Jane Fonda Says She Still Looks And Feels Young At 82

Feb 13, 2020

Jane Fonda is one of many celebrities who continues to work well past the expected retirement age of 60 or 70. At the age of 82, Fonda co-stars with Lily Tomlin in now their 7th season of the Netflix series Grace & Frankie. Through interviews, Jane Fonda shares her ageless secrets to feeling young throughout all of life. 

For some, 82-year-old Jane Fonda embodies the idea of age being just a number. Fonda has shared that her key to both looking and feeling young starts with how you live while you're young and continues for the rest of your life. Emphasizing the importance of building healthy habits, Jane Fonda told the Daily Mail,

"I feel lucky that I did a lot of fitness work earlier in my life because it means I'm stronger now."

In an interview with Healthy Living, Fonda said, "aging is what happens. There is nothing that can be done about it. We age. The question is not antiaging because that sets you up for failure and unhappiness. The question is how to age successfully. That’s a huge difference." From diet and exercise to makeup and mental health, Jane Fonda has lots of tips for improving the longevity of youthfulness.

Known for her beloved workout series from the 1980s, it's known that Jane Fonda promotes an active lifestyle. According to the Daily Mail, Jane said, "I still work out, although these days I do it slowly. I don’t run, I walk. I don’t ski, I cross-country ski. I still do resistance training and yoga but I do it very slowly. I’m never going to stop." For Jane, the key to living in a young body is staying active and to simply never stop moving. Jane said, "I’ve written a book about aging, Prime Time, in which I say that the most important thing is to keep moving, to stay active. That’s what I do and that’s how to stay strong."

Even at the age of 82, Jane urges hat you should move as much as you can, even if you have to adjust the way in which you move. She told Healthy Living,

"I walk about an hour a day. I do strength training. I stretch. There are a lot of things that I can’t do that I used to do. So I do things that are safer when you’re older. I walk. I lift lighter weights. I move more slowly. But keep moving. Keeping your body active is absolutely critical. If you’re in a wheelchair, move your arms."

Along with Fonda's famous videos also came her book that prioritized staying young through exercise rather than crash diets. When asked by Healthy Living if she partakes in dieting, Fonda responded,

"No, I eat healthy, fresh food, minimal red meat. Low on carbs, but I eat carbs. I eat a lot of fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, chicken."

In a video for BeFit, Fonda says that we should "think about making long-term, significant lifestyle changes" rather than dieting. Jane said, "forget fad diets" and "do not weight yourself" and followed-up by declaring that she doesn't even own a scale. 

After her fitness videos and big-screen Hollywood movies, Fonda has turned to Netflix and now plays the character of 'Grace' in the series Grace and Frankie. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fonda talks about how therapy is just as important in terms of overall health. "I had to go back into therapy and start Prozac," Fonda said when speaking about how playing the role of 'Grace' brought her own issues to the surface. 

Fonda also discussed in an interview with Healthy Living how mental health directly affects our physical well-being. "Your anxiety will drive you to do things like eat too much or drink too much or whatever," Fonda said. "Meditating, I meditate for 45 minutes to an hour every day."

As an actress, political activist, and fashion model, Jane Fonda is constantly keeping busy. While it's no secret that many Hollywood stars work past the retirement age of people in other professions, Jane Fonda continues to build to her repertoire even at the age of 82.

Now in the seventh season of the Netflix series Grace & Frankie, Jane Fonda represents older women both on-screen and in real life. Jane must believe that keeping busy helps her to feel youthful because even while being occupied with movies and filming, she continues her political activism and even organizes her own protests around climate change and sustainability. 

According to her feature in Harper's Bazaar, Jane says that looking young came with when she "started paying more attention to [her] hair and wearing makeup in real life." She then added, "It was a big step for me." In an interview with Coveteur, Jane's makeup artist, Shawnelle Prestidge, talks about how Fonda prefers more lightweight foundation, and therefore always uses, "HD formulas, which are highly pigmented and reflect light nicely" because "you want something that has the highest level of pigment because you can actually use less product to get an opaque effect."

Jane also added in her Bazaar feature that "curling my lashes and putting on mascara are things I try to do if I have time," and "as you get older, I think you tend to get paler, so I also put more blush on." For Fonda, natural is the way to go when it comes to makeup. 

When asked about how she stays looking so young, Jane told Healthy Living that "the number one most important thing is to not smoke!" Jane said how smoking is really what becomes a detriment to the aging of the face, specifically regarding wrinkles. Jane said that avoiding smoking is the way to age more gracefully rather than more rapidly.

Jane told the Daily Mail, "You could not pay me to be young again...after I turned 60, I began to understand who I was, and I became young again," and that even though she was in her 80's that she's "feeling pretty good about life!"

What do you think about Jane Fonda's tips for staying young? What's your favorite tip or the one you're most likely to incorporate into your life? Let us know your thoughts below and pass this along to others so they can share their favorite tip, too!