Las Vegas Weekly

May 21, 2009 · 2:56 PM

Exclusive: Suzanne Somers on the secrets to great sex and living to be 100

By Robin Leach

Suzanne Somers will follow up her best-selling book Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness with lectures at the Las Vegas Hilton on Memorial Day weekend.

Photo: Caroline Somers

Sexy actress Suzanne Somers believes she’ll live to be 100 and go on enjoying a renewed sex life for a long time to come. I know they say it’s impolite to ask a woman her age, but the anti-aging advocate freely admits she’s 62 -- and her husband, Alan Hamel, thinks she looks like she’s in her early 40s.

Hard to believe that nine years ago, Suzanne was diagnosed with breast cancer, and the former Las Vegas headliner reveals that it would have eventually killed her. Instead, she says it changed her life and started her on the road to being younger and healthier. She is the prettiest picture of good health as you can see in these photos by Caroline Somers.

Suzanne, a best-selling author of 18 books and an entrepreneur with a booming health business (go to www.suzannesomers.com for more information), heads into Las Vegas this Memorial Day weekend for two lectures on health, hormones, sexuality and wellness. It’s the follow-up to her latest New York Times bestseller Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness.

The Three’s Company star used to live here, but now her husband and she are best friends and neighbors with Barry Manilow in Palm Springs, Calif. I have known them since the very late ’70s before they wed. Suzanne did my very first live Entertainment Tonight pilot from Caesars Palace in 1980!

I chatted with Suzanne before her flight to Las Vegas for an advance listen to the secrets she intends to reveal:

Photo: Caroline Somers

The cover of Suzanne Somers' latest book Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness.

Suzanne Somers: You can’t get rid of me! I wanted to be near our friend Barry for Memorial Day weekend. I lecture by day, and he plays by night.

Wherever he goes, I follow! We will go see him perform because he’s going to do that memorable At the Mayflower album this weekend.

Robin Leach: So the last time I saw you was up at the Red Rock Resort here when you had another amazing lecture. Faithful fans were lined up around the block by the hundreds. Will this be the same or different?

SS: It’s always different. That was totally about menopause. This doesn’t deal with that subject. This is How Do You Feel Good, How Do You Not Get Cancer and How Do You Have a Great Sex Life When Everybody Thinks It’s Over.

RL: Which one of those is the most important?

SS: Well, I’ll tell you (laughing) having my sex life back is so incredible because as you know I can be a little uninhibited! I’ve reached an age where I don’t care what anybody thinks of me. At 62, I feel better, I think I look better, I’ve never been happier, and my body is in better shape. I’m taking care of myself, and I have figured it all out, and I am going to tell the audience all about it.

Photo: Hilton

Suzanne Somers.

It is about the way I live my life, what I eat, how I sleep and the hormones that I take and the chemicals I avoid. It is as simple as that! By doing those things, I’ve been able to turn my health around, get my weight exactly where I want it, get my eye’s shining and my hair shiny and my breasts perky. Everything is just working better than ever before without any artificial means.

RL: That’s great. So give me just a couple of hints of what chemicals you avoid and where you avoid them.

SS: I don’t eat any food that I know contains chemicals. So I eat organic food and no additives. I make sure everything at my house is chemical free. I put reverse osmosis on the water, and in the house there are no chemicals, aluminum or fluorides. I don’t use chlorine in my pool. I don’t take any pharmaceutical drugs unless I absolutely need them. I haven’t had any need for them for over nine years. I’m on a full natural hormone replacement including thyroid and HGH, and the combination of this has just been magnificent

RL: Now at one point you were diagnosed with breast cancer?

SS: Nine years ago and probably, in retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it was such a wakeup call as I had to sit back and say, “What have I done?” What have I been doing that my body is playing host to this cancer, and I started looking at what I was doing. I had not taken my diet seriously. I didn’t think about anything that I used in my house -- you know the stronger the chemical, the better because it cleans faster, whiter, better -- just the way they advertise all of this.

And if the doctor told me to take a pharmaceutical drug, then I took it. One of those drugs was birth control pills, which I took for 22 years. I never thought about it, but then I started noticing that all of those women who’d been on those pills in the ’60s were all dropping like flies with breast cancer, and nobody was saying anything about it. So I started really thinking about what is the cumulative effect of all these drugs and chemicals. I asked at what point does our liver say I cannot give anymore, and my liver had reached that point. There I was with breast cancer, and it was shocking news, so I changed my life.

Photo: Caroline Somers

Suzanne Somers.

