Patty has a great guest joining her today. She’s talking with Renata Joy, a wellness coach expert. Her mission is to help women over 50 live healthier lifestyles. She focuses on nutrition, exercise, and skin care to help women feel their best, sexy selves.
Her personal story might feel familiar. As a child, she was surrounded by people who were not well. She grew up worried that she would follow in their footsteps, so she intentionally made different choices.
She was a TV producer working for The View when the 9/11 attacks happened in New York City. She enjoyed her work, but she knew there was meant to do something more. She left her 22-year producer career in 2001 and Pure Joy Wellness was created.
During the pandemic, it became clear to Renatta that we needed community. She started a 30-day walking challenge, and it took off! It got women moving and talking and supporting each other.
Renata shares how we can reduce stress (a daily concern) and 5 easy things we can do to help clear our minds and reduce stress.
- Breath work
- Meditation
- Take a walk/go for a run
- Journal your thoughts
- Get into nature
Renata is an advocate for self-care. In fact, she’s adamant that women put their health and wellness first. She also wants women to be proud of their age and experience, along with our wisdom. She explains that it’s time to celebrate the richness of our experiences.
“Always do your best knowing that your best will change from day to day.” (From the book, The 4 Agreements)
Resources:
Pure Joy Wellness Facebook Group
Instagram
Pure Joy Wellness Website
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0:00:04.3 S1: Welcome to the space for magic podcast, where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to receiving all the gifts the Universe has for us. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex-type a corporate banker, turned intuitive coach, using a blend of common sense brain science and just a dash of magic, I’m here to help you create abundance in every area of your life and business. Welcome. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of the space for magic podcast. I’m your host, Patty lennon, and today we have a guest that I have known for years. I’m so excited to bring Renata Joy, when I met Renata, she was just such a bad ass in the wellness area, I met her through a networking group. And when I turned 50, I really started digging into Renata’s work because this is what she does. She is the new 60, she’s a mother, grandmother, aging well, expert wellness coach, experts peak or author of The Seven Secrets to staying young, strong and sexy for life, and the founder of pure joy wellness, a community-based lifestyle brand that helps high-powered women who… As they’re getting older, are frustrated with all the changes that are happening inside and outside their bodies, I gotta admit, it’s me, and they’re seeing obvious signs of aging and they’re just not liking how they look anymore, and at the end of the day, often feel invisible.
0:01:39.9 S1: Renata’s missions to help women over 50 live healthier lifestyles by teaching them the right nutrition, exercise and skin care to look younger, shed weight and feel confident again, so they age gracefully stay relevant and feel sexy, and I will say the looking older isn’t as much of a focus. And I get so much out of Renata, what you post and what she talks about, for me, it’s just still feeling vibrant to have my body still perform the way I feel in age, so Renata welcome… I’m so excited to dig in and talk to you about this…
0:02:15.7 S2: Wow, that was a lot. What I hear it coming back up and I’m like, That’s a lot.
0:02:25.1 S1: Yeah, well, you’re awesome. So there’s a lot there is to share.
0:02:28.9 S2: Oh, thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that. I’m so happy to be here.
0:02:33.8 S1: Now, I didn’t say I’m so glad you’re here. So I did see, I’m not as focused on the age, looking the age, but I know a lot of people are, and I will say, Renata, you do not age, I swear to God from the moment I’ve met you. You look exactly the same. Tell me how you make that happen.
0:02:57.0 S2: Well, I think that goes back to when I was a little girl. And so as far as I can remember, since I was three years old, I like to say, if you saw the movie, The sixth sense. And the saying was, I see dead people. When I was growing up, I saw sick people… My entire family was ill… My mother had polio, she died of ovarian cancer. My father had kidney failure, I had brother, had congestive heart failure, and I saw around me just illness and that scared the heck out of me, so I was so afraid that that was gonna be my path that I decided at a really, really early age that I was gonna do everything I could so that that would not be my faith, so I exercise every day, I ate a certain way. I’ve been wearing like eye cream and stuff since I was probably 10 years old, and that has always been my lifestyle, so I think that I learned at a very early age, that living a certain kind of lifestyle directly has something to do with the way that you age and the way that you’re going to look as well as increase your quality of life.
0:04:14.4 S2: So that’s how I’ve done it. So.
0:04:17.5 S1: Talk about your early career, how did fitness fit into your life and how did you transition into this business that you have now… So.
