Weekend Plans With Fitness Icon Jillian Michaels

Weekend Plans is our exclusive lifestyle feature where we highlight the real off-duty routines of the most exciting people in culture. 

This weekend, Emmy-nominated fitness entrepreneur Jillian Michaels sits down with The Daily Wire to chat about … well, everything. After becoming a household name as a ball-busting trainer on “The Biggest Loser,” she gained a stronghold in the wellness space with hit workout DVDs like “30 Day Shred.” Now, the New York Times-bestselling author and mother of two stirs the pot with her award-winning podcast “Keeping It Real.” Here’s why she’s essential to the conversation around health and how she’s inspiring everyone else to live their best lives, too.

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I’ve always been a little bit scared of Jillian Michaels. Her abs could probably cut diamonds, and, as she said on her hit TV show, she’s “yelled and screamed bloody murder at every contestant that has walked in these doors.” (Did you see the Netflix doc about it? She didn’t even have to appear in it to be portrayed as the evil villain.) I was mentally prepared to hit the floor and do push-ups during our conversation. 

But this is Jillian 2.0. Slightly less ferocious. Now, she’s busting pseudoscience to reveal the real story on health. How could I not be obsessed with someone so dedicated to perfect strangers’ wellbeing that she risks death threats in order to do it?

An advocate for fitness ever since she turned her own life around as a teen (she weighed 170 pounds at age 13 before martial arts led to a shift in mindset), Jillian has recently entered alternative media as a truth-teller on topics ranging from the hormonal damage of “gender-affirming care” to what MAHA should really be doing for our food. She’s a wildcard in the space. But she’s on a mission.

“There’s strength in numbers. You can’t let people die out on the vine alone,” she tells me. “You have to join the fight. It’s going to take a lot of people to defeat this radical ideology that’s infiltrated every part of our culture, including health and wellness.” 

This was her gateway. Already the face of transformative fitness, Jillian couldn’t stay silent when junk theory started encroaching on her territory. Earlier this year, she skillfully debated a roomful of body-positive activists on an episode of Jubilee’s “Surrounded.” The construct of the show — that debaters have to race to a single seat like musical chairs in order to have a conversation with the expert guest — created unintentional comedy, considering the crowd. GLP-1s have bumped body positivity out of the headlines, but every minute of that debate was pure entertainment.

“I’m actually not a debater,” Jillian says. “I’m a conversationalist. I want to understand. Even when I can’t convince the person I’m engaged with to adopt my point of view or some of my differing perspectives, you’re engaged in that conversation for the viewer whose mind and heart are still up for grabs.” 

I ask if “Biggest Loser” could ever make a comeback. She mentions a “Jillian versus GLP-1” style series that was in the works but never got the green light. “I would put on the tights again to take that on. They paid a hell of a lot of money to hold me for a year to mull it over and mull it over and mull it over … They didn’t have the guts to do it,” she says. (For the record, I would have watched that.)

“Big Pharma is pushing the fact that everybody needs to be on GLP-1s so that they can benefit from the halo effect of these medications, whether you’re larger or not,” she says. “It’s actually staggering the way they try to sell this as a panacea for every medical condition under the sun.”

She notes body-positive celebrities who abandoned the life-affirming joy of being overweight “to become anorexically thin.” Maybe you’ve noticed it too. Instead of pushing drugs, Jillian is determined to inspire others to go off-label with hard work, dedication, and never giving up.

New digs in the Cowboy State

Jillian’s a native Southern California gal, but her Western-style denim button-down tells me she’s spending less time in the Golden State. “I actually am a resident of Wyoming right now,” she says. Like other critical thinkers, she was essentially booted out of her native land.

“It is so sad,” she confesses. “You know, this woke ideology infiltrated my area of expertise, but it also ruined my home, and it was that one-two punch that pushed me into this arena … Wyoming is beautiful. People are awesome. The state is red, thank God, and it’s close enough to LA so that I can get in and out quickly and conveniently.”

One of Jillian’s superpowers appears to be creating a full life for her family, no matter where home may be. But now that her son is getting older, the days are getting sunnier by the minute. 

“I have been liberated. I have a whole new life. Let me just tell you how happy I am,” Jillian laughs. “I have a 16-year-old who has just gotten a car. Oh my God, I’m free as a bird. My life has changed, Lauren. I am a new woman. I was getting up at the crack of dawn to take these little rugrats to soccer and school and baseball and dance and tennis. Now I’m like, ‘Bye-bye!’ I am happily sleeping until about eight in the morning.”

While she occasionally gets up in the middle of the night with the family’s newly adopted puppy — “Dude, it’s like having a newborn,” she says — Jillian usually starts her day the old school way: with coffee. 

“There’s a caveat,” she warns me. “It’s organic coffee, and I don’t care how elitist that may sound. The reason is simply because it’s one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world, with pesticide, herbicide, fungicide, and when you understand what that stuff is, you’ll invest in organic coffee. Instead of going to Starbucks, you can buy a bag of organic coffee with some unbleached filters, and you’ll end up saving a fortune and imbibing organic coffee. A win-win — and no more than 400 milligrams a day, or the equivalent of two strong cups.” 

Cooking up a storm

Jillian’s happy to dish out nutrition advice, but she’s not offering up any cooking tips. When I ask who the chef in the family might be, she says, “It’s not me. I have a little junior chef in the house. My daughter is just like me — she can’t even make a grilled cheese. But the boy child, he’s quite culinary. We did get him a smoker recently. He damn near lit the house on fire. It was like Chornobyl. He put the smoker next to the window outside, and the whole house filled up with smoke overnight.”

