The Morning Beauty Ritual Jennifer Aniston Hasn't Skipped In Nearly a Decade

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When I sign on for a Zoom call with Jennifer Aniston, she looks relaxed and glowy (and so do her two pups snoozing in the sun behind her). Sure, she lives in sunny California and is, well, Jennifer Aniston, but she really attributes her glow to two accessible and non-negotiable steps in her beauty routine: Meditation and drinking collagen in her morning coffee.

"I am a creature of habit," she tells me. "I meditate every morning and I do write gratitude pages — not every day, but when I think to. But having a mindful morning is very important to me." (As she previously shared with InStyle, she's also a big believer in the healing power of therapy.)

"When I was away the last couple of months shooting a movie, my body was not saying to me, 'Wake up and work out.' My body was just really craving meditation. I had to have it, cause the movie was very physical, so I took a break from working out for a little. Normally, I'd feel like 'Oh, I don't feel like the same person, but it was necessary," Aniston tells InStyle.

"Meditation has always been a part of my everyday routine, but it used to be 'meditate and work out.' It was sort of like a checklist and I found that was not working for me. It can't be a checklist. It has to be something that you really are devoted to," she continues.

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Courtesy of Vital Proteins

Speaking of devotion, you may have recently seen the salad the actress supposedly ate every day for 10 years on the set of Friends on TikTok ("the Jennifer Aniston salad" has a whopping 60 million views). But as Aniston reluctantly clears up the misunderstanding for me, this was not in fact the salad. "I almost feel terrible to do this, but I have to be completely a hundred percent honest and say, that's not the salad! It's a beautiful salad by the way but that is not what I ate from the commissary at Warner Brothers," she says. (The actual salad was a take on the Cobb with lettuce, chicken, egg whites, garbanzo beans, and bacon, FYI.) "It was just easy and satisfying — I'm not a hot food person during the day."

Clearly, as evidenced by said game of salad telephone, when Aniston's name is attached to just about anything, it takes off. So, it made sense to "join the Vital Proteins family," since she was "already on the collagen train," she tells me. For those unfamiliar, collagen is the body's most abundant protein that plays an important role in strengthening the skin, and also helps with elasticity and hydration (aka plump, glowing skin). It also supports hair, nail, bone, and joint health.

"I've been using Vital Proteins specifically since 2014. My doctor gave it to me and said, put this in your shake in the morning. I noticed the difference in my hair, my nails, my workouts  — I just noticed a real benefit from it," Aniston tells me. She is so hooked she brings individual packets with her when she's traveling and adds she's gotten all of her friends on board with monthly collagen shipments (so we can only assume her Morning Show co-star Reese Witherspoon has started adding it to her morning smoothies now, too).

After signing on as chief creative officer in 2020, Aniston was tasked with "putting her spin on new product innovations" — so she decided to craft the perfect protein bar that she'd actually want to eat on set during the day. (Because no hot food!)

"I love a protein bar when I'm on the run or working and you don't necessarily have the time to sit — it would always be a great thing that I would grab to sort of hold me over but I found they were really big and they didn't taste great. The flavor was off and they were really chewy," Aniston tells InStyle. "So, I figured there's no reason we can't make a bar with all of the ingredients that I put into my shakes — Vital Proteins, but also other nutrients, like maca and all of the different mushrooms, which we know have such healing properties — and make them taste delicious."

Courtesy of Vital Proteins

She spent a year testing the bars to get them exactly to her liking, landing on three flavors inspired by her morning shakes: Peanut Butter Fudge, Dark Chocolate Coconut, and Cold Brew Coffee — Aniston's personal favorite. Coming in under 200 calories, the bars offer 14g of protein and less than 1g of sugar and contain functional ingredients like maca, maqui berry, and mushrooms including reishi and lion's mane.

We can only imagine the new Jennifer Aniston bars will be taking over TikTok next.