Sutton Foster Talks Youth

Younger star Sutton Foster recently sat down for an interview with New York Magazine's The Cut. Here's what she had to say:

On staying young: "I talk a lot about how age is really just a number and a mentality. I can be like, oh, I’m 42, I’m so old. But so what? You can’t do what now that you couldn’t do when you were 15? Sure, I shouldn’t do a back handspring or something, but I feel like it’s all what you project and your mental state. I really do believe that youth comes from how you look at the world. I’ve always thought of myself as a young soul, or young for my age. I was a late bloomer, and I still feel like I’m 15. I look at the world with hopeful optimism — I’m a bit of a Pollyanna.


I find myself more and more going, No, I don’t want to do that. But why? Why don’t you try it? That’s what keeps you young — trying new things. Because that’s what youth is: everything being new. When you’re in your 20s, it’s your first apartment, your first job, your first love. There’s all these firsts, and when you get older, you’re like, I remember when, and you have all these stories. But what’s something new that I can learn now? That’s why I just started learning tai chi – it’s terrifying and new, but I’ve never done that before. I also drink a lot of water, and I try to sleep a lot, too."

How I start my mornings: "We have two dogs, so I make sure they’re taken care of — that they’ve gone outside and eaten. Then, my morning usually starts with coffee. What I like to do, it doesn’t always happen, but if I have to be somewhere in the morning, I like to wake up at least two hours from when I have to be somewhere so that I can have time at home, time for my coffee and breakfast and get cleaned up.

I journal, so I write in the morning, too. I journal three pages — three little pages, not giant pages — but I used to do it a long time ago, and I have journals from when I was 15 years old. I have phases where I don’t do it for a while, and then I realize, actually it’s really good for me to get stuff out because sometimes I just need to write something out. So I like to do that in the morning, and have a little bit of quiet time before the day begins."

Wellness, to me, is: "a whole thing. I’ll be 42 this month, but before I turned 35 I really changed my outlook on wellness. It was less about vanity and more about longevity, and about proactive health and wanting to stay healthy so that I could have a longer life. My dad just had triple bypass last year, and that was also another reminder: Okay, I have heart disease and cancer in my family. Now I do everything in moderation.


I don’t deny myself anything — I do whatever I want in the moment — but I feel like moderation is the thing that can really sustain you for the rest of your life. If I want the piece of chocolate cake, I’m eating the chocolate cake. But I primarily try to fill my diet with all the things they tell you to — fruits and vegetables, and I try to limit processed foods and all those types of things. And then the other part of wellness is mindfulness and spiritual wellness, and incorporating something that is centering every day. That’s why journaling is so good for me. I take a bath almost every day; I light a candle."