Jillian Michaels needs more hours in the day. One of The Biggest Loser's trainers, Michaels leaves her hectic day job as NBC's tough-as-nails fitness guru and goes home to her two children, Phoenix and Lukensia — admittedly often running on fumes.
"I get up at 7 a.m. — after being up all night with the baby — and run around trying to get both kids diaper-changed, dressed and fed. Finally I'll shower, and before I know it, I've got 50 e-mails to answer, and I need to leave for work," Michaels, 39, tells the April issue of Fitness magazine, on newsstands now. "At the end of the day, I come home, and I'm like, 'OK, let me bathe you, change you, feed you, read you books, put you to bed' — wait, how am I supposed to do all this? Son of a bitch, this is hard!"
Sharing parenting duties with her longtime partner Heidi Rhodes — who gave birth to Phoenix in May 2012 and adopted Lukensia with Michaels less than a week prior — the trainer admits that she struggles to be patient with her daughter, 2, as she navigates life as a toddler.
"Everything right now is 'Lu do, Lu do.' She wants to do everything herself, but it means you have to sit there for 20 minutes while she tries to put on a shirt," Michaels explains. "It kills me because I've got to go to work. Heidi gets mad at me: 'How else is she going to learn how to put on her shirt?' or 'Don't rush her — you're rushing her!' It's brutal, but I'm really trying. I guarantee it's going to be their number one issue in therapy."
Still, Michaels — who returned to The Biggest Loser for season 14 after a two-year hiatus to help train kids in an effort to increase awareness of the childhood obesity epidemic — wouldn't trade her hectic, always on-the-go lifestyle for anything.
"Every day I tell myself how blessed I am. I have a great life. I can't bitch about it, because this is what I wanted. I just thought I'd be able to manage it better," she reflects, telling Fitness that she welcomes each day with a mantra: "My new motto is 'As long as I'm winning more than I'm losing, I'm still winning!'"
