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Jo Whiley reveals shocking discovery she made about her body since turning 60 as she stuns in stylish shoot: 'Why did nobody tell me about that?'

Jo Whiley reveals shocking discovery she made about her body since turning 60 as she stuns in stylish shoot: 'Why did nobody tell me about that?'

Daily Mail​4 days ago
She has been a leading voice of BBC Radio for 30 years.
But when it comes to her body image, Jo Whiley struggles.
Posing in a bold pink feather coat on the cover of Women and Home, the 60-year-old said: 'Your body undoubtedly changes as you get older, and things don't look the same.
'Your skin changes, and that's one of my biggest revelations.
'I do weights, which has become increasingly important, but no matter how many weights I lift, I can't do anything about the skin that's hanging off on my arms, or the papery texture my skin has.'
She continued: 'Why did nobody tell me about that? I'm not quite sure what the answer is, apart from wearing long sleeves and covering up, but I don't want to do that.
The mother-of-four India, 30, Jude, 24, Cassius, 21 and Coco, 14, revealed last year she has osteoarthritis in her fingers, which can cause swelling and pain, making it difficult to make a fist on some days.
Elsewhere in the shoot she revealed her arms in a strapless beige dress while sitting on a chair.
She continued: 'I wish I could say I'm great with self-care and that I moisturise my body all the time, but I'm rubbish at all of that. I have so many aches and pains, but I consider myself very lucky to be healthy.'
Last year Jo revealed that she'd achieved a six pack after turning to the gym to 'save' herself from debilitating menopause.
She confessed: 'I really lost myself when the menopause hit. I cried all the time. I mean, I cry a lot anyway, but I cried all the time. I just felt very weak.
'And going to the gym and getting myself strong has played a really, really big part in helping me be the person I am today. It really saved me.'
Whiley, who shares four children flexed her toned torso on the cover of Women's Health in a red sports bra and underwear.
She also revealed that life was not so sex, drugs and rock'n'roll for her in the 90s as she suffered from anxiety when DJing on stage to large crowds.
She said: 'I remember doing one gig and I was just so scared, I thought I can't go on like this. This is ridiculous. It's ruining my life because I'm just such a ball of anxiety.
'But then I realised how happy it was making people when I do these gigs and that was a game changer.'
Posing in underwear, Ms Whiley took the opportunity to speak out against the culture of 'lad mags' - lifestyle magazines from the 90s and early noughties aimed at men and typically featuring a woman also in her underwear.
The BBC presenter said: 'There was so much objectification and judgment of women and their bodies.
'It was a ludicrous time to be a woman, but I just kept my head down and weathered the storm.'
'I think [the current generation of girls] is still dealing with a lot.
'There are so many crises and so much pressure and so much to worry about in the world.
[But] there's an army of [young] women who are fearless, absolutely fearless, and they take no prisoners, and they will be who they want to be. And it's much healthier.'
Read Jo's interview in Woman & Home out now
Meanwhile Jo has also claimed her children will 'never be nepo babies ' even though she has achieved huge career success over the years.
But despite all her success, she has claimed her four children will never be nepo babies as the label alone 'horrifies them', according to The Sun.
She told the publication: 'My kids will never be nepo babies; they are very determined never ever to make it because I'm their mum.
'It really horrifies them - the thought that anybody would ever employ them because of what I do.
'So they're so determined to get jobs and do work on their own merits, and they will never take advantage of me at all.'
The former Radio One presenter is starting a podcast with her longtime friend and fellow DJ, Zoe Ball.
With two episodes a week, the veterans will be discussing family life, health and their careers.
