Reba McEntire's Wise Secret to Feeling 35: "Watch What I..."
The Happy's Place star has the most simple secret.
Reba McEntire feels great, looks great, and sounds great — so what's her secret? In a 2019 PEOPLE interview, the Season 25-winning Coach of The Voice explained it all and revealed her secret.
"I feel 35, maybe 40," McEntire revealed. "Used to be 60 years and one foot was in the grave. Now, maybe 85 is one foot, maybe 95."
McEntire's secret to feeling so young is as simple as it gets — the now-70-year-old takes her health very seriously, even if sticking to a specific diet feels like a chore.
"Watch what I eat, get plenty of rest, drink lots of water," she said. "And it's a chore. I used to be able to drop 10 pounds in a week by getting off fried foods and bread, and now it just takes so much."
At the time of the interview, McEntire was a few weeks away from hosting the 2019 ACM Awards before embarking on a nationwide concert tour, and she admitted that she had to get her diet in check before it was too late!
"I don't count calories," she said, but "I might have to start that because it just does not fall off, and I need it to fall off because I'm getting ready for the ACMs and then touring."
RELATED: How Did Reba McEntire Meet Her Boyfriend, Actor Rex Linn?
Even though McEntire feels like she's 35 — and looks it, too — the one thing she prioritizes above all is the health of her most prized possession: Her legendary voice! The star goes out of her way to protect her vocals at all times, and part of that means knowing her comfortable vocal range.
"It's a God-given gift, and I don't want to damage it and hurt it," she explained. "I don't holler. I don't scream. I was doing a voiceover not too long ago and they said, 'Okay, you gotta scream.' I said, 'I'll do it once, but if you want me to scream anymore, you gotta bring somebody else in.' It hurts your voice, makes you hoarse."
Before hitting the road, McEntire prepares by readying her voice a week in advance.
"I know the techniques to warm up," she continued. "I start warming up a week before [a show], sing to get my vocal cords more in shape. It's a muscle, so you just have to treat it just like that."
How did Reba McEntire meet her boyfriend, Rex Linn?
In the years since that interview, McEntire found a new man in her life: actor Rex Linn!
Believe it or not, the two stars first met more than 30 years ago on the set of the 1991 Western drama The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw and reunited in 2020 — and that's when sparks flew.
However, they quickly faced a big problem because of the COVID-19 pandemic. McEntire and Linn couldn't see each other in person for several months at a time, so the couple did the next best thing: They fostered their budding relationship through phone calls and texts.
The long-distance dating strategy paid off in a big way. McEntire told TODAY in 2023 that they called and texted each other every day. In fact, the Happy's Place star also said that Linn is still listed in her contacts as Rex Linn, long-distance boyfriend — and even though there's no pandemic keeping them apart these days, she has no intentions of changing how he's listed in her phone.
"I haven't changed it since 2020," McEntire confessed.
