'I was unfit and overweight. Now I'm a fitness icon at 78'
She's shaking up the fitness world
Lifestyle
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Here's how one woman's fitness platform, Train with Joan is inspiring millions every day, proving it's never too late to begin your fitness journey.
Joan MacDonald is entirely untroubled by bingo wings. So taut and sculpted are her triceps, in fact, that she’s been accused of using steroids (she hasn’t), while you could crack Brazil nuts with her biceps. She can bench press 45kg, do the splits and perform full push-ups.
She lifts weights for 90 minutes four times a week and does cardio training daily, while her meticulously planned and portioned diet is heavy on the egg whites and protein powder.
It all pays off, mind you – at 78 years old, she has 1.9 million followers on Instagram and pulls in a comfortable income from brand endorsements and subscriptions to her fitness platform, Train with Joan.
MacDonald is the first to admit that, seven years ago, a future as a global fitness influencer was not on the cards. Back then, she weighed more than 89kg at 160cm tall, was on medication for high blood pressure, high cholesterol and acid reflux, and climbing the stairs left her struggling for breath.
Today, she Zooms in from a white, sun-filled apartment in Tulum, Mexico, where she lives part of the year with her daughter Michelle, a 53-year-old bodybuilder and fitness coach, and her son-in-law JJ. The rest of the year she spends in her native Canada.
In a white shirt, gold-rimmed specs and a tawny shade of lipstick, which she’s taken to only since becoming an Instagram sensation (previously, she confesses, she believed lipstick “made you look like a hooker”), MacDonald is glowing and vital, a compelling advert for the disciplined lifestyle she endorses.
But, she says, it’s been a rough few months. Late last year, her husband Norm died following a fall that caused a serious brain bleed. They’d been married for 56 years, and MacDonald grows teary talking about him. “I’m not one that can hide my emotions very well,” she says.
To glance at her Instagram account @trainwithjoan though, packed with motivational mantras, you’d have little idea she’d been through a lot. There are perky gym selfies, swimsuit shots and pictures of the sprightly septuagenarian looking trim in form-fitting jumpsuits.
“You can’t wallow in what could have been – you’ve just got to go on,” she says. “And all you can think about is the best times you had with them.”
MacDonald’s “transformation” – a word she invokes often – has been primarily physical: from a 99cm waist at 70, it’s now 71cm. “I did get down to [66cm] – I don’t know how that happened, but I looked kind of thin to me,” she muses. “My hips were 107cm or something, and now they’re 94cm. And I lost 10cm off each of my thighs.”
But it also goes beyond the merely corporeal. “I didn’t start living until I started transforming,” she says. “And that’s because I changed everything. I changed my sleeping habits. I changed my eating habits. I changed the way I think about myself – and I’m still changing there. It’s something that’s ongoing, that mindset.”
On paper, MacDonald’s words can sound hackneyed, like some sort of fitness Tony Robbins, littering her conversation with “visualisations”, “manifestations” and “habit stacking”.
In person, however – perhaps it’s the Canadian accent or her evident surprise, still, at where she’s found herself – it feels much more authentic, inclusive and genuinely inspiring.
Among her generation, she says, “So many women are afraid to go to the gym. They say, ‘I don’t want muscle,’ and I guess I was the same way. I didn’t want to look like a guy.” She pauses. “But I don’t look like a guy. I do have muscles, but they don’t look bad.”
At the other pole is the myth you can’t build muscle tone after a certain age. “Hogwash,” says MacDonald.
Born in Newfoundland – where her father hunted and fished for some of the family’s food and the staple diet included elk, moose and bear – MacDonald grew up in Ontario, the second of seven children and the oldest girl. “I was second mum to my siblings,” she says.
She met Norm at work – doing administration in local government – got married in her early 20s and had three children. She put on weight with each pregnancy, she says, “and then got bigger after each baby was born. And then I started thinking this was just who I was. That this was the weight I was supposed to carry. By the time I was in my 50s, I’d pretty much given up.”
She had friends more overweight than she was. “I consoled myself with that comparison. I wasn’t fat – I just needed to lose a few pounds. I put off doing things I wanted to do because my weight was in the way,” she admits. “I knew I was overweight, but when I saw photos of myself I’d think, ‘It’s the camera.’”
It was hard, she reflects, to overcome the ingrained idea that, “You should never put yourself first. You were there to care for your family,” she says. “Anything that we’d now call ‘self-care’ was regarded as selfishness.”
Then, one Christmas in Mexico, Michelle watched her mother struggle, huffing and puffing up the stairs. Michelle had always been sporty and was, in her 20s, a competitive snowboarder. She is now a championship bodybuilder and runs The Wonder Women, a team of female fitness coaches dedicated to teaching other women.
She sat her mother down and dispensed some tough love. Joan was going to end up like her own mother, in a nursing home, she said. Did Joan want other people to have to look after her? She could help, she said, but she needed her mother to join her training group.
“She didn’t hold anything back that day. I had to listen to her and it was a reversal of roles,” says MacDonald. Michelle said that she and her husband were off to the gym. “I thought, ‘Well, if she helps other people, maybe she could help me,’” says MacDonald. She remembers finishing the first exercise that first day “and collapsing” but, within a few days, feeling a growing sense of commitment. “It was like learning a different language,” she says.
Michelle’s coaching program requires participants to photograph themselves at regular intervals. “The first thing that got to me was having to take those before-and-after shots,” says MacDonald with a groan. “You have face-on, side-on and back-on. Taking those pictures when I was that big, I was horrified.” But, she says, they were crucial. “Because you do not remember exactly what you looked like. And if nothing else can motivate you, that will.”