There can only be one meat worth saturating your material possessions with residual hickory. “Was it brisket?” I ask. “Yes, it was in fact a delicious brisket!” Jillian laughs. “I almost died, but the food was tremendous.”

Jillian says she limits herself to a couple of glasses of wine per week, but not because she’s scared about the latest research. “I don’t tolerate it as well as I did when I was younger. It’d be one thing if I could get away with it,” she explains. “If I had two drinks a night, a drink a night, and my body looked the same, my brain functioned the same, I felt the same. I wouldn’t think much of it.”

“A lot of doctors run around with their fear-mongering about alcohol. And I don’t think the studies truly reflect that. I’m of the ilk that if you don’t out-drink your metabolism, you’re going to be okay. When you’re drunk, your body can’t process it. So if I had a glass of wine every night, I would not be drunk. But I do notice a difference in my athletic performance the next day, in my cognitive function, my memory, my focus, my word recall.”

Anti-workout workout mogul

“I don’t really like fitness to begin with, and I never really have,” Jillian blurts out. I may have been in shock for the rest of our chat. Jillian hates working out? “It is a means to an end. You want to look good. You want to feel good. You want to do that as long as possible. That’s why I exercise.”

“I really am not the person who gets the endorphin rush,” she explains. “There’s never a moment where I’m going, ‘God, I love this.’ What I do love is, at my age, being able to keep up with my kids, right? Looking forward to picking up not just my grandchildren but my great-grandchildren. Being the kind of adult that makes my kids proud, that they aspire to emulate my healthy habits even though they often don’t, leading by example in my line of work — all those things mean something to me. I don’t enjoy the fitness part, so I go for efficiency. I do HIIT training a couple of times a week. I lift weights as often as I can.”  

I wonder if her proximity to the Rockies ever inspires an outdoorsy workout vibe. “My friends are like, ‘Want to go on a hike?’ I’m like, I’d rather be dead. I would rather stick needles in my eyes. But I’ll ride a snowboard. I’ll ride a mountain bike downhill. I will ride a horse. We have a UTV. I will get on a paddleboard. I love all that, but I don’t want to work for it. I don’t have that kind of time to be miserable,” she says.

Family in the balance

Jillian may have once appeared on TV as the world’s most terrifying fitness coach, but in real life, she’s always seeking balance. She’s raising her son Joaquin and daughter Lukensia to be mindful about nutrition — they are, of course, teenagers — and quality family time remains a priority. But Jillian’s line of work creates a dynamic that everyone’s had to accept.

“I can tell a funny story?” Jillian asks. It’s a tale her wife, DeShanna, has flipped into a comedic moment. It all started after Jillian’s contentious appearance on CNN’s “NewsNight with Abby Phillip” in 2025. “I question their narratives that all white people are evil and all of MAGA is racist, and confront them with the fact that you cannot lay all of the evils of humanity at the feet of just one race, and every race has, in fact, worn the chains and held the whip.” 

The following day, DeShanna, unaware of the news hit, was just shopping for groceries when her phone started blowing up. The first social media notification read “die, white b*tch.” DeShanna deleted it. Then the floodgates opened. Jillian cracks up remembering, “I get this call, and she’s like, ‘Honey, what are you doing in New York right now? Because I’ve gotten 800 death threats on my Instagram in the last three hours.’”

“The good news is the kids have learned how to be resilient, how to be strong,” she says. “They believe in the things that I’m fighting for, so they kind of take it on the chin and think of it as their own contribution.”  

The pro move for MAHA

I wonder what someone like Jillian thinks of MAHA since the food pyramid got flipped upside down. So I ask her to dish a little armchair policy.

“There’s only so much that we can do because the way the system is structured, it’s captured soup to nuts,” she says. “What these industries do — ag, food, pharma, insurance — is they wait out the administration, and then they change the rules right back. So what you would need is for Congress to get involved and start codifying laws.”

“We need government regulation,” Jillian says. Far from invoking a nanny state, she would love to see the government make lasting moves. “We’re talking about not allowing Big Ag to put poison all over your food. Poison that is linked to chemical warfare. Poison that is now conclusively causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. We know this stuff. It’s not a mystery. Not only do we not prohibit it; we give them blanket immunity to continue doing it.”  

But instead of relying on government initiative, she sees us as a guerrilla army. “A true rebellion has to start with you,” she advises. “It’s going to require some sacrifice. But is your health worth working for? Are you worth giving up the pizza and the Chick-fil-A in order to spend 10 minutes making something quick and healthy at home? It’s going to require personal accountability to overcome this because we’re not getting the regulation that we need from the government.”

How to live forever during your lifetime

I’m not letting Jillian go without tapping into her expertise on longevity. As wellness trends toward sustainable routines, I ask Jillian to offer her best tips for health-maxxing. I’m convinced her insight will be complex, but I’m instantly enlightened.

“It’s actually the opposite of complicated,” she says. “People engage in all kinds of … biohacking activities. Some are helpful, some are harmless, some are dangerous, and all are secondary to eating a bit less food, using common sense with those food choices, moving your body as often as you can, and getting your sleep. Those are the big rocks. They’re 90% of the battle.”

“You’ve got people injecting themselves with peptides that they bought off the gray market with no idea what they’re doing and no idea what’s in the bottle, or taking a fitness class where they’re dehydrating the hell out of themselves, and then creating an electrolyte imbalance. They’re looking for a hack, and I get it. I do the same thing. But it needs to be the cherry on top of your sundae. The idea is to focus on the common sense, big picture, basic foundation, and you’re going to be great. Really.”