Suzanne Somers, 75, Is ‘Natural First’ and Loves the Way She’s Aging
WELLNESSBrett ChudáOct 4 2022biggersmaller(Mike Azria)
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 her 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.
(Mike Azria)
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.”
(Mike Azria)
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].’
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Liv HEALTH | Start Living
Learn More Concierge Medicine HOW IT WORKS Join Now Weight gain? Hot flashes?
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“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 h
A true lover of wisdom has hands too busy to hold on to anything! He learns by
doing and every pebble in the path becomes her teacher! Oink