RL: Do you think you could have died from it?

SS: I think I could have died if I had taken the treatments. They wanted me to do chemotherapy and do the full, the whole cancer treatment. That’s when this little Irish person rose up and said, “That doesn’t sound good to me.” I remember saying to the doctor, “it just doesn’t make sense. You want to poison me to kill this cancer, and then we are going to cross our fingers to make sure that the good parts of me grow back”? Now what I didn’t realize at the time is that is the war! They chemo a person and then hope the immune system grows back faster than the cancer, so you go five years to see if it returns. I think that if I had done what they told me, I would not have done well with my body.

RL: Today you feel more alive than you have ever felt?

SS: Yes, exactly, and I took charge of my life. I changed my life completely. I can have a glass of wine and I have fun, but I just take every bite of food seriously. When I am on the road and I have to have food that’s not organic, then at night before I go to bed, I load up on antioxidants to eat free radicals. I’m constantly thinking about the revolving door, and I am not afraid of cancer anymore, plus I sleep eight hours a night.

RL: Without any artificial sleep aids?

SS: Without anything, and nobody my age sleeps all that much. When you can sleep that well, you’re really healthy.

RL: Breakthrough is your 18th successful book. What’s next?

SS: I’m working on No. 19 right now. I want to put an end to cancer and the way doctors are trying to cure it. It will be very controversial.

Can you believe Crissy Snow is going to get all fired up with the cure for cancer? Well, I swear to God they call it a war on cancer, but I always say this war has been a dismal failure! Dismal because they have made no progress, except they do the happy dance when they find a drug to give you an extra month of life.

RL: Do doctors who claim to treat cancer condemn you and criticize you for what you say?

SS: Well, they will when the next book comes out. I’ve already been viciously attacked talking about the hormones, but then I had to think why? Why would they care if I take hormones and help tell others about the hormones? I don’t know why! If everybody could be as healthy as I am and feel as well as I do on natural bio-identical hormones that cost around $65 a month, then we would have no need for all these drugs. All the controversy, the resistance and all the attacks always come from the pharmaceutical companies.

RL: So let me ask you the opposite of that question: Do you have any doctors that say you’ve got it right?

SS: Oh, yes! There is a body of doctors, the American Academy for the Events of Medicine. Wherever I’ve gone in the world and spoken to them or for them, there’s a standing ovation. They are the doctors who have said, “This isn’t working! Our patients are getting sicker and requiring more and more drugs.” So they have now switched over to alternative medicine.

So if people come to the lecture, it’s a great thing to do in the afternoon. It lasts just over an hour and will change your life. They will get to feel great. No one will admit that they’re not having a great sex life. Women especially think it’s embarrassing to say they can’t feel anything. For three years, when I had lost all my hormones, I’d rather have a tea than have sex. All the pleasure had gone.

Now I get letters from women saying they can’t believe their life with their husband is so much better. I think it saves marriages. It is great, and that’s why I want to shout it from the rooftops. I’m 62, and Alan tells me I look as if I am 40!

RL: Do you think this was your mission? To tell the world about good health after you’d become a TV star?

SS: You know, I wonder. Everything I try to do, I do so well, and then there was the political firing from Three’s Company. It forced me to reinvent myself, and in doing so, I became a Vegas headliner, but I had nothing to do in the daytime. So I started writing because I’m Irish, so we write and keep moving, and now I can’t stand to be without a project. Nineteen books later, and we have a constituency that is more solid than anything I ever had worked on, be it seven years on Step by Step’ or Candid Camera and the other series.

RL: But in a sense all you did on those shows was to make people laugh and chuckle. Now in a sense what you’ve been doing for the past 16 years is saving and changing lives?

SS: Changing lives and, yes, that has been a privilege. It also takes away the pressure off not having to vie for roles; I’m not vying with anybody, as there’s no one in my category. So I just live this blissful busy all the time, always on the lecture circuit, helping people feel better. I’m always listening to music, and Barry wrote me a show where I put a version of this get well, change your life story to music.

There’s no more acting, per se. But what I’d really like to do again -- just once and I’m in the mood for it -- is to remake The Graduate. They never remade it, and I would like Adam Sandler to be the seduced one as I unhook my stocking top and Adam is quivering as only he can do. And I’m in the best shape of my life and can do that really well!

Suzanne lectures at the Las Vegas Hilton on Saturday and Sunday at 4 p.m. in the Barry Manilow Theater, so don’t miss out on what she has to say because it might change your life, too!

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

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