0:04:27.4 S2: My early career is… I don’t even know if you know this, but I was a television producer for 22 years, and I worked for all of the major networks, and I like to say I work like 16 hours a day. But again, because of what I’ve witnessed when I was a child, health and wellness and fitness was really important to me. So what I would do is I’d go to work at 4 o’clock in the morning, I’d worked for two hours, I’d go to the gym, I work out, I’d go home, I pack my food, I’ve come back to the office. I did that every single solitary day when 911 happened. I was working at the View, I was one of the original producers of the view 9-11 happened, and something about that day made me think… There’s something bigger that I’m supposed to be doing and while I liked television, I didn’t love it. But health wellness fitness was something that I lived, I breathed, I slept. It was just such a part of me that I decided that I wanted to pass that on to other women and teach women the importance of taking care of herself, so in 2001, I left my career in television and started Pure.
0:05:46.0 S1: Joy Wellness. Wow, I did not know that or not, or if I did, somehow it got buried in the recesses… You probably did, yeah. Oh, that’s amazing. So it was interesting, the reason I had wanted you to come on now, and we had tried to book this actually a couple of weeks to, and then I had a conflict ’cause I even wanted it on sooner was I just found… Personally, I just turned 50, so that’s a piece of it. But I think a lot of people who had a fairly healthy lifestyle or a healthier lifestyle that ended up deteriorating through the pandemic… Yeah, and then I had seen you post about the role of emotional wellness plays in health, and I think a lot of this has to do with, we are all experiencing some level of post-traumatic stress, it’s the stress that comes once thing sort of start to regulate when things sort of start to go back to normal. That’s when our bodies are like, Okay, let’s process all this crap that like you shove down during crisis, and that combined with increased levels of sitting at desks that people are more likely to stay indoors now or not socialize.
0:07:13.3 S1: That was the thing, networking speaking, those were all the things I really got me moving, those are basically gone from my life right now, all of that came together, and I was really thinking about who’s the person that can speak to this that embodies it, and you are really top of my list because you have just always embodied this very vibrant life force…
0:07:37.5 S2: Well, the pandemic was very hard for everyone. Myself included, having been a person that moved all the time, and then all of a sudden that I’m… I’m stationary and I’m sitting down, and I did notice that my body kinda changed a little bit during the pandemic, I thought about people are depressed, they’re not socializing, what can I do to change people’s mindset? That to me was really important, but also get women moving, so I decided I was gonna start a walking challenge during the pandemic, because you didn’t have to be around anybody to do it, but… So I started this challenge and I said, Here’s what we’re gonna do, we’re going to walk every day for 30 days straight, and all I want you to do is to walk for 30 minutes… That’s it. Now I’m thinking, initially, people are gonna go 30 minutes. What is she talking about? This is crazy. It’s no big deal. I had no idea what it was gonna turn into. So women started walking, but the key was they had to post… They had to post a video or a photo of them actually walking one, so I could see that they were actually walking and for them to connect with other people in the group, because as you said, people were isolated.
0:09:03.3 S2: This was a way of creating a community and creating a bond, even though they were in different cities or different states or different countries, so women started walking as they’re walking and they’re posting their videos and their photos, and what I saw what… First thing I noticed was like I noticed the landscape of the country, I noticed that women started talking to each other because they were seeing each other’s videos and they were seeing each other’s photos, women who were… Say in Chicago, who one woman who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs and didn’t think that she could walk 30 minutes, the other members of the group were encouraging her, women who lived in different parts who had no idea about the other office and started talking to each other all the time through this walking challenge through our community, and through that, they kinda got inspired, they were held accountable, it got them off of movie and got them talking to other women about what their experiences were while they were suffering through covid. And I think that helped a lot because there’s something about a woman or anybody’s mindset, you have to make that shift when you’re in your own head all the time, we have all these voices in our head telling us all kinds of things…
0:10:27.8 S2: Most of them, by the way, are not true, but we believe them, and we have to make that shift. So what I did during covid as well, to help me as well as other women, is to start this walking challenge to get women moving, to get them exposed to other women that we’re experiencing the exact same thing they were experiencing. To get them to talk and share that experience with each other so that they recognize they were not alone, and it just blew up. We’re getting ready to have our fourth one, so at the end of April, and the last one we did was the first one that became… International women were walking in Germany, from Africa, from Vancouver, and it’s just remarkable how that brought women together.
0:11:16.6 S1: I love that. And you know what, I have other questions, but since we’re talking about the challenge and people are probably interested, is there a sign up for it? How do you participate in the challenge?
