripped off her skin with the mask?’”
The video, which now has 9.4 million views on Facebook, and others made her somewhat of a celebrity, catching the attention of local fashion designer Kini Zamora, who asked her to be a plus-size model in his shows in 2018 and 2019.
Shelton had always struggled with her weight, but over the years, it became a life-threatening problem. She tried numerous diet and exercise programs, even completing the 2017 Spartan Race, an obstacle-course event in Kualoa Ranch, but the pounds kept coming back. In 2018, shortly after giving birth to her third child, she gained 40 pounds in one month and was back near 300 pounds, and her doctor warned her that her weight was threatening her future.
“I was at the cusp of prediabetes. I had a fatty liver,” she said. “It wasn’t just like, ‘O-K, I like lose weight because I like look pretty or skinny.’ It was the fact that my doctor gave me a reality check and told me, ‘Jelayne, you’re on the verge of dying.’
“I started seeing that the negative and bad habits that I had, especially when it came to food, were slowly trickling into my kids. … At that point, I realized that I’m either going to make a change with my health now, or I’m not going to see my baby grow up.”
Her trainer for the Spartan Race egged her on to participate in the 2018 marathon, and she had sent in an entry “as a joke.” On race day, she was completely unprepared, having had “absolutely no physical activity whatsoever during that year,” she said.
“There was a lot of self-doubt and a lot of looking in the mirror and saying ‘You know what? You can just go back to bed. So what if people say, ‘See Jey, because you’re fat you can’t do it,’” Shelton said. “But there’s that devil and angel thing on your shoulders, and there was a part of me that went, ‘You know what? What if you do do it? What if you complete it? How crazy would that be?
“I’m the kind of person who likes to prove people wrong, especially people that doubt me and my abilities. Even today, thinking about it, I get emotional.”
Shelton livestreamed the event, sharing her 11-hour odyssey with followers. “I remember hitting the half-way marker crying, talking about my blisters, about how my whole body was swelling up and I couldn’t finish this,” she said.
But the reward of finishing the race fueled her drive to lose the weight. “I told myself ‘If I can complete a frickin’ marathon, then I can get healthy. I can do this. There’s no way I can’t,” she said.
Shelton now follows the “ketogenic lifestyle,” which features a low-carb, high-fat diet and drinking “lots of water, and less alcohol.” Though now divorced from her second husband and with three children to raise on her own, she gets her exercise in daily, circling a small lake near her Ewa Beach home, stretching and climbing on a children’s jungle-gym playhouse next door and occasionally working out at the community gym. Meanwhile, she’s on her phone constantly, shooting and editing her videos and writing inspirational messages and meal plans. An avid singer who went to college on a vocal scholarship, she also recently participated in her first music video with entertainer Jonathan “Jonny S” Sampaga.
Shelton has also started her own internet wellness company, Evolve360 (evolve360life.com), in which she dispenses dietary and fitness advice along with her customary good cheer to individual members. “It’s pretty much an accountability and support group that people can join,” said Shelton, who is working with a certified fitness trainer/nutritionist to develop proper meal plans and workout routines. She has about 600 paying members now and hopes to reach 1,000 soon, crediting her social media experience for developing her ability to interact with so many people.
While membership in Evolve360 costs $250 a year, no purchase is necessary to share in Shelton’s experiences. Her videos of yesteryear are still posted on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and recently she’s joined TikTok as well.
“I feel like I’m being very open and honest and very real and sometimes raw, and sometimes too raw in what I post and share on social media,” she said. “I try not to come off as a character. When you come to my page, you’ll see that sometimes I’m doing product reviews and sometimes I’m crying on my bathroom floor because I’m just overwhelmed with the stress of motherhood. I feel like me sharing all those parts of me makes me human to people.”
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Jump-start with Jey
Wellness company Evolve360 offers Shelton’s advice on “taking control of your health,” nutrition and exercise, a members-only Facebook community that can provide support and other benefits.
>> Cost: $25 for 30 days, or $250 a year
>> Info: evolve360life.com
On social media
>> facebook.com/jshelton19
>> instagram.com/jelayneshelton
>> youtube.com/c/JelayneShelton/featured
>> tiktok.com/@jelayneshelton
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