Jennifer Lopez admits ‘I’ve never struggled more with my health and nutrition’ than during the pandemic
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Jennifer Lopez hasn’t let the pandemic slow her down, as she’s announced the highly anticipated JLO Beauty line and the upcoming release of a new album, and even took to the stage of the E! People’s Choice Awards to accept the “People’s Icon” award. Despite her ongoing projects and exciting performances, however, the singer, dancer, actress and entrepreneur admits that 2020 has certainly been a challenge.
“I’ve never struggled more with my health and nutrition,” she tells Yahoo Life, “and I'm a pretty motivated person. But throughout quarantine, I was just, you know, I just felt like some days I was motivated to eat well and work out. Others, I just didn't want to, I just didn't see what the point was.”
The 51-year-old, who has become known for defying age, and the boundaries that the industry typically places on women as they become older, is no stranger to showing off the hard work that she puts in at the gym — oftentimes alongside fiancé Alex Rodriquez — to make sure that she’s feeling happy and healthy. Nowadays, she says that she’s been getting that same release by spending time doing more spontaneous activities at home.
“The one thing that I tried to keep constant in our home was to dance and to play outside. Just turning on music and having a dance party,” Lopez says. “Sometimes for, like, 15 minutes with the kids is all you need. Having them step outside from being in front of the computer all day or being on their electronics all day is all you need to do.”
Her current partnership with Yoplait and Feeding America encourages other families to do the same while stressing the importance of giving back at the same time. “You're doing something good for yourself and you're something good for others,” Lopez says of the Yoplait’s Lids to Feed America Program, which allows people buying Yoplait products to scan and submit the receipt to YoplaitLids.com for Yoplait to donate up to $600,000 to Feeding America. “They’ve made it easy for people in a very difficult year to help and contribute to giving back. And I think in a time when everybody's so emotionally taxed, one of the best feelings is doing something for other people, feeling like you're helping. It's like you always say, it's better to give than to receive.”
She’s even applied this motto to life at home, noting that it’s been difficult to stay hopeful but working to keep her children— 12-year-old twins Emme and Max who she shares with ex-husband Marc Anthony and Rodriquez’s girls, Natasha, 16, and Ella, 12, who live with the couple — happy has enabled her to get through this difficult time.
“As the mom in the family you can feel bad for yourself for a little while, but you can't feel bad for yourself for long. You have to get up and motivate everybody else to get up,” Lopez says. “I realized that when you're a parent, it's really about just taking a little bit of time out of your day and out of your work and going, ‘Let's do something together.’ They'll do it, they'll do it. They just need to be encouraged to do it, and they'd so enjoy their time.”
From that family time, she’s become even closer with her two children and their blended family.
“You think you know your kids so well and you're doing great and they're doing great and they're doing good in school and you're working, and the whole thing's humming... And I always felt like I had such a great relationship with my kids and I do, but it deepened in a way that I didn't realize that it even could,” she shares. “You get their personalities on such a deeper level and we got to sit and have dinner with them every single night for months and months and months. That's not something that happens in our house. [Alex and I] travel, they have a very full life themselves with school and after school activities. So it was awesome. It was an awesome time. And I realized that that's a part I don't want to lose now as they go into becoming pre teens.”
More importantly, Lopez says that she doesn’t want to lose that time with her family even when the world returns to normal.
“I want to stay that in touch with them, even when we go back to working full time and this vaccine takes place and all of this stuff happens and we slowly move back into more of an integrated lifestyle with other people,” she says. “That we hold onto the things that we learned during this time, too, that bought us so much more close together.”
For the latest coronavirus news and updates, follow along at https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised continue to be the most at risk. If you have questions, please reference the CDC’s and WHO’s resource guides.
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