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Jane Fonda “avoids depression through exercise”.
The 84-year-old actress revealed there is a lot of depression in her family so she does everything she can to avoid it.
She told Vogue.com: “I come from a long line of depressed people. One of the ways that I avoid depression is through exercise. When I move, when I walk, when I exercise, the depression lifts. That and activism are the two best anecdotes for depression as far as I'm concerned. I mean, unless you have chronic depression, which is a different thing.”
Jane also revealed she finds exercise empowering and has heard similar sentiments from other women who have done her famous workouts over the years.
She said: “It started off with ballet. I started there and, oh, boy, that was it. I got hooked. When I took a ballet class, my body would change. So I did ballet almost every day. Then I was making a movie with Michael Douglas, ‘The China Syndrome'. I fell toward the end of the movie, and I broke my foot. It was in a cast for a while. Within a month, I had to do a movie where I wore a bikini, ‘California Suite'. So I had to do something, and I couldn't do ballet. So after my foot got better, my stepmother told me about a class taught by a woman named Leni Cazden at the Gilda Marx studio. After a few weeks and my foot got better, I went and took the class and it was basically the workout. Oh, my God, it had a huge impact on me.
“So that's what I was doing. Leni and I decided to do a workout studio. Then she got married and was sailing around the world. I went ahead and did it. I was just fascinated with how [people embraced it]. I mean, maybe people started doing it because they wanted to get thin, but women would say to me, ‘I don't take insulin anymore for my diabetes,' or, ‘I stood up to my boss for the first time because I could see the muscles in my arms'. It empowered women in very profound ways. I was really happy about that.”
