Jennifer Lopez is getting candid about her health.
The Shotgun Wedding actress, 53, discussed maintaining a healthy lifestyle with PEOPLE for the launch of her newlower-calorie alcohol line Delola, and said the key is keeping a daily routine.
“For me, [a] healthy lifestyle is about self-care,” said Lopez. “Working out regularly with some consistency, taking care of your skin…”
However, she said that it all starts with the basics, including getting enough sleep and drinking lots of water, and also focusing on meditating and “taking care of your mind, your body, your soul.”
“Those always work. They’re the fundamentals of any sport or anything that you do,” she explained.
“I always feel like, okay, if I’m feeling too tired, what am I neglecting? Am I neglecting my sleep? Am I not working out consistently? Have I let that go? Do I need to get back on that? Whatever it is, or am I not drinking enough water? Why do I feel this way? If something’s off, just check the basics, and for me that that always works,” she added.
She noted that it can be hard to make sure that the basics are taken care of on a daily basis because people “get busy” and “bogged down with life,” but letting go of one thing can lead to more things going wrong.
“We have to kind of remember that if we’re not right, nothing goes right,” Lopez said.
On Tuesday, Lopez dropped Delola, her new alcohol brand that offers ready-made spritzes — which will hit stores, restaurants and bars in April — each contain a different spirit. The Bella Berry is made with vodka, the Paloma Rosa has tequila and the L’orange features an amaro base. The 750ml bottle retails for $23 and the 375ml is $12.
With industry experts, Ken Austin and Jenna Fagnan, along with renowned mixologist Lynnette Marrero, the team curated lower-calorie cocktails with ingredients like elderflower, hibiscus and passionfruit.
Each single serving has roughly 110 calories or less, while containing about the same ABV as a glass of wine.
“I loved the idea of creating something a little more healthy, a little bit more to my taste with kind of healthier ingredients and being gluten-free,” Lopez said.
The actress has previously opened up about finding a healthier lifestyle after experiencing severe panic attacks in her late 20s, which were brought on by exhaustion, in her On the JLo newsletter released in July, 2022.
“There was a time in my life where I used to sleep three to five hours a night. I’d be on set all day and in the studio all night and doing junkets and filming videos on the weekends,” she wrote. “I was in my late 20s and I thought I was invincible.
“Until one day, I was sitting in a trailer, and all the work and the stress it brought with it, coupled with not enough sleep to recuperate mentally, caught up with me.”
“I was completely frozen,” Lopez wrote. She said she “couldn’t see clearly” and the physical symptoms “started to scare me and the fear compounded itself.” The performer added: “Now I know it was a classic panic attack brought on by exhaustion, but I had never even heard the term at the time.”
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She said she visited her doctor who told her at the time that the panic attack was caused because she wasn’t getting enough sleep (seven to nine hours to be exact), and that she needed to get her “workouts in” if she was planning to “do this much work.”
Lopez explained that she “let my own self-care needs go completely” as she prioritized work during a time in her life that yielded the dawn of her lifestyle empire, her debut studio album On the 6 and a budding film career that included her Golden Globe-nominated performance in Selena, as well as her first marriage.
“I realized how serious the consequences could be of ignoring what my body and mind needed to be healthy — and that’s where my journey to wellness began,” she added.
