Keto and plant-based and intermitten fasting, oh my! Selecting the perfect diet for your body can require some pretty heavy lifting. Which is why Jillian Michaels suggests avoiding the process altogether.
“You don’t need to find a diet that’s right for you,” the health and wellness expert explained to E! News’ Francesca Amiker in an exclusive interview. “And here’s what I mean: Instead of like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to count macros, I need to be vegan, I need to be keto, I need to be carnivore, I can’t eat beans,’ this is largely bulls–t. It really is.”
Save for those dealing with food sensitivities, nobody really needs to do the work of finding the ideal diet.
Instead, insisted the Keeping It Real With Jillian Michaels podcast host, “What they need to do is literally choose food that’s whole and eat less of it.”
Beyond that, she continued, do you.
“If you want to be vegan, be vegan,” she stressed of the importance of avoiding ultra-processed foods. “You want to have a steak for dinner? Have a steak for dinner. You want to have a vegetable stir fry? Have it. You want to have the pizza? Well, you get two pieces and a side salad and water, not a half of a pie with the soda and garlic rolls.”
No matter how you slice it, making common sense food choices, doing your best not to drink your calories and adding a bit of activity into your day is key.
“It’s whole foods, protein, fat and carbs in every single meal, and ideally, good quality food whenever possible,” explained Michaels. “That’s the rule.”
Don FloodIt’s an edict she happily follows herself.
Personally, “My diet is really clean,” the 50-year-old shared. After a 14-hour fast window, she’ll cook up two eggs over easy with a slice of organic sourdough or whole grain toast, organic yogurt with berries or her go-to smoothie, a blend of collagen, peanut butter, creatine, carnitine, banana, milk and cocoa nibs.
For lunch, “Today I ordered from goop Kitchen,” she detailed of the Mediterranean hummus bowl with quinoa, chicken, greens and Greek goddess dressing. “And I think for dinner I’m gonna end up having chicken pho.”
Michaels doesn’t eat sweets and “very rarely” drinks alcohol, sticking to water, coffee and tea instead. “Not because I think it’s the devil,” she said, “but I just don’t need the calories.”
Her strategy is universally sucessful, she insists, but for those looking for a more personalized plan, her creation The Fitness App is “a one-stop shop.”
“You could pick keto, you could pick vegan, you could set your goal to weight loss, muscle gain, weight maintenance,” Michaels detailed of the food guidance. “There’s community, there’s tracking, there’s meditation made simple, there’s sleep support. It generates shopping lists for you at the grocery store.”
Devotees also have access to her entire DVD library of workouts and now they can basically take the weights off her rack thanks to Balance by Jillian Michaels, her new line of dumbbells, foam rollers, mats and resistance bands sold exclusively at Walmart.
They’re the same tools the mom to Lukensia, 14, and Phoenix, 12, relies on when she’s sweating it out in her living room.
Aiming for a minimum of 7,000 steps, she relies on a walking pad as she takes calls throughout the day and, said Michaels, “I try to get four workouts in a week.”
In a perfect world, she’s hitting up a yoga studio or a spin class, but she’s not above squeezing in a high-intensity interval training session at home. “I’ve got a resistance band, I’ve got some handheld weights, a jump rope,” she detailed. “I’ll throw in circuits of push-ups, Supermans, squats, lunges, squat rows or flys with the tubing. I can do anything I need in my living room.”
Photo by: Aaron Poole/E! Entertainment/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesThat’s really all it takes to be your healthiest self, said Michaels, who also touts the importance of “common sense” food choices and quality shut-eye.
“It matters,” she detailed. “If it’s 10 o’clock, don’t watch that extra episode of The Agency, Prime Evil, Outlander. Go to bed. Sleep in a cool room. Put on your blue blockers, whatever you need to do to help you improve your sleep hygiene and stay asleep.”
She acknowledged, “We can go down a rabbit hole, absolutely, on supplements and freaking biohacking and all kinds of weird, crazy s–t that I love to do.” But, if people can commit “to these basic things, they’re winning,” she stressed. “The rest is icing on the cake.”
And she’s serving up seconds of her straightforward strategies, outlining her no-nonsense health advice to E! News.
Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty ImagesEat Less
Yep, it’s that easy. Well, not easy, Jillian Michaels allowed, but definitely simple: “Just stop eating so much.”
And while she joked that “of course I want people to eat organic f–king blueberries and, like, Moringa greens, grown by Tibetan monks in the third phase of the crescent moon,” eating less of anything will do the trick.
“If it’s too much to ask people to switch that pizza to a chicken salad, here’s what we’re going to do,” Michaels said. “Instead of half the pie, you’re going to do one slice of pizza and you’re going do a side salad. Or two slices of pizza and a side salad with the dressing on the side. And we’re going to opt out of the Coke. Or the two glasses of wine. Done. And all of this will work. I promise.”
Photo by: Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesPay Attention to What You Eat
This part might feel rough for a stretch, Michaels acknowledged, but it’s essential to track your calories—both the ones you burn and the ones you consume.
While she knows that calorie-counting can get a bad rap, “If I don’t tell you how to do it, you won’t be able to actually effectuate change. And then you don’t believe what I’m saying because you don’t realize how much you’re eating and you get discouraged and become vulnerable to more fads and trends.”
She recommends taking the time to learn how many calories are in the foods you regularly eat and aim to create a 500-calorie-a-day deficit that will translate to losing roughly a pound each week. “It’ll be tedious for about two weeks while you learn how many calories are in the foods that you consume regularly,” Michaels said, but “once you know, you’ll know forever.”
Jillian Michaels/InstagramConsider a Wearable
When it comes to tracking how many calories you’re burning, well, there’s a shortcut for that. Michaels is a big fan of smartwatches (her go-to is the collection from iTOUCH Wearables) “because they give you accurate information,” she explained. “And with this accurate information, you can make informed choices, that yield powerful results.”
In other words, you can have the best of intentions, but if you don’t have the cold, hard facts (i.e. I’ve burned this many calores, thus I should aim to eat this many to see results), you could be setting yourself up for failure.
“People are like, Why does everybody give up?” Michales noted. “Because they’re killing themselves. They’re making sacrifices. They’re working hard. And when they don’t see the fruits of that labor, they’re like, f–k this.”
The key to avoid that roadblock is “getting results from the work you put in,” she continued. “And that’s why all of these wearables play such an important role.”
Don FloodAvoid the All-Day Graze
Yes, it’s possible to feel satisfied without turning your day into a snacking free-for-all, swears Michaels.
She recommends aiming for three to four meals a day: Breakfast, a snack three to four hours later, a late lunch “because it’s going to make you eat less for dinner” and then your evening meal. It’s there that she recommends trimming portion sizes. But you can also create a 500-calorie deficit by, say, skipping your favorite mocha latte.
“Don’t worry about macros,” she said of tracking nutrients like carbs, protein and fat. “The truth of the matter is you really don’t need to think about it.”
Paul Archuleta/Getty ImagesGet Things Moving
While the trainer offers seemingly endless exercise possibilities on The Fitness App, she recognizes that not everyone likes to get their sweat on.
“If you’re like, ‘Well, I just f–king hate it,’ give me a step goal,” she said of efforting to get in 10,000 steps per day.
She checks off that box with the help of a treadmill she purchased on Amazon. “I put my computer on it and I walk 1.8 miles an hour and work. It’s a game-changer.”
Ideally, she continued, you’d work your way up to, say, a 20-minute workout in your living room (joked Michaels, “I’m the queen of at-home fitness, right?”) but if that feels daunting, “Talk on the phone standing up and pacing,” she recommended. “Do two minutes of jumping jacks every hour on the hour. Just getting you to move is going to make a massive difference.”
Photo by: Aaron Poole/E! Entertainment/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesTry to Eat Food in Its Most Whole Form
Michaels joked that too deep of a TikTok dive might have you thinking that everything is off-limits, but as a rule, no food is truly off the table.
She would advise cutting back on sugars, though, the kind you might find in, say, a Twinkie, not fruits like bananas and berries.
Bottom line: “Added sugar sucks, white flour sucks. Use your common sense and eat foods as whole as possible,” she said. “Start there. Don’t overeat. Eat on the schedule I mentioned. Try to stop eating when you’re full. Try to move your body in the way I talked about. And you can forget the rest.”