0:11:27.4 S2: So the challenge happens, I hosted on two platforms on Facebook, I have a private Facebook group, so if you go to Pure Joy wellness, look for our private Facebook group and sign up there to join and on Instagram through stories. And basically all you have to do is say that you wanna participate in the challenge, and as I said, it’s for 30 days, but the key is you have to post a photo or a video of you actually walking and they’re actually called the pure joy wellness walking warriors. So you put the #PJWWalkingWarriors on all of your posts and all of your videos, and that way everybody sees that, and we have a walking playlist that we put together, and it’s interesting because people have found other members that are in their same cities and so now they’ve started walking together and we’re gonna be creating walking events to different cities now that covid has lifted, so… Yeah, so people wanna participate, just join our pure joy wellness private group, and we’ll get you walk in, we’ll put the link directly to that as well in the show notes, or if you’re looking for that, you can just check out below the episode.
0:12:43.7 S1: So I’m gonna transition into something that’s come up since I had originally offered you the invitation, which is that with the Russian aggression in Ukraine, one of the things that we’ve been talking about a lot here is that to desire peace, that has to come first from within, to want something over there, it can’t be manifested out of your existence without you experiencing it from within, and I think walking, getting clear about what it takes for your body to feel healthy, what it actually needs is so important. So from that perspective, talk about what you feel are the most important components when health and wellness… Where health and wellness is concerned. You said mindset, but can you talk a little bit more about that and maybe how it connects to feeling peaceful.
0:13:42.5 S2: So I just did a blog post when this whole Russian invaded Ukraine and it was entitled five tips to quiet your mind, because we’re living in extremely difficult times, and there’s so much chaos going on in the world, you talk about the Russian invading Ukraine, you have the pandemic, you have… Last year, the insurrection, there’s so much stuff going on. So what I like to advocate is that during times like this, we really need to practice self-care, and it’s fit for me… This is not optional. This is about self-preservation. And there are several things that I think that we can do in order to make that happen. And first thing is meditation, meditation and being able to quiet your mind and go inward, I believe, is really, really important and the second thing that I like to do, especially if I’m feeling anxious, where I’m feeling nervous, is deep breathing, and if you take a deep inhale and exhale, it’ll. Start calming you down. You mentioned earlier about going for a walk or going for a – I like to go for a run when I’m feeling running or solo walking and things like that to kinda clear your head is a good thing to do.
0:15:04.3 S2: Also journaling, journaling, I think is so critical to get your thoughts out of your head and get them down on paper, not only does that help get it out, but it also helps you… I think about when I was in sixth grade in my English class, and they had us keep a journal for you to go back and see your growth, or where you were and where you are now, it kind of gives you a history lesson on yourself and the last thing I would say is get outside and get in nature, go to a park, go to a beach, there’s something about sitting back, I was looking out the window the other day and I was watching the clouds go by, there’s something about nature that just calms you down so I would say any of those five things, I think are crucial to self-preservation when there’s so much chaos going on around you, but also inside of you…
0:16:03.2 S1: Yes, and I’m curious if you find that… Before the show started… Before we started recording, we were talking about over 50, right? Because when I met you were not focused exclusively on this community, and that that has been something you’ve developed, and I wanna talk a little bit about why, but also specifically, do you think it’s different for those of us who are over 50 to navigate the times that we’re in right now. And the answer may be no, but I’m curious what your thoughts are on it. To navigate.
0:16:43.5 S2: Me. That’s an interesting question. I think for me, I think as you get older, I think certain things become more heightened and more important too, so I would say that probably over 50, when you see what’s happening in the world, it becomes more important to you, you’re more alarmed by it that I would say then you are when you’re younger, part of that, I think that you’ve lived enough life to understand what that actually means, you’ve lived in enough history to understand what those things mean, so I do think that navigating yourself through it as your older is different from navigating yourself through it. As you’re younger.
