Still Hot at 65

Show Introduction and Guest Welcome 0:00

Welcome to Hotness, the podcast that brings you practical tools to balance your hormones and rekindle connection, confidence, and desire in midlife and beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Liz Lister. Hotiness is a safe space for honest conversations about menopause, sex, identity, love, loss, reinvention,and desire, because you can embrace your hotness at every age. Welcome back to Hotness, the podcast where hormones, confidence, and desire come back online. Today's guest is an incredible powerhouse, wonderful woman named Jana Short.

She is the editor-in-chief of the best holistic life magazine. She is a bestselling author and she is the host of the podcast, Oh My Health, There Is Hope. I've been fortunate to be a guest on her podcast and She's just an amazing person. She inspires transformation through authentic living, wellness and purposeful storytelling. This is where if you want to learn more about her, we will let you know that during the Podcast and also in the show notes. But it's really fun. We are both women in our 60s.

we compared a lot of notes about how things are different than when we were in 20s, what do we do now? How do you reconnect with our hotness? She's just, we had a lotta fun with that question towards the end of our interview. So please enjoy my conversation with Jana Short. Welcome, Jana Short, to Hotness.

Midlife Growth and Lifelong Learning 1:51

Thank you. I'm super excited to be here today. Awesome. Fantastic. Well, let's start there. Let's talk a little bit more about you, and you and I have connected through our work. Your audience is people of all ages. However, we are both women in midlife and, you know, a lot of women reach mid-life, and they feel like they're supposed to shrink or slow down or settle. And I know that that is 100% not your belief. So what has really emerged for you in this really fantastic season of life? Wow, there's so much.

I went back to school in my fifties, right? I wanted to learn something new, to build my practice on what I was doing. When I say practice, I'm not a doctor, but built my platform and brand and I want more education. taking over the world, right? And when I just think I learned something, it's upgraded, and I got to learn more. And it is so challenging and so exciting. For me, It is. I love feeding my brain on a regular basis. So for me moving into my now 60, I'm 65 now, cannot wait to see what 70 has for my and not slowing down.

Just opened a new magazine. opening in new cities, went back to school again so I could learn more about AI, by the way. I don't think I'll ever be out of school for that. Right, I think that's right. But I, think it keeps me young. By the, way the whole time I'm doing this, i'm listening to cues from my body because I realize I am 65 and I do not want to get so busy that I m not paying attention to what's going on in my, body so i m always listening the cues like those little whispers are something you should be paying So otherwise they get louder.

That's exactly right. They not only get loud or sometimes they just completely take your feet out from under you, which is what happened to me in my fifties. And now I listened to those cues. I'm never too busy to listen to my body. So, um, as I doing all this and building things, I listening, like I highly recommend you guys pay attention to. Yes, you talk a lot about that on your podcast. Oh, my health. There is hope. So we will definitely link to that. I love that and I've had the honor of being guest on Your podcast, so that's just tremendous and you focus on hope and healing and resilience and mindset as well as the title of the magazine best holistic life.

so, that implies the holistic approach and interviewed huge names in holistic health. What is a wellness belief that you think still needs correcting that's out there, that the mainstream health industry gets wrong or just maybe isn't ready to hear yet? Wow, I absolutely have an answer to that. For me, the thing that they have completely wrong, and we need to get right, is Western medicine and holistic medicine are not meant to work separately. They're always meant best integrated together. It's not one or the other.

The other thing I think that it hasn't quite gotten right is I talk about holistic and I wish that when I created my magazine I would have used the W in front of it. because holistic isn't necessarily herbs. It's not one thing, it's everything. When I say I listen to my body, I listened to, am I attaching to the loved ones that I have? Am I paying attention? I connecting to people, my moving, there's movement involved in my eating correctly. There's so many things in holistic is the whole thing.

Holistic Health and Integrated Medicine 5:36

The whole enchilada. So you can't just have the beans, right? You have to have it all when you're doing it. So I wish that people understand Western and holistic medicine work best together, integrated together. And I think that it's also important to understand that holistic isn't the one thing. It's multiple things. I can do one and expect change. First of all, I think that's completely correct and accurate. And I also think it's the opportunity of midlife. Because we don't have to think about all those things when we're 20, we have high levels of hormones which provides this buffer.

It's a buffer against not enough sleep, not eating right, and not exercising correctly. But that buffer just gets thinner. And then here we are in this, what I think is an amazing, wonderful phase of midlife where we have to pay attention to that. Our body asks that of us. I Think the old school method was when you retire, like I looked at my grandmother and my age, I like there's no way that's she's got to be way older, right? The old mentality of aging was you slow down. You aged, you retired, You set on your rockers on the front porch waiting for your grandkids to come visit, which by the way is lovely.