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'I definitely believe in something other than ourselves,' she says. 'I believe in a higher power. We're in his image. So when you see someone, you're looking at God.' It's hard (but maybe just for an atheist like me) to square this trenchant, evangelical certainty with her politics, and those, generally, of Saturday Night Live, the flagship US sketch show that doesn't just take casual aim at religiosity, but makes the most complicated, long-form scriptural points about race, politics, capitalism and Trumpism. Respect for faith at absolutely no time gets in the way of a joke. The problem, Jones says, is not God, but the rightwing capture of Christianity. 'He made all these animals, he made all these plants – you think he didn't make gay men? A transgender man or woman?' Yes, of course. 'How can you look at a platypus and not see a woman who is not as beautiful? Does that makes sense?' Not really, no. But even the intonation on 'platypus' is mysteriously hilarious. Her grandmother was funny, her dad was funny, her brother was 'kind of goofy funny'; if any of them had become comedians, she would have been out of a job, she says. 'My mom wasn't funny, but she was a very joyful woman.' Yet her childhood and indeed life have not been easy, as she detailed in her memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones, two years ago, which she prefaced: 'Now I'm gonna be honest: some of the details might be vague because a bitch is 55 and she's smoked a ton of weed. A lot of it is hazy, but I will give you the best recollection of it that I can.' Her dad was an army veteran who became an electrical engineer. He was also an alcoholic, who moved the family from Memphis to LA when he got a job at Stevie Wonder's radio station, but then lost that job. Meanwhile, her mother had a stroke when Jones was very young, and both parents died within six months of each other, her dad in 2000, her mum in 2001, when Jones was in her early 30s. Jones missed both funerals because she was working to pay for them. Her brother died in 2009, when he was only 38, having been found unconscious in a park in Santa Barbara. Jones describes her young life as a series of glorious flameouts. Having a natural height advantage, she wanted to be a basketball player. 'When I had my mind on it', she says, 'I was so good, but most of the time, I was inconsistent. But I could coach my ass off.' She got a basketball scholarship to Chapman University in California, then switched to Colorado State University, changed her major several times, started off doing computer science, dropped it, spent a term and some determination on being 'not just law enforcement, a serial-killer finder', but couldn't shoot a gun. 'I thought: 'I can be Columbo. You don't see him shooting a gun.' And everybody was like: 'Columbo totally had a gun. He was a cop.' Then I was going to be a lawyer, because I love to talk. I was not going to be a lawyer when they handed me all those books and wanted me to read them.' She eventually settled on communications. She was, however, a natural comic, winning 'funniest person on campus' in 1987. After that, 'there was never a point of giving up, because comedy was my thing. When it didn't pay the bills, I'd have to get a job and still be a comic. Because I'm a comic.' After the bereavements of the 00s, though, it was a different kind of comedy. Particularly after her brother died, 'I was evil. Not evil, just angry. Performing, and angry. My routine was raw, it started getting to where I thought: 'I don't give a fuck whether you all laugh.' I was destroying it. That's when I started wearing a mohawk. People thought I did it for fashion – no, I just didn't want to comb my hair. I was bare minimum getting out of bed.' She was taking drugs, she says, and she doesn't mean weed, 'I mean drugs drugs. Speed.' Of all the rotten substances, I say, why speed? 'Because I was having sex with a guy. I mean, listen, if we're going to be honest, let's be honest. He was hot, first of all. He was really good in bed. And he would do speed, so I did it because he would do it. I did not know how it was affecting me.' I come out of this unclear on a lot of the causal links, but with a pretty clear read on the mix of nihilism and life force that messed her up but propelled her along at the same time. 'I was like: 'Hey, everybody's gone; if it's time for me to die, then I'll die.' Then I saw this couple, who you could tell were on drugs, and I thought: 'That's going to be you if you don't stop this foolishness.' I busted up laughing. That was hilarious.' In 2013, Saturday Night Live held an unusual mid-season casting call to add at least one African American female comic to the cast, in response to the criticism by two cast members that the show was too white. Jones was hired as a writer, rather than a featured player, later appearing on screen the following May. At 47, she was the oldest new hire the show had ever made, but none of this was an easy fit. She was not political, she says. 