Whether playing the adorable, ditzy Chrissy Snow on “Three's Company” or pumping sales for the popular Thighmaster machine, Suzanne Somers has always seemed “ageless.” The best-selling author and health advocate visited “Today” to discuss her book, “Ageless.” Here's an excerpt:

Chapter 16
Sex, Sleep, and Stress
The Importance of Sleep
Sleep . . . glorious sleep. You never appreciate the fact that sleeping is a daily function until you can’t sleep. Without hormones, it is really impossible to sleep. Without sleep, prolactin keeps escalating. Prolactin is a pituitary hormone that induces lactation and prevents ovulation. Prolactin is the domain of nursing mothers. A mother with a new baby needs to be awakened many times during the night to feed her baby . . . thus the high prolactin. Nature has provided this phenomenon for the new mother.

A young healthy reproductive woman has a full complement of hormones, and if she goes to bed early, sleep is a given; but as we age and begin to lose our hormones and develop bad sleeping habits, the body gets confused and prolactin keeps escalating.

T. S. Wiley writes in Sex, Lies, and Menopause, “At the end of perimenopause, cortisol soars and estrogen and progesterone hit bottom . . . just as they do during labor and delivery. At this point in the template, your immune system revs up so high that it may attack your cartilage and mucous membranes, and that scenario creates joint pain (arthritis), allergies, and an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis can also happen. Once your immune system has attacked and halted thyroid function, with the insulin resistance from sleeplessness, you just keep getting fatter” [and more and more tired].

NBC VIDEO Suzanne Somers on 'Ageless' Oct. 10: The "Today" show's Ann Curry talks with the actress about her new book that tells readers how they can slow down the aging process. Today Show Books

Wonderful things happen in the night if you go to sleep early enough. Early is between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. I know, I know, nobody goes to sleep that early; it is one of the reasons we are in such poor health in our country. As a nation we are sick because we don’t sleep. In fact, sleep loss is the new American deficit. We are fat and diabetic from lack of sleep. We are dying from cancer and heart disease from lack of sleep. Our healing hormones have no chance to do their work without sleep.

When you lose sleep, you really can’t catch up. Your hormones don’t spring back like that. Sleeping less than you need affects at least ten different hormones, not just melatonin. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sleeplessness causes shifts in all these hormones and changes appetite, fertility, and mental and cardiac health.

The National Institutes of Health concludes that six hours of prolactin production in the dark is the minimum necessary to maintain immune function like T-cell and beneficial killer-cell production. But you can’t get six hours of prolactin secretion on six hours of sleep a night. It takes at least three and a half hours of melatonin secretion before you even see prolactin. So if you don’t go to bed two or three hours before midnight, there won’t be enough time for this hormonal action to happen. Remember, if you sleep enough each night, you will lose weight as a result of your cortisol going down. Now you’re listening, aren’t you?

If we go all the way back before electricity, we had to go to sleep when the sun went down. There was no light—at all—so there was no choice. During the night healing hormones would go to work. Going to sleep early caused cortisol levels to drop, and when the cortisol levels were lowered, insulin levels lowered. We had no choice but to sleep until it was light the following morning. When the sun came up, cortisol and insulin levels would rise. Nature had it all worked out beautifully. Plenty of sleep, increased vitality and energy, controlled weight because the lowered insulin at night helped to keep weight at optimum. This is the way it is supposed to work. Did you ever think that going to bed early was a component of weight loss? If you are eating correctly, exercising in moderation, and going to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., you are ahead of the game. I tried this experiment on myself this year. I do eat correctly almost all the time, I do exercise in moderation regularly, my hormones are balanced, but there was some extra weight hanging around me through the middle that I just couldn’t shed. I have a lot of stress in my life, and I tax my adrenals regularly as a result. I know that if one hormone is out of whack, they are all out of balance.

So for the past year, I have been going to bed at 9:00 and 10:00 in the evening most nights. Guess what? Without trying, without changing my eating program or changing my exercise routine, I lost ten pounds . . . from sleeping!

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