Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights with Janet McConnell

In this episode of Taking Healthcare by Storm, Quality Insights Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm speaks with Janet McConnell, speaker, author and fitness coach.

Janet shares how a midlife health crisis led her from a corporate career to coaching longevity, reframing aging as reinvention and “decay as optional.” She highlights consistent strength training, protein-forward whole foods, and daily challenge for brain and body health, warns against quick fixes, and calls for a healthcare shift from disease management to prevention through movement, lifestyle education, and community.

If you have any topics or guests you'd like to see on future episodes, reach out to us on our website.

The views and opinions expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of Quality Insights. Publication number QI-050126-GK

Transcript

Welcome to "Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights," the podcast that delves into the captivating intersection of innovation, science, compassion, and care. 

In each episode, Quality Insights’ Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm will have the privilege of engaging with leading experts across diverse fields, including dieticians, pharmacists, and brave patients navigating their own healthcare journeys. 

Our mission is to bring you the best healthcare insights, drawing from the expertise of professionals across West Virginia, Pennsylvania and the nation.

Subscribe now, and together, we can take healthcare by storm.

Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Taking Healthcare by Storm. I am Dr. Jean Storm, the medical director here at Quality Insights. Today's guest is Janet McConnell Healthy Longevity. Advocate, national champion, athlete, author, and transformational fitness coach on a mission to rewrite society's rules about aging. After experiencing a health crisis in her mid forties, Janet made a bold pivot from a high powered corporate career to redefining her life around strength, vitality, and purpose. Now based in Scottsdale, Arizona, she helps clients across the country embody wholeness in mind, body and spirit, proving that aging is inevitable, but decay is optional. As the author of Elements of Aging, well, Janet challenges the outdated belief. That midlife is a slow decline. Reframing it instead as an opportunity for reinvention, resilience, and renewed power. So today we're going to be exploring how strength training is for brain and body, the myth of quick fixes, the existential upheaval of midlife, and how we can all activate our full potential at any stage of life. Janet, thank you so very much for joining me today. Good morning, Jean. Thank you for having me. I am really excited to be here and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Yeah, I'm excited too. I wanted to start I said in the intro, you experienced a health crisis in your mid forties that completely shifted your life from a high powered corporate career. To becoming a fitness coach on a mission to rewrite society's rules of aging. I mean, they're all made up anyway, right? So why not rewrite them? So what happened during that turning point and how did it reshape your identity and purpose? Well, it is funny. I mean, we know that probably that phrase that we hear sometimes where you can have many problems, but when your health falls apart, you have one problem. It makes you get focused really quickly. So that period in my mid forties was a true wake up call on the outside. I looked successful. I had a solid corporate career. I was busy, productive, doing all the things that society tells us we should do to make us feel fulfilled. But on the inside, my health was deteriorating slowly, inex inexorably. It was going, it was coming to a head, and I only had little symptoms. Of fatigue and digestion problems, trouble sleeping, stuff that we go, oh, well it's just life and, yeah, I'm getting older. I guess it's normal, but I was exhausted, inflamed, and deeply out of alignment with the signals my body was sending me. So when it hit. It was actually it was a physical, going to a medical, you know, an annual physical where all of the blood work and everything was just completely off the scale. And this forced me to stop and really look at my life that I was living. I realized that I'd been prioritizing achievement over vitality, and I was performing well in the world, but I wasn't truly well. And so that moment was my turning point, and instead of asking how do I get back to normal, I started asking What would a truly healthy, vibrant life look like? And that question led me to strength training, lifestyle change, and eventually into the fitness and longevity space. Not where I started out. Yeah. It reshaped my identity from someone chasing external success to someone devoted to internal strength, resilience, purpose. And now my mission is to help others realize it's never too late to reclaim their health. And in doing that, you can reclaim your life. I love that. Reclaim your health and reclaim your life. You talk about ageless beauty and activating our full potential at any stage of life, what beliefs about aging do you think need to be dismantled most urgently, especially for women? Yes. I think that kind of the concept started probably about six years ago. I did a, a series of, like a limited series of podcasts and I wanted to get. Lots of women from different age groups, different perspectives, different life experience on it, and so in order to attract that variety, I just called it Ageless Beauty, and I got the most amazing. Responses from women when I would ask them what to you is ageless beauty. I had a yoga instructor who knocked it out of the park and she said, ageless beauty is when you peel back all the layers and all the pieces that aren't you and what's left is your ageless beauty. But I would say one of the most damaging beliefs. Is that aging is a slow, inevitable decline and that women in particular become invisible or less valuable as they get older. We've been conditioned to think that youth equals worth, and oh, you look really good for your age. You know, is always that little sideways kind of like compliment, but it's not quite the compliment that was intended. So the wrinkles appear, the hormones change, energy