Forget counting calories or sticking to a strict keto plan. When it comes to staying fit, healthy and seemingly ageless at 73, Suzanne Somers tells HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY that her secret is eating, not dieting. “I eat real food,” the former Three’s Company star says. “I eat butter, cream, sour cream, olive oil, full fat cream cheese. I eat grass-fed or organic protein. All my food is organic. I’m never on a diet.” The actress, who is promoting her new book, A New Way To Age: The Most Cutting-Edge Advances In Antiaging, swears by eating “with gusto” and, yes, that includes red meat, drinking tequila “several times a week” and occasionally indulging in a little sugar.
With her full blonde hair, her glowing skin and trim figure, Suzanne defies the traditional concept of what a septuagenarian is supposed to look like. She says that’s mainly because of what she puts into her body, including supplements. And that starts, primarily, with the food she eats. “Where I grew up everything was organic (even though they didn’t know it) because they weren’t spraying poison on our foods,” says the California native, in between sips of beetroot juice.
Suzanne kicks off her day with a smoothie for breakfast, which is jam-packed with kale, spinach, ginger and apples. “I’m getting my three cups of vegetables a day, right there,” she says. Sometimes she has an egg and whole wheat toast with “a lot of butter and sea salt” for breakfast. Lunch – on the day we speak – is a “bowl of Vietnamese soup with little chicken meatballs, bean sprouts” and rice noodles. Dinner is a rack of lamb, salad (with vegetables picked from her garden) and baked baby sweet potatoes.
“What I keep trying to tell people is food is one of the big pleasures in life…” Suzanne says, adding, “When you get yourself on a regimen where you’re eating right and not eating chemicals, you don’t get any strange cravings, because it’s the chemicals that cause the craving. The way that works is, when you eat, let’s say a fast food hamburger, the brain goes, ‘OK, I didn’t get what I needed there. I didn’t get the minerals. I didn’t get the right vitamins… Let’s just have some more.’”
When it comes to consuming more minerals and minimizing the toxins in her life, for Suzanne, that includes everything from supplements and beauty products to household cleaners. She actually has her own range of Suzanne Organics Skin & Body Care and toxic-free home products.
But, looking – and feeling – good also extends to exercise, including sex. Suzanne frequently gushes about being intimate with her 83-year-old husband, Alan Hamel, twice a day. “I love being a grown up,” she says. “I like the way I look at 73… I like the way my husband looks at me at 73 and I like having the backs of the women who think it’s over. I’m out there to say, ‘It ain’t over.’” A New Way To Age: The Most Cutting-Edge Advances In Antiaging is published by Gallery Books.