But I think it's cheating. And we're seeing aging now as an opportunity. Our kids are raised, we have more time on our hands. We're through with building our careers, right? We are in the midst of it or finishing it up. We have so much opportunity now and time to do the things that we're passionate about. It's the doors for me just blew off when I hit 50. And then when had to turn 60 instead of crying, I was so excited and I tell people all the time now I cannot wait to see what the seventies have for.

Like I, but it's going to be spectacular. Are things changing? We just talked about this at the beginning before we started recording. Aren't things in my life, in body? Absolutely. I'm very quickly. And it's okay. It's like, okay, I still do my golden rules, like pay attention, listen to the cues, take time. There's movement, there's community, and there are so many important things that I have to incorporate in every single day. And so it is not just business and driving a magazine or doing a podcast.

My family and the spirituality come next and then moving forward into my community and doing, you know, as much as I can. And one of the things I will tell you, I learned in my sixties. So it took me six decades to learn this. I cannot fix anybody else. I cannot make my husband change, make kids do the things I think they should do. The only person I can change for the better is myself. And so I work on every single day. That is so, you keep giving me chills. I'm like listening to you. Yeah. It's such an epiphany.

But we still spend a few decades thinking we have those answers. I spent the first few decade trying to get those answer so then I could use them on other people. That was my trajectory until life threw me some curve balls that said, you know what, I will look at me and I'll share what I can. and we will go from there. So that is just really beautiful.

Health Crisis, Recovery, and Listening to the Body 9:15

And you've had your own health journey that has really been a story of hope and resilience and more than that, expansion and moving into bigger chapters. What can you share with us? My health journey changed my life, Dr. Leister. I will tell you that I'm not supposed to be here. And for those of you who are waiting to cure whatever you have, I still live in the exact same diagnosis that was in 14 years ago when they told me I didn't have very long to live. And I thrive in it now. And, I think a lot of that is what shifted in my mind.

So, making shifts in your brain really starts getting your body to adjust to better things. And so I'm not going to act like a sick person. And I move forward in a healthy lifestyle, doing the best I can. But I lost my stomach because of a surgery for a fundification. By the way, these happen all the time. Not that the injury I got through that surgery, but fundifications are very common. And it's from a high in a hernia. People get them as they get older. A lot of times they fix them, a lot times, they just tell you to do certain things to adjust to it.

But mine was twisted, which meant it would deepen us and open up and I become septic. So I had to have the surgery and they damaged my vagus nerve, And so months later, I was eating and every time I ate, it was like food was poisoning me. I Was miserable and my stomach started getting big and people were congratulating me on my baby. And I'm like, well, thank you so much for thinking I've been having a baby because I am in my 50s, but I m not pregnant. And finally, I ended up in the ER with a massive beezer in my stomach, which is food that could not exit.

And your stomach is magical. It'll just keep expanding. Right. Wow. So my whole thing was after getting gastroparesis from this surgery, i had to have my tummy removed because it was that bad. I had a radical gastrectomy. i was supposed to be fed through a PICC line. When they feed you TPM, that's a synthetic. And my body just didn't like it. So after- It was a very big deal. It seems like, oh, just an IV drip. No, no, it's a huge, huge deal, its intensive care level. Well, I was going to bring it home with a pack to feed me, like you could hear the pack moving, feeding me.

Wow. And so when I using it, my organs just started shutting down. I did not like this synthetic thing. Nutrition, quote unquote. Uh-huh. I still to this day eat, I tell people I live in the same diagnosis, and that was almost 15 years ago. I think it was 14 years in April. And so I living the diagnosis. Whatever I want, there comes with consequences. esophageal from throwing up so much. So I listen to those little whispers. I get my endoscopy every year to make sure it's not progressing. Like I do the things I need to do, but I just went on a vacation, I ate chocolate every day.

Everything that I could eat. That happens in Europe. I hear that all the time. Their food is different. The food industry is also different, yeah. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah, I also walked 111 miles. And walking, which is the lifestyle there. But it was amazing. And here I live in that diagnosis, paying attention to my body. Like I just had a hip issue. They told me it's bursitis. It was not. I tore something in the gym. So now I'm healing that. But I listen, I pay attention and I move. Constantly get up and move I think there's this old saying, and don't know who said it, maybe you do, but a body in motion stays in a motion.