dips. Many women interpret those things as personal failures instead of natural transitions. And another belief that needs to go is the idea that we should take it easy as we age. So first of all, we have the physical manifestation of what aging can look like. And then also what we do in our behavior and our mindset. So in reality, our bodies are incredibly adaptive. And when we give our bodies the right kind of challenge and our minds the right kind of things to solve, especially strength training and doing new things, doing hard things, everything responds with more strength, more cognition. Better mood, greater independence. It's kind of like insurance for the future. So aging is not disappearance. It's an invitation to become even more powerful, more authentic and more purposeful at if we choose to engage it in that way. Because is a choice. Yeah, definitely. I don't think people understand that, but it is a choice. Your coaching philosophy centers on embodiment of wholeness, mind, body, and spirit. So those are, you know, words and I always say the menu isn't the meal. So what does that actually look like in practice? And how do you help clients move from fragmented self-improvement to a more integrated style of living? Oh, I love that menu is not the meal. Can I steal that? Sure, sure. That's great. I love sayings like that because they kind of shock the thinking for a minute and make you think about things differently. So embodiment of wholeness means that we stop treating ourselves like a collection of problems to fix. Mm-hmm. I mean, I think we all catch ourselves doing that sometimes. I need to lose weight, I need to reduce stress, I need to fix my sleep. It's all these different things. Right. But the body and the mind don't operate in isolation. Everything is connected. So in practice, wholeness looks like moving your body regularly, especially with resistance training and cardio. Nourishing yourself with real food. Whole Foods, prioritizing your sleep hygiene, making sure that you're doing as many things as you can to support that process. Managing stress, being aware when you're ready to go off the rails and do your deep breathing and your meditation and you're journaling and whatever it takes to bring that mindset back to even. And staying socially and mentally engaged, not walling ourselves off. Which is easy to do nowadays in our digital world. So with clients, I don't just hand them a workout plan or a meal plan. I help them build a lifestyle structure that supports their whole being. We look at their habits, their environment, their beliefs, their daily rhythms. So the goal isn't perfection, it's integration so that their choices reinforce each other instead of competing with each other. It makes complete sense. I mean, and it's very simple and it's, I mean, common sense. Common sense wins. So you are a national champion athlete. And as I said, longevity advocate. How do you explain the role of strength training? Not just in physical appearance. I mean, everybody, you know, wants to have buff arms and a six pack, but where does strength training play a role in mental strength, cognitive health, and life fulfillment overall? Yeah, that's a a good point because I think the first half of our lives we're concerned about our looks and wanting to, you know, have a beach body and all of those things. As it turns out, anybody who, any age who takes care of themselves looks amazing. Mm-hmm. And that can look different at different ages, but strength training is one of the most misunderstood tools in the wellness world. Many people think that it's about Vanity or Jim Bros. And getting all bulky and muscular looking to look a certain way. But the real magic of strength training is what happens beneath the surface, because when you stimulate muscle growth, you support your metabolism health, and your independence as you get older, rather than becoming more sedentary, you improve insulin specific. Your metabolic health has a better chance of having a good foothold. You release beneficial brain chemicals for mood, and also you increase the blood flow to the brain, including when you work your large leg muscles, especially those are, they're, they're your big engines, right? And those help you release something that you need for brain health. It's called BDNF. Brain derived neurotropic factor. And this is miracle growth for your brain. And what it does is it doesn't stop at your neck. It goes into your brain where all those neurons are, and it helps to keep them healthy, keep connections, synapsing taking out the trash, making sure that you're cognitively healthy and sound. Along with the blood flow that is increased. So you build resilience physically and mentally. And there's also, so there's the brain health part with, uh, dementia and Alzheimer's being on people's minds these days. But there's also a psychological component because when someone picks up a weight, they never thought they could lift. Something shifts in their identity. They begin to see themselves as capable and strong and adaptable. It's it's almost like that weight room experience is a microcosm of where you go the rest of the day because when you do something that you've never done before. In a five or 10 minute moment, and then you go into a tough meeting or a difficult conversation or having to hold space with someone who's going through something, you are better equipped to do that because you have already done something hard. So strength training isn't just about building muscle, it's about building a stronger life. Yeah, and I don't, I think people don't often think about that as, as it, you know, really not just making you strong, your muscles stronger, but improving your brain health so therefore you can function better in your life overall. So in your, in your book Elements of Aging, well, you describe midlife as more than a crisis. It's an existential upheaval, and I love that. I feel like there's so many opportunities in upheaval. So what makes this phase so destabilizing and how can people navigate it with resilience instead of fear? Yeah, fear is the thing to be able to work around because upheaval isn't always a bad thing. It just sounds dramatic, and it is. So it midlife is destabilizing because it strips away illusions. In our younger years, we often operate on autopilot. We're following scripts about