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By Jennifer Bixler, CNN CNN) — In the 1980s, Jane Fonda was the face of fitness for millions of Americans. “The Jane Fonda Workout” became the highest-selling home video ever, with more than a million copies purchased. Since then, Fonda has produced and starred in over 20 home exercise tapes and DVDs. After a 15-year hiatus, the Oscar award-winning actress returned to the fitness field with the goal of helping baby boomers feel better and stay active. Her latest DVD, “Prime Time: AM/PM Yoga for Beginners,” releases Tuesday. Fonda turns 75 later this month. We spoke with her Monday about aging, eating and living life abundantly. Q: When you released your first workout tape in 1982, did you have a sense of how big a phenomenon you were on to? I did not have a clue. I had no idea. It was pure luck. I didn’t realize the role timing would play in the whole thing. There was no video industry. I didn’t know anyone who owned a video, because no one could afford the hardware to play a video. And there was no video that beckoned people to do it over and over and over again until that tape came out. That’s what caused the video industry to explode … it was all very synergistic … it had no strategic thought on my part. Q: How do you stay motivated? What motivates me is how good I feel afterwards. (Laughs) I don’t wake up saying “Oh goody, I am going to work out.” But I do it because of how it makes me feel when it’s over. I feel so good. If I’ve felt depressed or down at all, it picks me up and makes me feel great. Q: Do you feel you have to do as much as you did 10 years ago? Absolutely not, no. I can’t do what I used to do. My body just wouldn’t tolerate what I used to do. (Fonda has had hip and knee replacement surgeries.) The mistake that so many people make is that if they can’t do what they once did, then they don’t do anything. Big mistake. It’s important just to do something. If you can’t run, walk. … If you can’t lift heavy weights, so lift light weights. But just keep yourself physically active. It makes all the difference not just for your body, but for your brain as well. Q: What do you eat? I eat fish, chicken and eggs. I eat red meat maybe twice a week. But when you are older, it is very important what you eat because your cells regenerate more slowly and also you put on weight more easily because you have less muscle than you used to, so every single calorie you put in your body has to count for something. I eat by color. I try to eat something dark green, dark purple, red, orange, yellow, white, because they all have different vitamins and minerals in them. Q: What foods do you avoid at all costs? Well, I am not a purist. I am not perfect. Now that the Christmas holiday is coming, I will take a bite of a pecan pie, but I won’t eat a whole pecan pie. I will take a few bites of the dressing, but I will eat a lot of the turkey. Turkey meat is so good. I will eat it with cranberry sauce and gravy. But I try to eat less of the very fattening food and more of the really healthy food. Q: What do you think is the secret to a well-lived life? I think it’s more important to be “interested” than to try to be “interesting.” I’ve always remained interested and curious and I’ve always been a student as well as a teacher, so I think that’s key. Also being intentional … living an intentional life … thinking about who you are, how you affect other people, how you are perceived in the world and how you can change that to be more positive — instead of sort of just drifting along like a leaf in the river, being really intentional about how you live. When you do yoga, you can do the poses thinking about the grocery shopping or what you are going to do tomorrow, or you can be intentional … in the moment, being present in what you are doing. That’s how to get the most out of life and learning. That has been very important to me. click here for complete article

Oscar winner performs dramatic reading of work by Israeli author Nava Semel at a US symposium promoting study of a long overlooked topic By DANIEL WEIZMANN November 9, 2012 “I feel so glad that we hear about the Holocaust through firsthand accounts,” Jane Fonda said from the podium Thursday night at the Ray Kurtzman Theater in Los Angeles, addressing a private audience of scholars and historians. “Seventeen-hundred of those testimonies are of sexual violence — from those brave enough to talk about their experiences.” The Oscar-winning actress then moved the crowd with a dramatic reading from Israeli author Nava Semel’s novel And the Rat Laughed – a stark pastiche of childhood memories, confessional poetry and a Polish priest’s diary, time-tripping from 1943 through the present to 2099. Tackling the very darkest of material — the tale of a Jewish girl hiding in a pit with a pet rat, sexually abused by the son of a Polish farmer — the actress looked up to the ceiling and called out with her unmistakable, pleading voice, “How to tell the story?” Fonda concluded by pointing out that the long overlooked voices of sexual victims of the Holocaust are relevant to the present — “from Yugoslavia to Rwanda to the Congo.” She introduced a short video, shot in Denver in 1995 as part of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation project, which has collected almost 52,000 testimonials in 32 languages. This clip showed Manya, a rosy-cheeked, 77-year-old Auschwitz survivor, recounting how she had been pulled aside by a Nazi guard. “He said that I’m pretty. ‘She’ll do different work.’” In the video, Manya recalls in broken English how she was taken to clean in the officer’s quarters, a private room stocked with weapons and guns. “I knew I’m in trouble because he touched me in the face,” she says. ‘This was a minor area in genocide studies. In the past, [sexual violence] was considered too specific, ‘niche,’ something for feminists’ Ultimately, he beat her and raped her, and Manya remembers that “the guard told me, ‘When [your] face will be gone, you’ll go with the fire … you see the smoke?’” He then pointed to the chimney from the nearby crematorium. The clip ends with Manya exhorting her fellow survivors to speak out as she has. It was serious stuff for the Kurtzman Theater, a tony venue in the Century City area that’s part of Creative Artists Agency, the talent firm created by Hollywood power brokers including former Disney head Michael Ovitz. The video, and Fonda’s reading, marked the culmination of a groundbreaking two-day symposium attended by more than a dozen Holocaust scholars. Put together by the USC Shoah Foundation — in conjunction with Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel, founder of Remember the Women Institute, and Jessica Neuwirth, one of the founders of women’s rights organization Equality Now — the seminars brought together social historians, language professors, biological anthropologists, doctors of political science and Holocaust experts from all over the world. click here to continue reading the rest of the article