0:17:27.2 S1: Yeah, I like that. I’ve just been considering that recently as I’ve been watching the way my children are navigating this way some younger family members, we’ve had a couple of events recently where we’ve all been together and… It’s definitely different, right? And just generationally you’ll operate differently, period, but I think for me personally, when I crossed over 50 and even moving into that, I have felt more of an ownership to mother, the community, then to just mother the children that live in my home, that has felt stronger for me, but again, that could be a personal calling, God knows there’s a lot changing in my body at that transition us into, why did you shift this focus…
0:18:26.0 S2: Well, I shifted into this focus for two reasons, but one of the main reasons when I turned 53, I go to my doctor for my annual pap smear and she’s looking at my chart and she’s like, Oh, you’ve been on the pill for a… Blah, blah, blah, let’s take you off the pill, blah, blah… She took me off the pill and my body went nuts, I gained weight for the very first time in my life, I gained 12 pounds just like that, and it was all in my stomach area, my libido went to the toilet, and I didn’t understand what was happening so I go to my doctor and I say, Hey, what’s happening? And she goes, Oh, welcome to menopause. You have to do is just eat less and exercise more. And I said to her, Have you met me? Exercises more or the way that I eat. So I try to talk to other women about what I was experiencing and no one wanted to talk to me about it, and the reason they didn’t wanna talk to me about it because there was the shame around getting older, so once you go through menopause, which means that you can no longer have children.
0:19:33.1 S2: It means that you’re old and I was like, Well, wait it out, look, feel old, I don’t… What do you mean? That’s it. That’s it, it’s over that. That can’t be it. That can’t be the end of the story. And so I decided that I wanted to change the conversation about what it means to age, we are all going to age… There is nothing we can do about that. Okay, the moment we are born, we start aging, but there is something that we can do about how we do it, so it became my mission to do a couple of things for women over 50. 1, explain to women that what’s happening to your body is not your fault, because women were saying to me, I’m doing the same things that I did before and I easily lost weight, now I can’t lose a weight anymore. It’s not your fault. That was the first thing. It’s not your fault. Your hormones have changed, they’ve shifted. They have a mind of their own. The first thing you have to understand is what’s happening to your body and how you have to balance out your hormones, so the things that you did before are not gonna work anymore, but that’s not your fault, all we need to do is teach you the things that you need to do…
0:20:57.4 S2: Now, the other shift that needed to happen is for women to be able to say loud and proud their age, that’s why I like to say I am the new 60, because until I claimed it, my life was stalled because I too was ashamed to say, I’m going to mental, I was afraid to tell my partner that I was going through menopause because I was afraid he would think I was old, even though he was nine years older than me, but I was still afraid to tell him, so I was like, We gotta get through this, so then I decided, I’m going to say it loud and proud. I am 60, I am a mom, I’m a grandmother, I’m young, I’m strong, I’m sexy. All these things, we need to claim it and not think that… We have to fall into this trap of, I have to look a certain way. Because if you look at what the health and wellness space says, everyone who’s healthy, who’s fit, they’re a size 2… Well, you know, bodies come in all different shapes and sizes, and my thing is not about how you look, is how healthy are you? I have met people that, look, I got six pack abs.
0:22:18.6 S2: I got… Obviously, I would not consider them to be healthy. There are a lot of things that comes along with this, Are you mentally fit? Are you physically fit? Are you emotionally fit? Are you psychologically fit? There are a lot of things that I look at when I’m thinking about encompassing the wellness, and in particular, women my age, we were raised to be caregivers, to care for other people and not care about ourselves, and a lot of women feel guilty about putting themselves first so what my goal was that the important thing is to put your health first, take care of yourself first, and that became my mission, let’s change this conversation about that aging is this bad thing, we can’t control it. We cannot control it. I know women that are in their 70s and they’re kicking ass, we need to be celebrating that, and truly, this is the only country that does not celebrate women as they age. So that’s why I did it.
0:23:28.5 S1: Do you feel that that… So just for context, ’cause not everyone’s from the United States were at… In our country that we’re in the is the US. But do you believe that really, that we’re the only one? I feel like, I don’t know.
0:23:41.7 S2: I think we’re one of the only…
0:23:43.1 S1: One of the only ones. For sure.
0:23:44.5 S2: Rashi, you go to other countries. They really celebrate. I have a friend who came to me and she said the things that makes her sad, she has a daughter who’s 21 now, and she goes… Her friends do not come to her for advice because they think she doesn’t know anything, and so all her years of experience and things that makes her feel like she’s worthless, and I hear that a lot from women here in the United States, it seems that we don’t value all the experiences that women have had and what women can bring to the table with those experiences… Yes, it’s a hard… It’s a really hard pill for women to swallow when they get to be a certain age and they go… I have all this experience, now I know all these things that people are like, Oh, you don’t know anything. It’s hard. This is the invisible part. They start feeling like they’re invisible, their voice doesn’t matter, their experience doesn’t matter. Now, it’s not the same thing for a man or for a woman, that becomes sort of this ongoing dialog, so women become ashamed. I had this woman say to me, she’s in her 50s, she’s single, she’s going on these dating apps, and she says she doesn’t tell the guy her real age.