career. Family success identity, we follow. You know, what we were taught as children, what we see our peers doing, what our mentors are coaching us for, but by midlife. A lot of those original scripts stop working and that's what's such an upheaval. I've always just been able to, you know, skip dinner and then I, my jeans fit the next day. Mm-hmm. I mean, that's a silly example, but it says what used to work and when we were 25. Does not work at 45. In fact, it makes it worse. So the body does change. Our hormones do change. Roles shift. Children grow up careers, plateau or lose meaning, and suddenly people start asking deeper questions like, is this all there is? Who am I now? And what really matters. That can feel like a crisis because the answers don't just come out of instant questioning, but it's also an opportunity. It's a chance to consciously redesign your life instead of unconsciously repeating patterns. So resilience comes from leaning into that questioning rather than avoiding it. It comes from building physical strength, emotional awareness, and a renewed sense of purpose, a new direction. What is it that you wanna be? What do you care about? Midlife. It's the, it isn't the beginning of the end. Like it can feel like sometimes it's the beginning of a whole more intentional life. Yeah. I, and I think we, I think more and more I consider myself in midlife. I'm 50. I think more and more individuals are seeing it this way. Like this is the beginning. Like this is the next stage. And, and I love that you're giving individuals a guide, a guidebook. For that next stage. Yes. So you've seen firsthand that diets we, you talked a little bit about diets. Extreme regimens and harsh mindsets don't sustain us long term. So why do quick fixes become even more harmful as we age and what replaces them? Oh man, that is a tough one. All of my clients are over 50 and all of us have these conversations about our various ways of arriving at this conclusion separately and now together because. The more something doesn't work, the harder we try to do it. And then we just dig ourselves deeper. You know like a jeep trying to get out of a, a sand hole and you just end up bury yourself more. So as we age, our bodies become a lot less tolerant of huge extremes. So crash diets. Punishing workout re regimens that are just over the, you know, over the top and harsh, no pain, no gain mindset. It can really create stress. And in the younger body that stress gets buffered by strong hormones and quicker recovery. We have that forgiveness and vitality of youth, but after 40 or 50, it's almost like biology says. You are smarter than that. Now you should know better. So those strategies increase inflammation, disrupt hormones, reduce muscle mass because crash dieting, you don't just lose fat, you also lose muscle. It slows down the metabolism because muscle takes more calories to maintain. You lose muscle, your basal metabolic rate slows down. So then when you do eat a healthy meal, you're more likely to save more of it as fat damages joints and connective tissue, which leads to injuries and feeling of like, oh, I'm falling apart. What replaces quick fix fixes is something I call consistency. So instead of extreme dieting, you wanna have a balanced. Plan that is protein forward eating. Instead of punishing workouts, progressive strength training that is mindful and sensible and to get rid of the all or nothing thinking sustainable routines, as I say, um, we wanna be progressive, not aggressive. So that's the real secret to aging. Well, not intensity, but intelligence, consistent effort over time. Yeah. Consistent consistency is so underrated, right? Yeah. I mean, I don't, yeah, so for someone listening who feels stuck or overwhelmed in, in what you call this third trimester of life, and we were talking about, you know, midlife after the upheaval. What are a few simple shifts physically or mentally that can reignite their power and momentum? Yeah, if someone feels stuck or overwhelmed, I always suggest starting with three simple shifts and also don't try to do everything at once. So pick one thing and get that right first. The little, just kind of peel back the layers bit by bit, because if we try, we go in a panic and try to just. Take everything apart at once. That can also be, it's a recipe for burning out and giving up. Hmm. So one of them is to move your body with intention. Start strength training two to three times a week. Most people understand the importance of walking. We hear that a lot out in our popular culture. 10,000 steps. Okay, so walking, of course, that's a functional activity that we have been doing for eons, and it is still good for you. So you wanna keep that up. You wanna make sure that you get enough. Sweaty, breathless, you know, a little bit of cardio, but not overdo it. And then the thing that is usually the last rock of that to go into the jar for a lot of women who are 50 and over, is to get that idea that strength training does not mean you're going to get big, muscular and bulky. It's going to protect you against osteoporosis. It's going to protect you. To not be frail in your older years. You have to start now. And so strength training two to three times a week will do that. Nothing extreme, just consistent progressive movement. And then as far as nutrition, we all know having Whole Foods is the best. Staying away from as much as possible from processed foods. Make sure that the things that you eat are directly related to. Something from the ground or something from the pasture so that it's real and not too doctored up. But most of all, we tend to under consume protein. We don't understand that as we get older, we become less able to process or to metabolize protein. So we even need a little bit more to compensate for that simple increase in protein at each meal can improve strength. Energy metabolism and save those muscles that you're building in the gym. So the third one that's, I don't know if this is easier or harder for people. It depends on probably your personality, but do one hard thing every day, not something overwhelming. Just something outside your comfort zone. If that means taking a new route to work, if it means being able to learn, like learn a foreign language or just something where your brain is like, whoa, what is going on here? A challenging workout. Being able