Grandma celebrates 70th birthday with inspiring bathing suit photoshoot: ‘I’m loving my age’
A California chef’s bringing the heat with stunning pictures of herself rocking a swimsuit in celebration of her 70th birthday.
Babette Davis, a vegan cook and owner of Stuff I Eat, a restaurant in Inglewood, Calif., was going down memory lane when she first got the idea to pose in a bathing suit. “Well, my daughter had sent some photos of she and myself. I must have been in my early forties, maybe late thirties and I noticed that I hadn't really changed very much aesthetically,” she tells Yahoo Life. “I thought, well, for my 70th birthday, I'm gonna do a photoshoot in a bathing suit.”
In the week leading up to her Dec. 7 birthday, Davis shared an image a day to social media, dubbing the series “Seven at Seventy.” Wearing a black tankini with a matching headwrap and heels, the pictures instantaneously resonated, with each post getting thousands of likes.
She also received comments from countless users that expressed their amazement and showered her with compliments.
Influencer Tabitha Brown commented, “You look amazing!!! Love you!!!” Host of VH1’s Couple’s Therapy and Family Therapy Dr. Jenn Mann said, “You are 70??? You are my inspiration! I bow down to you #newgoals.”
“Giiiiiirl you betta!! I’m posting this in my story! Everyone needs to see this magnificence!” a commenter declared. “I'm totally Smiling right now You are so Beautiful and Curvaceous, simply Amazing...Thank you so very much for honoring us....” another user added.
To the critics who say “women of a certain age” shouldn’t wear bikinis, Davis says that’s “stupid.”
“If you look good, you look good,” she says. “People need to stay in their lane and you don't need to be worrying about my bikini.”
Davis admits she had no clue that her pictures would go viral.
“People just really got into it, especially women. You know for us it's a big deal,” she notes. “We want to look good for as long as possible, but we need to care for ourselves and we need to stop comparing ourselves to other people.”
The grandmother regularly promotes her message of body positivity and confidence to her more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. While she credits her self-love attitude as a major contributing factor to looking amazing at 70, working on her core has “always been massively” important to her as well. “All I had to do was see one life alert commercial! And I thought to myself, I am not going to have to call a fire department to get me up,” she jokingly says.
In addition to working out, she toots her vegan lifestyle too, which she’s maintained for more than 20 years. After being so inspired by a meal her husband made her, she transitioned her diet “overnight and I never looked back.” She even made it her career, selling vegan treats from a cart outside of a spiritual center. After consistently having lines around the block for six years, she and her husband decided to open a restaurant. They have been at their current location since 2008 and even throughout the COVID-pandemic, haven’t closed once. “It's been a good, good ride for us. A good journey for us,” she says.
But Davis’s journey is far from over. In fact, she wakes up at 2 every morning and gets a workout in around 3 for thirty minutes. Then, she goes to her restaurant, where she stays and cooks until it opens. “So that's how my day runs,” she explains. “Sometimes I get tired...but I have a lot of energy.”
With her spirits as high as ever, Davis is excitedly looking towards the future and asking what’s next. “People get depressed about their age, but I'm so excited about every age I am. I'm so excited. What's the next thing I’m going to be able to do? Am I going to be able to defy some odds? What am I going to be able to do at 75? Retire?”
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