The original story appeared in BRIGHT by The Epoch Times. Click here to view
You may know Suzanne Somers as the cute blonde, Chrissy Snow, on Three’s Company, a hit TV show in the 1970s. Or as the spokesperson for the ThighMaster (yes, it’s still being sold!). But it might surprise you that Suzanne Somers, now 75 years old, has spent decades exploring breakthroughs in anti-aging that avoid chemical toxins and Big Pharma.
Fourteen of Somers’ 27 books have made it onto the New York Times bestseller list, and most of them center around natural health. Her latest book is titled “A New Way to Age.” Her decades-long investigation into cutting edge anti-aging therapies and her no-nonsense way of talking about them have positioned her as a sought-after speaker on the topic. She lectures regularly, including recently, to doctors at a medical conference. She’s also a highly successful businesswoman, a wife for over 50 years, a mother, and a grandmother.
Her journey with alternative treatments started 25 years ago, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Around the height of he r celebrity, Somers made the controversial, and very public, decision to eschew chemotherapy. The world held its breath and “counted the days until her death,” she said, since chemo and radiation were seen by many as the only way to save her life. She went on Larry King’s show to talk about her diagnosis and was profiled by Dan Rather. Thankfully, she found success with natural supplements and her cancer went into remission. But take it from her, she’s no extremist when it comes to alternative medicine.
“I go natural first,” Somers says. “And I take care of my body. I feed it right, I sleep it right, I think it right, I love it right. And then if nothing else, if none of the natural treatments work, then [I] resort to allopathic and then they’re a godsend. Drugs were meant for catastrophe. But now it’s … the first thing we reach for.”
She aims to help change that by connecting people to the most effective and natural treatments in America.
How Does Suzanne Somers Look and Feel This Good at 75?
“My message is, ‘you can get it back,’” Somers begins, referring to that “spark,” that life force many people start to lack after a certain age. “You can actually not only get it back, you can get it back better than you ever had it.”
How? Begin with bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, she says, for men and for women. Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy or BHRT has laid the foundation for her to look and feel good as her body advances. It took her one year with a doctor who specializes in the treatment to find the perfect mix of hormones to gradually replace the ones her body had stopped producing.
But then, she says, “I was the best Suzanne I’ve ever been in my whole life. I felt great.”
BHRT differs from other hormone replacement therapies through its plant-derived compounds that mimic exactly the hormones found in our bodies. Conventional hormone replacement therapy (HRT) often consists of synthetic hormones that merely approximate what our bodies make. HRT has been found to cause more side effects and have a higher risk of cancer. Take bioidentical progesterone versus synthetic progestin, for example. According to one study, “both physiological and clinical data have indicated that progesterone is associated with a diminished risk for breast cancer, compared with the increased risk associated with synthetic progestins.”
Especially when it comes to her hormones, Somers goes “natural first.”
Before BHRT helped her become her “best self,” she spent three years being what might have been her worst self. The terrible symptoms she experienced helplessly for those years led her to coin a new phrase, the “Seven Dwarves of Menopause: itchy, bitchy, sleepy, sweaty, bloated, forgetful, and all dried up.”
The worst part about this time is that it began affecting her marriage. Her behavior toward her husband, whom she calls her best friend in the world, started getting so bad that one day he turned to her and told her, “You know, Suzanne, a marriage can only take so much of this.”
“I thought, oh! Here I am pushing away the person I care about most in the world,” Somers said. “And so that is what really got me in the car to drive. I went from doctor to doctor to doctor to doctor … I heard about an endocrinologist in Santa Barbara, who was working with bioidentical hormones. I called her, I made an appointment.”
“When you recognize that you can manage and manipulate the aging process by doing sophisticated labs, blood and urine and saliva, to see where your deficiencies are, then you can put back what you’ve lost in the aging process…”
Bioidentical hormone replacement is what she recommends above all, but in her latest book, she gives specialists the floor, so to speak, to talk about a gamut of anti-aging breakthroughs: stem cell therapy, yoga, jaw realignment for heart health, functional medicine, the role stress plays in hormones and aging, and more.
Beyond her writing, she promotes her own brands of natural supplements, nontoxic home cleaning products, and organic skin care. On regular social media live sessions, she discusses the effects of environmental toxins and what to do instead. First, get away from them, then detoxify your body, and choose organic whenever possible.
Aging Is a Chance to Become Better
Somers’ infectious happiness about aging stems from how positively she thinks about life and what’s ahead of her.
When Somers was a young, single mother, her son was hit by a car and almost died. It caused terrible nightmares that led her to seek therapy for him. The therapist helped Suzanne, at the same time, begin to overcome the effects of her abusive, alcoholic father.
“Maybe we have to go through this crud in life to realize all that we are. And in each of the circumstances in our lives is the basis for our wisdom, layering on itself.”
That early experience with an excellent therapist gave Somers the confidence to take on a major acting role on national television and set her on a lifelong path of self-improvement.
“I looked at every negative as an opportunity and use[d] it as the next stepping stone to growth. So at my age now, when you think you’re going to start not thinking about growing, I’m thinking about ‘Wow, I wonder what’s ahead of me now … what do I get to learn next?’ And there’s always, always something.”
Her beautiful and hard-earned life experience is why she’s so grateful to be the age she is now.
“I almost want to say to people younger than me, ‘Wait, wait until you get to be my age, it’s so great!’ You have the one thing young people can’t buy or have, which is wisdom and perspective. So, I’ve got this newfound wisdom and perspective and a take on life that is ‘I’m done with negative.’ I don’t think negative thoughts … If [there are] people you’d like to be pissed off with, I immediately shut it out. And I think ‘It’s so not worth it.’ I wish them well.”
How You Can Get Started
At first, when Somers’ social media followers began asking her how to start on any of these specialized anti-aging regimens, she was at a loss.
“Cutting edge, integrative, and alternative doctors are not in every city,” she says. “And so I finally found it. I found a group called Liv Health. www.livhealth.com/suzanne These are not your primary doctors. This is your doctor for going forward: for hormones, for health, for gut problems, for sexual problems. You do a lot of interviewing as a patient with a concierge. And then the concierge listens to what you say. And then says, ‘You know, as I put all your information together, I think the right doctor for you is Dr. X in Kansas City, or Dr. Z in [that city].’
“We’re so grateful to be able to have [Liv Health] because then you’re going to get the right kind of natural hormones, you’re gonna get the right kind of lab work….”
“Aging is like maintaining a Maserati,” Somers said. “If we hear a noise in the engine, or a tiny thing seems off, we’d take it to go get checked. But we don’t do that with our bodies. We wait until it’s almost in a catastrophic place. And then you go climbing uphill. What I’m trying to say is, that’s the old way to age, wait till it’s broken down and wrecked, and then try to climb uphill and fix it. I’m saying, let’s catch it all before it becomes dilapidated and catastrophic.”
“What’s ahead of me? I think there’s probably another ‘big first.’ And then the lessons will come. And I trust and have faith and I live a happy life. Every day I just thank God for this beautiful day … I look forward to the future. I plan to be here till I’m in my hundreds.”