Cheryl Meyer: The Woman Who Lost Her Health While Building a Seven-Figure Business and Found a New Purpose in Returning to Wellness

Discover Cheryl Meyer’s journey from building a seven-figure jewellery business to becoming an award-winning author, health coach, speaker, and wellness entrepreneur.

Sarfraz Khan

Cheryl Meyer: The Woman Who Lost Her Health While Building a Seven-Figure Business and Found a New Purpose in Returning to Wellness

For Cheryl Meyer, the biggest lesson of her entrepreneurial journey did not come from a business failure, financial setback, or a difficult client. It came from her own body.

For years, Cheryl was a successful solopreneur in the jewellery industry, building a seven-figure business through the kind of determination, discipline, and work ethic that entrepreneurs are often celebrated for. She was busy, ambitious, and focused on growth. But while she was investing everything into building her business, one part of her life was receiving almost no attention: her health. In hindsight, Cheryl describes that period with striking honesty. She had built a successful business, but she had, in her own words, “bankrupted” her body.

One morning, everything changed.

And Cheryl learned: you can’t be great if you don’t FEEL great.

Cheryl woke up in such severe pain that she could barely move. Her muscles and joints hurt, and getting out of bed became a struggle. She sought medical help and underwent tests, but she got no answers. The tests showed that nothing was wrong, but Cheryl still couldn’t function because of severe chronic pain. The experience became a turning point. Rather than accepting her condition without further questioning and living a life of pain and pills, Cheryl began researching, reading, and searching for a deeper understanding of what was creating her chronic pain.

That decision would eventually change the direction of her life.

Today, Cheryl Meyer is an award-winning author, certified health coach, teacher, speaker, podcaster, and PSYCH-K facilitator. Her books have collectively won 24 awards, and through Cheryl M Health Muse, she has created a platform built around wellness education, lifestyle change, self-care, and personal empowerment. But her work did not begin with a business plan or an attempt to enter the rapidly growing wellness industry. It began with a woman who was in pain and refused to believe she could return to wellness. She kept looking for her puzzle piece to return to Feeling Great.

When Success Came at a Personal Cost

Entrepreneurs are conditioned to believe that long working hours are normal. Stress is treated as unavoidable. Sleep, exercise, and personal time are frequently postponed in the belief that there will be time for them later.

Cheryl lived that reality.

She had built a successful business, but she had not made herself a priority. Looking back, she came to believe that the lifestyle she had created around constant work had taken a serious toll on her wellbeing. Her health eventually involved conditions including fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s, IBS, Type II diabetes, and fatty liver, and she was obese. The first four are autoimmune diseases, and the fatty liver was discovered by accident during a scan for something else.

The experience forced Cheryl to confront a difficult question that many ambitious professionals avoid until a crisis makes it unavoidable: What is the value of success if your health is paying the price?

For Cheryl, there was no simple answer and no instant transformation. She began what became an intensive personal investigation into food, lifestyle, and environmental factors.

She studied different approaches to health and started examining the choices she made every day. She followed people in a new field called Functional Medicine, where they looked for root causes and understood that everything and all functions in the body were connected.

Everything about her life changed. What she ate changed to eating the organic rainbow of real foods. She became more conscious of environmental toxins, eliminating them first from her food and then from her environment, looking up every ingredient in all her products, personal care products, cosmetics, cleaning products, her water, her cooking utensils, and food storage. She replaced toxic products with low-toxin alternatives, significantly lowering her toxic load.

Cheryl then learned to lower her stress—her cortisol was so low she was borderline Addison’s Disease.

Her relationships changed. She broke up with a toxic relationship that was emotionally non-supportive when he refused to change lifestyle habits, and found someone to go on a get-well journey with her instead. She eventually married him. She also eventually sold her business.

She began making significant lifestyle changes and gradually developed a much broader understanding of what health meant to her. Along the way, she lost 75 pounds without dieting, but by eating for her future health.

“I knew something was wrong,” Cheryl has said while describing the beginning of that journey. The feeling pushed her to keep researching and, eventually, to take an active role in the decisions she was making about her own life.

The Entrepreneur in Her Never Disappeared

What Cheryl did next reflects the same entrepreneurial instinct that had helped her build her years as a successful businesswoman. In business, she learned to look for what was missing and how she could solve that problem. Then she found solutions for that problem for herself and for her customers. She was a master problem solver.

She started solving the problems of her health, one by one.

Entrepreneurs are accustomed to facing uncertainty. When something is not working, they gather information, test solutions, change direction, and keep moving. Cheryl brought that same persistence to her personal health journey. She immersed herself in research and gradually developed a lifestyle centered on whole foods, reducing unnecessary toxins, and making self-care a priority. She redefined self-care as all aspects of her life where she could build resilience. This included emotional resilience, physical resilience, mental resilience, financial resilience, and spiritual resilience.