When I get sitting too long, like I've got to move, feel like, don' t want to get stuck in sitting position the rest of my life. So I'm constantly moving, I have little alarms here that tell me, because I work at a desk, that tells me get up and move, go breathe, get outside, put your feet in the grass, and I go and do it when it gives me those alerts. That is so yummy. I absolutely love that. And what prompted you to start the magazine? What's the origin story of Best Holistic Life? I went back to school like I said in my 50s.

I got some pretty powerful credentials because I didn't want to be that person I was looking for that wasn't qualified to help others. So I when got a bunch of coaching credentials, I started coaching. And when I get so busy, i was booked solid for a year and I realized I did not live to have my calendar completely booked. that I don't even have time to see my grandkids. That's not what I want for my life. So I started backing out of coaching and my clients were freaking out and they were like, can you at least do a newsletter and start sending us information?

So health, you were coaching in health and lifestyle. I was coaching a more mindset because I believe when we make that shift in our brain, everything else follows. And so I was being more of a mindset coach. I got an NLP practitioner, master practitioners licensing. So I can hear the words you're saying to me and like, Hey, did you hear what you just said? And help them see what they're seeing and adjust it back. And, so as I. Was coaching, they asked if I would do a newsletter and honestly Dr.

Liz, I, was too lazy. I am like, I don't have time to do a newsletter, but I was working with some really famous people at the time. So I'm like why don' t you read an article about your story and I' m going to put it in the newsletter. And I think I got like 35 articles. Which is a lot. That's great. How do you put those in a newsletter? Well, I have an interior design background. Right. I went to school as an Interior Designer, so I had an Interior Design background, and I got on Canva. And I'm like I can make this into a little booklet and it looked like a magazine.

So I put it on my newsletter and you had to sign up for the newsletter. We got like 37,000 people signup for that.

Launching Best Holistic Life Magazine 15:30

And now it's up to millions. 100%. Yeah. Incredible. Now we have 2.8 actual subscribers and 4 million readers each month. And I think there's more. I just have stuff. Man, if you wish for it, it will come, especially if your working towards it. I didn't realize the cost of having that many emails. You've got to pay for that. It gets very expensive. Wow. That's a problem I look forward to. Shopping problems, I know. Right, exactly. Let's just see. I want to hear a little bit more, you've alluded to this, but I wanna ask you a bit about what part of you has been the thread that has carried you through all of this.

I think this is one of the reasons you and I have sort of bonded, is that I am a seeker, I've been doing personal transformation, writing and workshops and that sort thing since I was a teenager. And that has been kind of like a through line for me of my whole life and all the things that I've done. What has through all of the difficulties, all challenges that you've been through and risen to the occasion, what about Jana has this theme that really you have preserved all this time? Well, I'm torsible and pretty bullheaded.

I sometimes don't know when to quit. And I never, ever believed in failure. Even as a little girl, I've never believed I failed a test or I have failed at anything. I believed that I learned something. So it was, for me, feedback, how to do it better next time. And so for, me I carried that thread of it's only feedback to be better. A lot of people talk about Thomas Edison creating the light bulb and how many times he did it. Yes, just thinking about him. Can you imagine if he stopped at 872? He took that information and went further and further with what he's learning.

Same with space travel and all the things. They take all that info, it's not failure, they collect the data and how do I move forward doing better? And that has been a theme of my life since I was very little. And the stubbornness, I'm very stubborn. Yes. Well, Taurus is also an earth sign, so very grounded as well. You get both of those features. So that is really awesome. I love that. Now, another aspect, I think you and I have talked about this, that women midlife, you know, they share with me the wins.

The best sex ever, the best relationships ever. You know, I think about midlife really as our hotness era. I think you and I share that. Why do you think it's not being talked about more?

Resilience, Mindset, and Reframing Failure 18:30

And what can we do? I thing it is not been talked that more because we're thinking of our grandmas. Like our generation is thinking what they were probably doing right. My grandma probably was hot. She probably felt hot, but as a young kid growing up, she was grandma. she didn't look hot and were carrying around the past with us. And now I look at women and like I cannot believe her age. By the way, I don't want to judge on ages either because I work with a lot of celebrities and I feel so bad for them because every wrinkle, every dimple, everything is completely torn apart.

And I want us to just love who we are. We're healthy and we feel good. That's beauty to me. and i want people to be really careful about saying, oh, she aged badly or oh she age really well. It's still not okay. It's their judgment call, either way. Even as a compliment, it's still assessing. Right. And I do, I have friends who are celebrities that won't even go out, like, well, let's go to dinner. I don't want to because if I'm not completely made up and everything's, and I am hitting the right light, someone's going to take a picture and it is going be all over and i've got to deal with that.