0:25:14.1 S2: And I said, Well, why not? She goes, cause if he knows how old I am. He may reject me. Okay, so what happens if you hit it off with this guy and you start dating him at some point, you gotta tell them how old you are, and you started the relationship off with a lie, so we need to get to a point where we’re proud that we have this experience, we’re proud of the lives that we’ve lived, most of us, our experiences are so rich and the things that we’ve learned and the things that we’ve evolved to be… And there’s richness in that, and we need to celebrate that on International Women’s Day…
0:25:57.8 S1: Yes, which is on the day that we’re recording this, this is International Women’s Day, so very apropos. And I think too, ’cause we just I had Judith Nilan on probably two months ago, and she… Her book was called to Crone, and we talked a lot. She focuses in Ireland, her works in Ireland and just the… Even there, the loss of the respect for Crone wisdom, and really, when you look across society is the historically way, hundreds, hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, the reliance was on feminine wisdom, that that was the guide post the masculine wisdom was the protector, the hunter, the one that was the wall of the fortress, but the direction, whether to go to war or not, whether to go out, whether to plant, whether and all of these decisions, the wisdom of the older feminine in the community was what guided their community, it’s like that’s how they made decisions.
0:27:15.2 S2: And if you look in household, it still is… It still is, it still is. Women have that guiding force, the men go to their women and they say, What do you think… So it’s more society at that looks at women as if women don’t matter once they reach a certain age because we’re so focused on one thing, and that is whether or not we objectify women, and if you do not look like this anymore or you can’t produce children anymore, it’s just a, you’re not worthy. So the mission was to change all of that, but also a couple of things to change the mindset of women and for women to come into their own power and to be able to say no when they don’t wanna do something and be okay with that, or to say yes when they do, to really protect their emotional health and be able to really figure out what is it that you really want, what do you desire, what’s important to you, and don’t stand for anything less than that, and that’s perfectly okay. For so long, we’re taught that we’re supposed to please… We’re supposed to be caregivers with it, and we don’t really think about what it is that we need, and I think that has done a lot of damage to our psyche, and so now I am saying, It’s okay.
0:28:43.2 S2: As hard as it is, it’s okay to say, You know what? That doesn’t really work for me, and no, I don’t wanna do that. That’s okay, and that’s really hard for women to do, but with the community that we’re building, of giving the space of having that support and say, I understand that that’s hard, but you did it and we’re all here to support you that you did it. And the more you do it, it’s like a muscle, the more you work it, the stronger it becomes…
0:29:10.7 S1: I love that. So you mentioned the community, and the community is on… Facebook is hosted on Facebook, it’s hosted on Facebook and on Instagram. Is there anywhere else that people can find you?
0:29:26.6 S2: They can go on our website, PureJoyWellness.com. Everything’s @purejoywellness. We’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we’re on LinkedIn, and we have our website.
0:29:39.5 S1: And if someone wants to do something beyond the spring walking challenge with you, what is the best way for them to get in touch with you?
0:29:48.2 S2: The best way to get in touch with me is through the website, go to our contact page, send me a message and I will be back in touch with you.
0:29:55.9 S1: Awesome. So first, thank you for being here, Renata, and sharing your wisdom. Is there any last words of wisdom you do wanna leave our audience with…
0:30:07.0 S2: Oh, I always like to say there’s a quote that I love, and it’s from the book called The Four Agreements, and I think of it every single solitary day, and one of their agreements is always do your best, knowing that your best is gonna change from day to day, but as long as you’re doing your best, that’s all anyone can ask of you… Or that you can ask of yourself. Just always do your best.
0:30:37.2 S1: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much Renata, and I’m so glad we got to spend this time with you. Oh, I’m thrilled. And I will be doing the spring walking challenge everyone. So I hope that you join us, I’m excited, I’m excited to be a part of this community. And again, all of that information will be in the show notes, and I wish you a wonderful, wonderful week, have a beautiful, beautiful week ahead of you. And make space for Magic. Hey, thanks for listening. If you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this episode with them, and if you’re feeling really generous, I’d love for you to leave us a review at your favorite podcast app, it helps us reach many more people and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you have to say about what I’ve shared. I’m cheering for your success, have an amazing day, and don’t forget… Always create space for magic. This.
0:31:47.4 S2: Podcast is part of the sound advice FM network, sound advice, FM women’s voices, amplified.
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