One idea became particularly important to her: eating the rainbow to harness their essential nutrients and the thousands of phytonutrients in each color. These were the elements to harness to rebuild resilience in her body and brain. These were the building blocks to support her body every day.

For Cheryl, this meant building meals around a wide variety of colourful, whole organic foods. It was not about following another punishing diet or constantly counting what she could not eat. Instead, she focused on the quality and diversity of the food she was bringing into her future health and life.

Over time, Cheryl says she lost 75 pounds without conventional dieting and experienced major improvements in her health. She describes her chronic conditions as having gone into remission or being resolved through the changes she made. She learned about Epigenetics: that we are given a blueprint in our genetics when we are born, but whether this blueprint is realized is up to our lifestyle habits and choices and whether we turn on the switch for disease or leave it off.

The transformation gave her something more than improved health. Over the years, she returned to wellness and to Feeling really Good.

It gave her a new direction.

Cheryl began to ask a different question: If these changes had such a profound impact on my life, how could I use what I have learned to help others?

That question became the foundation of her second career.

Starting Again at 67

At 67, after having already built a successful entrepreneurial career, she went back to school to become a certified health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. She already held a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, but Cheryl was prepared to become a student again because she wanted her new work to be supported by formal training as well as personal experience.

It was a bold decision.

Cheryl could have retired or simply continued sharing her experiences informally. Instead, she chose to develop new credentials and build a new professional identity around what had become her life's purpose.

Your purpose is where your joy, your gifts, your story, and what you have to give the world finally meet. And it is often the gift that comes from your greatest crisis. Teaching others how to do something lifechanging becomes your final step to wellness.

Cheryl committed herself fully to health and wellness and to sharing with others what she had learned.

That decision led to the creation and expansion of Cheryl M Health Muse, a platform through which she now shares books, courses, coaching, podcasts, educational resources, and wellness guidance.

Her journey offers a particularly relevant lesson for entrepreneurs: You can’t be great if you don’t feel great, and you get a do-over whenever you decide to have one. We find our purpose through our biggest crises. That crisis becomes the raw material for our next venture and our greatest passion. She decided to encourage others to own their own health and then to own their own life.

Turning a Personal Story into a Platform

One of Cheryl's strengths as an entrepreneur has been her ability to transform lived experience into meaningful intellectual property.

Her health journey gave her a new success story. She learned that she had more power over her health and life than she had ever been led to believe. She learned that if she set her mind to it and became unstoppable, nothing was truly impossible. Her education and continued research helped her deepen that understanding. Then she began finding ways to share what she had learned with a wider audience.

She wrote books.

She developed courses.

She created educational resources.

She began speaking and appearing on podcasts. She has 130 podcasts of her own that went out to 75 countries, and she has appeared as a guest on over 350 more.

She launched her own conversations around wellness and how to own it.

Her books have now won a combined 24 awards, giving her work significant recognition in the wellness and publishing space. Through her writing, Cheryl shares the principles that helped reshape her own lifestyle and encourages readers to take a more active and informed approach to their wellbeing.

Her cookbook, Eat the Rainbow, takes one of her central philosophies directly into the kitchen. It is an extension of her belief that healthier living needs to be built upon putting quality ingredients into the body we call home. The way to do that most effectively is to control the sourcing of the ingredients. It does not involve deprivation or impossible routines. Food, in Cheryl's approach, should nourish the body while remaining something people can enjoy. She loves cooking for others and hearing their response, “Wow, that was healthy? It was so delicious.”

This is where Cheryl's entrepreneurial experience becomes particularly visible. She has not built her work around a single service. Instead, she has developed multiple ways for people to engage with her mission. Someone may first discover her through a podcast, read one of her books, download her free health magazine, explore a course, or eventually seek private mentoring.

The message remains consistent across every platform: own your own health by developing lifestyle habits that will make you feel great in your future. It is not something to think about only after losing it. There is NO magic pill; you are your own magic pill and can create your future health with wellness habits starting today and moving forward.

It is something worth making a priority while we shape our daily choices.

Beyond Nutrition: Cheryl’s 20 Pillars of Health

Although food is an important part of Cheryl Meyer's philosophy, she does not see wellness as something that can be solved simply by changing what is on a person's plate.

Over the years, she developed what she calls her 20 Pillars of Health, a broader approach that recognizes the many varied factors influencing how people feel and live. Nutrition is one part of the picture, but Cheryl also places importance on areas such as stress, sleep, movement, mindset, personal environment, and the habits people build over time. The number one most important pillar, as proven by the Blue Zone project, is community. Surrounding yourself with others who enjoy your same healthy philosophies and who support your life.

The philosophy is rooted in a lesson she learned personally.

Health is rarely determined by one decision.

It is shaped by patterns.

What we repeatedly eat. How we repeatedly respond to stress. Whether we give ourselves time to rest. How we support ourselves with self-care. Whether we pay attention to the people, environments, and routines that influence us and build a supportive community.

Cheryl's approach is therefore not simply about telling people what they should do. It is about helping them understand how they can begin making changes that are realistic for their own future lives.