Their poor spirits are just getting beaten down, beaten, down beaten. So as women, i think we should realize it doesn't matter. we need to stop saying that. We need stop. Here we are, no filters, right? There's no filter on us. And we're talking about, like, it's okay. Aging is okay, if you want to do something while you're aging, that's ok. If you don't want do do anything while your aging it is ok, so long as you are happy with who you. Are if want make adjustment, make an adjustment. For me, I don't do elective surgeries because I can't.

Having said that, if I could, i'd probably be flipping through those pages. What can I do? But I am happy with myself. So I just want to say, when we comment on those, on social media or to a friend, it's putting it out in the air and we're literally taking each other down. Even if it is a positive comment, by the way, you have to be careful when you're even doing positive comments. So I'm super careful and very sensitive about that in my life with women. Like, do we need to say that? Yes. She always looks amazing.

Right. Regardless of how she looks on the outside, she is amazing. Exactly. Yeah. That is absolutely beautiful. I'm literally jotting little notes because I am getting ideas for other topics and other episodes because, I think there's like a little gold nugget in

Hotness, Aging, and Self-Care 21:00

so much, like every sentence that you're sharing with us. Let me pause us just for a moment and if people want to learn more about your work, if they want be able to read the magazine or even participate in the magazines, can you say a little bit about how that works and what people should do? Absolutely. It's super easy to just go to my website, it's janna at jannashort.com. So you can go my web site to learn more about me. If you want, we save half the magazine for free one time writers. We have three strict rules, no curative claims, not type of diagnosing and no treatment plans because we first do no harm.

And so you can write an article about your story, something you want to educate on. You can reach out to me at Jana at bestfilisticlife.com. Say you heard me on Dr. Liz's podcast and that you would love to talk to about submitting an articles. We save half the magazine for people to have an opportunity to share their knowledge or their story in the magazines. The other half is our regular like Dr Liz columnist that write monthly on a very important topic that our readers want and learn about. You can absolutely reach out to me for any of those.

Wonderful. That's really, really great. I mean, the magazine is big. It's very rich. There's a lot of content, a lotta different kinds of authors and contributors, so it's, it really something. So I just love that and thank you for doing that. I've literally gotten chills so many times during this discussion. I can't wait to like listen to the whole thing again and just can wait. Ooh, maintenance. Seriously, I see my hairdresser. Here's the thing, i wear fake lashes. They put on, they're permanent.

I've been doing it for seven years. Can I tell you why? So that people don't think it's always about vanity. When I was recovering through my illness,I would get up every morning and I look in the mirror and i was sick and a sick person greeted me in that mirror. i had an event to go to so i got lashes And the next morning I got up, no makeup, I looked in the mirror and a healthier girl looked back. Like she was looking back at me and she looked very healthy, right? Like I literally have a little bit of blush on today.

And of course some lip tint. But a healthier girl look back me. And it started shifting how I saw myself. I didn't see myself as a sick person anymore. And so I do maintenance for myself, I get my hair colored, because I'm going gray. Do lots of fun things for my self, but I did that. No shame. Like this is how i choose to age and I am going to do it. So I have had people say, i can't believe you wear lashes. Absolutely I can. It makes me feel amazing about myself so yes. Love that so much. That's incredible because I also get the lashes put on for me It's a question of time.

It saves me so Much time because of exactly what you said you'd need like very little else It just has such an impact so and you and I do a lot of this a Lot of interviews and videos and podcasts and so it just like saves Me so time and what I love the most about what? You said is you use the phrase for myself. I'm doing something for my I am not doing it for others Doing it for, you know, doing it yourself, I think that giving yourself that gift allows you to give such gifts to all of us. So thank you for that.

Thank you. I one time had a friend tell his wife in front of me that I was super high maintenance.

How to Connect with Jana Short 25:00

Like, she must be exhausted. She's super highly maintenance... I really don't feel like I am. But my answer to him was, damn straight I'm, but you don' have to pay for it, so what do you care? Not asking you to pay for it. I know. Again, it's what we choose to do to feel our own hotness. So I love that. That's just wonderful. Thank you for that Thank you very, very much, Jana. Thanks for being here. I always love our conversations and I look forward to seeing you again soon. As a gift for listening, go to drlizmd.com forward slash hotness for your free midlife guide filled with powerful support for you mind, body and soul because you can embrace your hotnes at every age.