to learn a skill or something like that is very important. Do one hard thing every day and that daily dose of challenge keeps your body and your brain alive and it. It sends that emotional message. I am still in the game. Yeah. I love that. I love doing one hard thing every day. I mean, that's you know, you get it done. And I, I mean, I had my workout this morning and it's hard to get started, but like once you do it, it's like, oh, I did it right. And it's like you come on the other side and you feel so much better. So doing that hard thing, I mean, I recommend first thing in the morning. I think it's a good time to do it, but you know anytime. Right? I agree. Get it done before the day takes over. Yes. So my last question, and I ask this of, of most guests. If you were in charge of healthcare in the United States, how would you redesign the system to prioritize prevention, vitality, and thriving relationships, not just disease management, which is what it is now, right? Yeah. If I could design the healthcare system, I would shift the. From disease management to health creation for sure. Getting out in front of and building those habits that take out, take disease and illness out of the equation except for the occasional bump in the road. Right now, we wait until people are sick and then we manage the symptoms with medications. That was the story, even back 20 years ago where I had, this was actually, it's longer than that because I'm gonna be 70 in a couple of months. Oh wow. I, you know how you think about, oh, back in the nineties, that wasn't that long. Oh, it was a long time ago. But, uh, it, I would say that was what the doctor did first when I had high blood pressure. High cholesterol, high triglycerides. He slid a stack of prescriptions across the desk at me, never asking once, how are you sleeping? What are you eating, when and how are you exercising? Never came up. And that's when I pushed back, which taking us back to the beginning of my story, that's how I became what I am now. So right now waiting for people to get sick is not the way to go. I would integrate strength training and movement as a standard prescription, everybody that is very important. I would provide nutrition and lifestyle education as core healthcare services so that the general public. Owns it and knows it and recognizes it, you know, making sure that how they provide for themselves and their families for the next generation to have that foundation education. And I would incentivize prevention rather than procedures, because right now there is money to be made in illness. There is money to be made in disease and injury. It's a big money maker. , It does not make money to never be sick right now, you know? And so we wanna find a way to incentivize prevention and to create community-based programs that build social connection and physical activity together. Because one of the aspects of healthy aging beyond exercise and nutrition and sleep, the mental health and the emotional health aspect. Is profound that we need community. We need interaction with our fellow family, friends and, you know, outside of and acquaintances so that we have a feeling of connection as humans. So there needs to be, there's some of that happening now that's starting to kind of come into the fore. But we need more of that. Building social connections and doing the physical activity while you're together. This is two for one. So health doesn't happen in a doctor's office. It happens in the kitchen, it happens in the park, it happens in the gym and in the living room. And systems should support people where they actually live their lives. Yeah, it makes complete sense, and I agree with you, and I hope you get your chance to be in charge of healthcare in the United States. I think we'll all be healthier and happier. Right? Yep. I think, well, it's almost like a grassroots movement because there's people like you and I who are. Definitely aware of these things and there needs to be more and more people talking about it and in our own circle of influence, being able to educate and encourage and provide ways for people to do all of these things. Yeah, absolutely. So if people wanna learn more about you and your book and what you're doing, how can they find you? How can they find more information about you? Well, one of the most vibrant ways that I'm interacting now is I have this. Exploding YouTube channel. I have to say, it's a surprise to me. It's just a little over a year old and it's, I already have almost 6,000 subscriptions. I mean, people are just blocking and they're saying, Janet, thank goodness I found you. There's no good. Because a lot of the influencers out there are young, and they're not wrong about what they're saying oftentimes, but they don't speak to the older individual who's kind of 50 and over and so. I would say that would be the best place. So my YouTube channel's called Aging Strong for Life. You can either search that in the YouTube channel search bar or just Janet McConnell and that'll come up. And then the other way is my book is called Elements of Aging. Well, my journey so far, and you can search for it on Amazon. And, uh, or just search Janet McConnell and that will come up. Sometimes it's easiest just to remember one name and search for it. So those are the two most I would say active places where you can learn more about my message or interact with me in, uh, social media. Excellent. I hope everyone out there does it. It's well worth it. It's changed your life. Janet McConnell, thank you so very much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much, Jean. I really appreciate this and I hope that people will take some nuggets of wisdom with them and improve their lives because as you said in the beginning, aging is inevitable, but decay is optional.

Thank you for tuning in to Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights with Quality Insights Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm. We hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you found value in what you heard, please consider subscribing to our podcast on your favorite platform.

If you have any topics or guests you'd like to see on future episodes, you can reach out to us on our website. We would love to hear from you.

So, until next time, stay curious, stay compassionate, and keep taking healthcare by storm.