This is also where her work has increasingly expanded into the area of self-love.

For Cheryl, self-love is not a slogan or an occasional act of indulgence. She sees it as the foundation of lasting self-care. If people genuinely value themselves, she believes, healthy habits are how we show ourselves self-respect and create a life of Feeling Good. Self-love becomes the foundation of all hopes and dreams. When we love ourselves, healthy habits are no longer a bother. Failure no longer exists; it’s simply a guide for what didn’t work so that we can find a new approach that does. Abundance comes easily because we know we are worth it. A happy life in all aspects comes from self-love. It even attracts loving, supportive people into our orbit because our own self-love becomes reflected in those we attract.

That perspective has become one of the strongest themes in her work today. Her message is that people should care for themselves because they believe they are worth caring for. And this belief becomes the key to the kingdom of joy.

Why Knowledge Alone Is Not Enough

Cheryl also understands that information does not automatically lead to transformation.

Most people already know that they should sleep better. They know that movement is important. They know that excessive stress can affect their lives. The challenge is often not knowing what to do. The challenge is doing it consistently.

That understanding led Cheryl to continue expanding her professional training. She became a certified PSYCH-K facilitator and integrated this work into her broader approach to helping clients address limiting beliefs and patterns that may prevent them from implementing the changes they want to make.

The underlying question is simple but important: Why do we continue doing things that we know are not helping us? And how do we change them into supportive habits?

For Cheryl, lasting change often requires more than information. People may need to examine the beliefs, habits, and internal barriers that keep them stuck.

Her willingness to continue learning is one of the defining characteristics of her leadership.

Cheryl is constantly seeking new puzzle pieces in her journey to wellness. Her work has continued to evolve as she explores new ideas and tools that align with her broader mission of helping people improve their wellbeing and quality of life. Helping them Feel Good again.

That intellectual curiosity is one of the reasons Cheryl's story goes beyond a typical health transformation narrative. And she practices Heart Math to stay in the higher vibrations of self-love, love, compassion, kindness, gratitude, and hope. She lives in joy. And she wants everyone to Feel as Good as she does.

She has continually rebuilt herself.

First as a businesswoman.

Then as a researcher of her own health.

Then as a student again.

And finally, as an author, coach, teacher, and wellness entrepreneur.

A New Definition of Success

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of Cheryl Meyer's story is that it challenges the conventional definition of success.

For many years, success meant business growth, professional achievement, and financial results. Cheryl had experienced those things. She had built a seven-figure business.

But her health crisis forced her to look at the other side of that equation.

What happens when professional success is achieved at the expense of the person achieving it?

Today, Cheryl speaks directly to entrepreneurs and professionals about that question. Her message is informed by experience rather than theory.

You reach success by curiosity, continued learning, belief that nothing is impossible, and the self-love to implement all the things that you learn.

Health does not compete with ambition; it’s the foundation for everything you want to achieve.

Self-care does not mean lowering professional goals; it is an expression of self-worth and self-love.

At 76, Cheryl says she feels better than she did in her fifties. She continues to write, coach, speak, create educational resources, and expand the conversation around wellness.

The woman who once built a business while neglecting her own wellbeing has now built a new purpose around encouraging others not to make the same mistake.

The Second Act Is Sometimes the Most Meaningful One

Cheryl Meyer's story is ultimately not just about illness or recovery.

It is a story about reinvention.

She could have treated her health crisis as the end of an important chapter. Instead, it became the beginning of a whole new life and everything she wanted. Everything in Cheryl’s life is better than what led up in her life to waking in extreme chronic pain.

She returned to education at an age when many people are preparing to leave professional life.

She turned personal experience into a new career.

She married the man of her dreams, who partners with her in every endeavor.

She wrote award-winning books.

She built a platform around a mission she deeply believes in.

And she continues to create new ways to reach people.

There is an important leadership lesson in that journey.

Reinvention does not require a perfect moment.

It requires a decision. And then it requires action.

Cheryl did not wait until she felt completely certain about every step. She learned as she went. She researched. She trained. She experimented with new ideas. She kept moving forward. And, like the GPS system in her car, when she didn’t get the results she was looking for, she recalculated and found a different and better way.

Fourteen years after beginning the health journey that changed her life, Cheryl Meyer continues to encourage people to believe that change is not only possible; change is growth.

Her message is remarkably simple.

It feels good to feel good.

But behind that simple statement is a much larger story of pain, persistence, learning, and reinvention. And a happy ending.

Cheryl Meyer once built a successful business while, by her own account, forgetting to take care of herself.

Today, she has built a new life around making sure others do not forget the same thing.

Her greatest message is: Own your own health. Own your own life. Create the life of your dreams. Be unstoppable. Impossible is a choice.

And perhaps that is the real measure of her leadership.

Cheryl and her husband are currently working on an AI App for access to her 14 years of holistic research, coming soon. Health Muse in a Box.