'I was just a regular person that thought the government did its thing, I ain't got time to worry about what they doing, I'm going to work every day. If you guys raise the gas price, it doesn't matter, because I'm still going to put $20 in my car. I had not a clue. And you know, I am the average American. We just think, 'The government's going to take care of that shit,' and when people complain about the government, you think: 'Oh, that's just because you're trying to get one over on the government.' I might have been kind of a Trumper and didn't know it.' For a long time, she relentlessly harassed her main mark on the show, co-star Colin Jost, who she adored, wrestled and kind of manhandled in a way that really foregrounded her attachment to comedy so physical it's almost mime-adjacent. 'People don't understand in that first year, maybe the first two seasons, I was really in love with Colin. I didn't know how it was going to happen, whether we would just work late together and make out in his office and drink whiskey. I had all the visions. He was so cute, and funny, and he was just so white. Such a white nerd frat boy, that I was like: 'I want him.' Every time I would see him in the corridor, I'd shout: 'I love you, Colin, you beautiful white stud!'' Nothing came of the crush, except that it became a recurring joke on the show. Jost got together with Scarlett Johansson in 2017, and they married in 2020. Last year, Jones told Drew Barrymore on her chatshow that she'd sworn off men for good, having grown 'tired of raising boys', and she picks up this theme with gusto. 'People talk about society going through a 'lonely man' phase. It comes back to you all won't do the work to become the person that you really can be. You're waiting for me to solve your problems. You're waiting for me to give you permission. Grow up – I'm not Build-A-Bear. Fuck that shit. Every time I get on the dating apps, I'll be like: 'I want to call the FBI. All of the serial killers are here.'' If she struggled to settle in at SNL, it wasn't just because she wasn't 'woke' enough. She was also still grieving, and 'I was not acting out, but I wasn't well. I wasn't cognisant of how my behaviour was affecting others. I remember Lorne [Michaels, producer and creator of SNL] texting me; I had said, 'I'm so sorry how I'm acting,' and he said, 'I talk to my wife about a lot of things, and she says: 'I am so glad you are talking about these things, but can you not talk about them to me? Can you find somebody else?' That's when SNL found me a therapist.' She speaks more highly of therapy than anyone I've ever heard, but really for what it did for her comedy: 'To be a good comic, you have to go deep into yourself, and have empathy and love yourself. It takes years to get fucked up; it's gonna take years to clean up. So, you know when you go to a psychic?' Not really, but go on … 'And you're, like, 'Bitch, you're not going to tell me shit,' and then by the 40th minute, she has broken you down? That was therapy. It made me a better person, made me a better friend, for sure, made me a better comic.' Three years into her SNL work, she got the role of Patty Tolan in what turned out to be an ill-fated reboot of Ghostbusters, which spawned a depressing wave of racist and misogynistic abuse on what was then Twitter. 'The platform is the first thing I went after, because I was like: 'Hey, I'm in your club; you're supposed to have security. People are shooting at me. I shouldn't have death threats on here.' People were like, 'Ignore it', and I absolutely was not going to ignore it. I am so tired of this attitude, I am so tired of being the bigger person. No, meet these motherfuckers where they at and fight back. I am not a victim – you're an asshole. It's wild to me that we can build these glorious things, we can build an iPhone, and we still can't beat racism.' She left SNL in 2019, and has since hosted the reboot of Supermarket Sweep, as well as an MTV awards ceremony, guest-hosted The Daily Show, voiced animated projects for film and TV and written her memoir. For her next move, she says, 'I want to do a serious acting role, maybe play some kind of detective. I could find the serial killer or I could be the serial killer.' She dissolves into laughter, as it is not lost on her how often she talks about serial killers. In a way, there's nothing more serious than her mission as a comic to get funnier the worse things get. 'That's my job, to bring some joy – you can't cry all day. That's what they want, they want you sad. They want you to see no light.' Leslie Jones is on tour in the US from 19 September to 22 November

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