Jeanne Calment - France - (1875-1997) 122 years and 164 days. This is truly amazing. Look at this pic - she smoked cigarettes!

Here's a reference for this amazing woman - she met Van Gogh when she was 10 years old. This lifespan was documented and verified.

She smoked a cigarette a day until she was 117 years old. She drank every day. She loved life so much, full of excitement. She took up fencing at 88. She lived alone until she was 110 years old. 

Ironically, a real estate mogul saw an opportunity with an old lady. He paid her $500 a month until she dies so he could have the house when she was gone. She was 90 years old. Guess what? He passed away before her!

We often ask, what was her secret? I have to look back at some long-lived people who loved their lives. 

Bob Hope (100)
Betty White (99)
George Burns (100)
Norman Lear (101)
Carl Reiner (98)
Dick Van Dyke (alive at 100)
David Attenborough (100)
Jimmy Carter (100)

There is a combination that could occur with a gene for longevity mixed with a stubborn sense of determination and excitement. I

In studies of longevity, they found that a commonality is adaptability. When things change and new events happen, they simply don't fight it, they go along with it. 

There is also a placebo effect. Should someone not succumb to stories of dying in 70s and 80s and complaining for every ache and pain and almost wishing for Heavenly relief, they might just focus on what's next. And then, next comes and they get excited for the next "next."

God bless a woman who drained every drop out of human battery to the best of human capability.

Humans apparently have the capacity to live to 122 years. That is what this lovely lady (above) did. Science continues to wonder why this particular lady lasted so long. She didn't necessarily drink wheatgrass juice and meditate an hour each day. Perhaps there was a longevity gene and somehow it was activated.

LINK: Epigenetics refers to how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes (mutations), epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change the sequence of DNA bases, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.

Here's personal examples - 

In my mom's family, those who smoke do not get lung cancer, but they do get emphysema and pass in their 60s or 70s. If they don't smoke, they usually live into their 90s. 

In my father's family, if you are athletic, you have long-lasting stamina, muscular build, and lean. If you are sedentary, you may have high cholesterol, truncal obesity, and end up with a heart attack.

Then, there's other factors, like if you exercise excessively to stay young, you may create injuries and arthritis with chronic pain that causes a background depression that affects the health. It's possible to do too much good, like eating a vegan diet and forgetting to take B12 because you don't eat meat.

I'm not physician, simply a happy researcher who worked in the health care industry and was born into Appalachian healers. i believe, ultimately, your mind is the real one in control. Unattended life traumas lead to bad behaviors and depression that causes either hypersensitivity to health issues looking for something legitimately wrong with a person, or not caring at all about the physical. 

You can party hard or work yourself to death, and it's all in life choices that don't necessarily include vegetables or cigarettes - those are choices made by what the mind's goal has become. If you have reasons to live and excitement for each day, each day means balanced choices and years turn into decades. Look at the long-lived celebs above again and see that they were full of the spark of life. 

In fact, they all seemed to have an ease of self, lack of anxiety or concern for others comments, humor, wonder, and creative energy. 

Perhaps it comes down to this - don't take life personally. Instead of feeling it's coming at you like an assault on ego, body, mind, spirit, it is there to entertain and enrich you. Observe, archive, flow, and always continue with the character and childlike wonder that keep you even keeled in the strongest storms.