For her 87^th birthday this year, Deborah Szekely gave herself…a personal trainer. A Navy SEAL comes to her home at 6 a.m. three mornings a week, to help her get the most out of her daily workouts.

Deborah Szekely refuses to slow down.

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Fittingly, Szekely (pronounced SAY-kay) is the founder of two of North America’s premier destination spas, Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico, and The Golden Door in Escondido. Through her vision, these fitness-oriented spas, which have played host to Hollywood elite, social philosophers, “health nuts” and hundreds of thousands of guests, have long been the gold standard of spas.

Szekely is regarded as the godmother of the modern-day health-and-fitness movement, and was an advocate of eating organic foods and following a sustainable lifestyle long before those phrases were coined. She has founded, funded, and serves on the boards of numerous charities and nonprofits. She meets with the Dalai Lama, authors cookbooks, serves on international commissions and is constantly in motion.

With the vitality of a woman half her age, Szekely is an unstoppable force of nature, and challenging the perception of aging. In her 60s, when other people would have begun slowing down, she ran for public office, started a new career with the U.S. Diplomatic Corps and served as president and CEO of the Inter-American Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Her life has been anything but conventional. As a child, Szekely’s fruitarian parents moved the family from Brooklyn to Tahiti, to escape the Great Depression in a community of like-minded expatriates. From the time she co-founded Rancho La Puerta with her husband as an 18-year-old newlywed in 1940, and then founded The Golden Door in 1958, her vision has remained focused on health and fitness, accomplished through exercise and nutrition, a concept well ahead of its time.

“I have always been in the business of making healthy people healthier,” she says. “There is nothing that says you have to be sick. New cells are constantly being produced by the body, and they can be made from good material or bad. By keeping fit, our bodies have better raw material from which to produce healthy cells.”

Diet and exercise are equally important in Szekely’s opinion. She enjoys a low-fat diet that includes seafood, but not red meat. She takes long morning walks and does Pilates three times a week.

“It’s great to have physical strength, it’s very ego-building,” she says with a smiles. “Especially with the Pilates, I see so much progress. My body can do things now that it couldn’t do five years ago.”

Szekely considers life in her 80s to be like the star on a Christmas tree.

“As you get older, you have to keep moving, especially once you reach 80,” she says. “It’s not optional if you intend to stay healthy into your 90s or beyond. If you stop moving, if you stop doing, you die.”

For Szekely, it’s all about attitude. “You create your own joy,” she says. “You create good health. There’s always something new that fascinates me, some new project I want to start. I have as many goals and ambitions today at almost 88 as I had at 58. I have too much yet to do. I don’t have time to get old.”