Q&A: Suzanne Somers on healthy aging

At 60, Suzanne Somers claims to be feeling better -- and thinking better -- than she has in her whole life. Her secret? Good food, lots of sleep, minimal stress and balanced hormones. In her new book, Ageless, Somers continues the discussion of bioidentical hormones begun in her bestselling The Sexy Years. Through interviews with leading doctors on their recommendations for healthy aging, she shares with readers -- both men and women -- concrete solutions on how they can stay healthy and happy by taking control of their health and well-being. We spoke with Somers about her book, her lifestyle and her advice on living well.

Canadian Living: What is the key concept you want people to take away from your new book?

Suzanne Somers: The concept is you have to learn how your body works and be proactive about your own health, because we're living in a world of the greatest environmental assault the human species has ever before endured. We experience more stress in one day than people in Elizabethan times experienced in their entire lifetime. And people are losing their hormones -- men and women -- 10 years earlier than they once did. So normally a woman would start losing her eggs at 50 and go into menopause; it's now starting at 40.

What I've done for myself by taking advantage of my celebrity and getting to all these doctors is I really learned how my body works at a hormonal level. And I've tried to simplify it in this book and also to explain that we don't have to expect the diseases we associate with aging, which is heart disease, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer's. We take too many drugs -- every drug is designed to keep us on them for life -- and really, we should only be taking drugs for three things: for pain, infection and mental illness. All the rest are conditions that can be dealt with in a natural way and only going to Western medicine as a last resort.

Our biological reason for being here is reproduction. So if we're no longer of reproductive age, our body wants to eliminate us. Technology has figured out how to keep us alive now, to 90 and 100 years old, but nobody's thought about the quality of life in those years, and without hormones, there's no quality of life.

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