Even more challenging, however, was the tech. “I’d only had an iPad for about a year before I got started with this. I didn’t have a phone or a computer that I could really do things with.” Back in Canada, she struggled to download the PDF workout sheets she was sent.
Yet MacDonald persevered and was soon seeing dramatic results. In six months she had lost 20kg. After a year, she’d lost another 6kg. She now weighs just over 57kg. Michelle realised the powerful potential of her mother’s journey and in 2018 launched her on Instagram as Train with Joan.
After such a tremendous weight loss and suddenly being on social media, did she feel the need to buy a whole new wardrobe? “Yes, but I was afraid to buy too much because I thought, ‘Well, if I’m continuing to lose weight, I can’t afford to buy new clothes all the time,’” insists MacDonald. “I was on a pension and had to be careful with my money.”
She bought a few pieces and, she says, “Workout clothes stretch, so you don’t need to replace them all the time.” But one of the great joys of her new body was “that I now get to dress the way I always wanted but didn’t think I could before”. And thanks to her epic social media stardom, “When I see something that I really like, I don’t even look at the price tag anymore. If it looks good on, I’ll just get it.
“I have no idea what my [financial] worth is,” she says with a shrug. She doesn’t look after the business side. “All I know is I can do things I never used to be able to do. Like travelling.” And the eyelid surgery she underwent in 2019.
MacDonald is rigorous about meal planning, aiming for a daily intake of 150g protein, 120g carbs and 40g fat. She eats five small meals a day at three-hour intervals, starting the day with porridge before having a second meal of egg whites, cheese, lean protein, vegetables and an English muffin.
Meal three is yoghurt, blueberries and protein powder. The next is a lot of vegetables plus protein, and meal five –really not a meal at all in anyone’s book – is coconut water and protein powder blended with ice. “It’s like a parfait, like dessert,” claims MacDonald.
And she doesn’t drink. “It’s a waste of calories. And wine puts me to sleep.”
Does she never – especially when in Tulum – pop down the road for a burrito? “Burritos aren’t that bad, if you know what’s in them and how they’re made,” she says, thereby discounting the whole point of a burrito to many of us.
“I do treat myself once in a blue moon.”
MacDonald clearly has discipline in spades, but, she says with evident regret, could not convince her husband to join her in her new regimen.
“When I met him, he was very active,” she says. “He was a good baseball player, a good hockey player. But he lost interest. In his 50s he just dropped everything, which was kind of sad.”
While she was pulling on lycra and heading to the gym, “He stayed at home,” she says. “I tried to persuade him, but you have to be in that mindset.” Which is not to say Norm wasn’t proud of his wife’s efforts. “Oh, he bragged about me when I wasn’t around,” she laughs.
Although the idea behind her platform was to encourage other older people to become active, MacDonald reports “most of my following is younger people, late 20s upwards”. Many of them, she says, want to help parents or friends.
Michelle runs the account but MacDonald responds to all the questions and comments herself. “I’ve been told I spend too much time doing that,” she says with a sigh. “I just feel they put the time in to read and ask questions so they deserve an answer. But I’m very slow and I have to think things out, and you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”
She has also established a reputation for “telling it like it is”, she says. “If someone is saying, ‘I can’t do this,’ or, ‘That didn’t work for me,’ I’m going to say, ‘Did you put your all into it? Because if you did, you wouldn’t be saying that as you would have results.’”
For all that MacDonald is softly spoken and amiable, it’s clear she takes no prisoners. Of her peers who accept the advice of doctors unquestioningly, she says, “They don’t want to try anything different. I’m going, ‘All you have to do is give up those cupcakes.’”
Of men growing complacent, she says, “They get too damn comfortable. They don’t want the challenge any more.”
“You have to change the story,” she says. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. There are no easy answers to anything in life. You have to own your mistakes and that’s a hard pill to swallow, but you feel better when you do something about it.”
Even after losing Norm, MacDonald hasn’t deviated from her regimen. “It’s part of my life now,” she says. “And, all in all, I feel a heck of a lot happier than I did seven years ago.” A few days after we speak, she’ll be heading to Canada to organise her late husband’s estate.
After that, she hopes to travel more. “I’ve never been to Europe. And I would just like to see more people – more women, especially, but it wouldn’t hurt for men, too – taking life in their own hands and making a commitment to be healthy,” she says. “I would sooner see more people doing preventative care than fighting for more healthcare funding.”
Ultimately, she believes, we all have it within us to be ‘more Joan’. “You don’t have to accept ill health or an erosion of your life. It’s not a done deal unless you want it to be.”
Joan’s not-so-secret tips for regaining your health at any age
#1. Eat more protein
“Eat at least 1g of protein for every pound [500g] you weigh, based on your ideal healthy body weight. The older we get, eat more not less of it.”
#2 .Create a diet rich in quality produce
“Choose vegetables from all the colours of the rainbow, as well as healthy fats like cheese, nuts and avocado, plus quality starches like sweet potato and rolled oats.”
#3. Strength train
“Even three times a week for 30 to 45 minutes can do wonders for bringing back your reflexes, general strength and tone. Exercising with weights is one of the best antidotes to the muscle loss and poor posture that we generally see with ageing.”
#4. Find more joy in your life
“Surround yourself with people who help you flourish. Do things that bring abundance into your life. You are the only one who can make yourself happy.”
#5. Keep learning
“Develop a growth mindset; chase after things that expand your mind and challenge your thinking.”
Feeling inspired? Read Joan's full story in her book Flex Your Age: Defying Stereotypes & Reclaiming Empowerment, $42.99 from amazon.com.au
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