- Marta Feinberg celebrated her 100th birthday in August.
- She credited her long life to a low-sodium vegetarian diet and “good luck.”
- But the centenarian said there were some things she wanted to do differently with her life.
When you ask 100-year-old Marta Feinberg about her secret to living a long life, she often shrugs. She said: “I have no secrets, I just got lucky.”
But on reflection, the mother of four admits that she has gone to some lengths to stay fit, healthy and alert.
“I have some regrets, but I feel like I’ve done enough to take care of myself,” she told Insider.
Author Dan Buettner, host of the hit Netflix series “Living to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones” wrote about five different regions of the world where people live the longest.
The healthy cluster includes a small community in California called Loma Linda. Feinberg said she had never heard of the Blue Zones concept, but she lives just a two-hour drive from Loma Linda.
Like many “Blue Zoners,” she doesn’t eat meat, limits her salt intake, and does light exercise. She credits these habits with helping her live a long life. She shared four of them with her Insider. She also added two things she wishes she had done differently.
she left her comfort zone
Feinberg said she vowed from an early age not to stay in her home state of Indiana. “This is an agricultural state and I felt like the opportunities were limited,” she said.
This 100-year-old man decided that the best way to immigrate was to become an academically successful person, even if it was difficult.
“I was always a very average student, but when I was in middle school, I asked my sister, who was an honor roll student, to guide me. I ended up graduating high school in fifth place,” she said.
She won a scholarship to attend the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “I was determined to go to college in a big city,” she said.
After graduating, she took a job as a set designer at a major Hollywood film studio. “She made $3.50 an hour,” Feinberg said. “That was the equivalent of $50 an hour in today’s money.”
She took one of the highest paying jobs of the time and became an architect. “It was a man’s world back then, but having a career before getting married gave me a lot of confidence,” she says.
she noticed her weight
Feinberg said her parents immigrated to the United States from Poland and Russia, so she ate a “traditional” Eastern European diet of mostly meat and potatoes as a child.
She started dieting on her own at age 11 after her teacher told her she was 10 pounds overweight. “She stopped eating bread and potatoes and didn’t eat extra portions,” she said.
She said her success with the diet made her worry about her weight throughout her life. She said she maintained her stable condition by eating healthy food and doing exercise such as cycling and roller skating.
Now, she stays fit by walking 1,500 steps a day around her house and in her backyard when the weather isn’t too hot.
She adjusted her diet to compensate for her health problems.
The centenarian said she developed several health problems in her early to mid-30s, including fluid retention that caused her ankles and feet to swell.
“When I ate things that had too much salt, I had fluid retention,” she said. The grandmother of two also inherited high blood pressure from her parents, but she followed a “salt-free diet.” The swelling has gone down considerably.
These days, I sometimes buy processed foods like vegetable patties, but I always check to make sure they contain less than 400 milligrams of sodium.
She stopped eating red meat in the early 1970s and “fortunately” has since become a vegan. She said she has maintained her energy levels for decades by eating proteins such as eggs and low-sodium cheese. “They provide a quick, high-protein meal,” she added.
She still wears makeup, never misses cold cream, and doesn’t dye her hair.
As for Feinberg’s beauty routine, she never uses soap on her face. Instead, she splashes water on her face and slathers it with her cold cream before going to bed.
“I use cold cream to remove my makeup, and I’ve noticed that the residue softens my skin overnight,” she said.
She said she uses foundation to even out her skin tone and applies a little lipstick when she goes out.
“I used to have reddish-blond hair, but now it’s much lighter,” Feinberg said, adding that she never changed her hair back to its original color.
She should have stayed out of the sun
“When I was younger, I used to go out in the sun a lot because I thought it would make me look healthier,” she said.
She says her social life at USC revolved around the beach. “She didn’t put on sunscreen, she didn’t wear sunglasses,” she said. “That was bad judgment.”
She said she developed skin cancer as a result. “I’ve had multiple surgeries when I’ve had to have extractions and skin grafts,” Feinberg said.
She said the worst affected areas were her nose and lower lip. “The main reason I wear foundation is because of the discoloration on my nose, and I have a small scar on my lips,” the matriarch said. “I really regret being out in the sun so much.”
I think she wanted to travel more rather than feel the social pressure to get married young.
Feinberg said she felt she missed the opportunity to travel to other countries after graduating from college. “I think she felt pressured to find a husband for her,” she said. Despite this, she got married at the age of 26. She was “relatively old” for the time.
“I wish I had seen more of the world, especially Europe, when I was younger,” she said. She said her love of art and her career in architecture inspired her desire to visit the continent.
Instead, she said that after getting married (her husband, Seymour, died in 2018 at age 96), they enjoyed regular vacations in Hawaii.
“Seymour and I visited Hawaii often,” she said, adding that as they got older it became a habit.
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