Betty White must have a secret.

The actress is 87, an age when most people usually start pumping the brakes on life. Yet here she is, America's Senior Sweetheart, a bundle of twinkly-eyed, grandmotherly energy who still appears in movies, advocates for animal health, cracks jokes on late-night talk shows, drops F-bombs in viral Web videos and loves every single, hectic minute of her jampacked days.

So what does this irrepressible woman know about staying vital that we don't? Betty White, are you eating something the rest of us should be?

''French fries. Hamburgers. Hot dogs,'' she confesses during a recent telephone interview to promote her new comedy, The Proposal, co-starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. ``I'm not a health nut. I weigh every morning, and if I put on a pound, tomorrow I just take that pound off by cutting something I indulged in the day before. My weight has stayed the same for decades.''

''I really don't get tired,'' the former ''Golden Girl'' says. ``I am enjoying life very much at this point. I'm so lucky. Don't think I take it for granted.''

Actually, no one should believe that White takes anything for granted. During the course of a 20-minute conversation, the multiple Emmy Award winner uses ''lucky'' five times to describe herself and gushes about what she calls her ''marvelous'' experience working on The Proposal.

In the movie, White plays Grandma Annie, a chipper, New Age-y seamstress so eager to see her grandson (Reynolds) get married that she alters her wedding gown to fit his faux bride-to-be. (Yes, that's faux bride-to-be. The rom-com's plot forces Bullock and Reynolds to pose as fiances so she won't get deported to Canada.)

Even if White is all warm and fuzzy in this onscreen venture, anyone who has seen her foul-mouthed turn in the thriller Lake Placid or her regular wacky appearances on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (including one last year in which she called Sarah Palin a ''crazy [female dog]'') knows White's other side, the one that's wickedly naughty.

That mischievous alter ego is also on view on the humor website Funny or Die via a video that claims to capture a ''real'' argument on the Proposal set. Because of the content (Bullock, White and Reynolds blurt out a series of bleeped profanities and, at one point, White flips Reynolds the bird), the actress initially resisted doing it.

''[The studio] sent me the script, and my little speeches were, every second word was the F-word,'' she remembers. 'And I said, `I don't want to do that. What does that have to do with our nice little romantic comedy?' ''

But she relented. Even though she thinks the bawdy-Betty routine has gotten a little stale (''David E. Kelley started it with Lake Placid, and pretty soon it got to be kind of cliche,'' she says), the sitcom veteran is savvy enough to get the joke. Which also may explain why, during her recent Proposal late-night talk-show tour, she played beer pong on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and told Ferguson she once slept with all of the Marx Brothers.

Even after the Proposal promotional hubbub dies down, the Beverly Hills High School graduate doesn't plan to sit still. She starts shooting another Disney comedy, You Again, with Sigourney Weaver and Kristen Bell, later this summer.

She will attend plenty of meetings related to her work with the Morris Animal Foundation, a nonprofit group devoted to animal health and welfare, and the Los Angeles Zoo. And then there are those fan-mail responsibilities that still come courtesy of her two most memorable roles: the saucy Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the breathtakingly dim Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls.

After 61 years in the industry, White accepts the joy and the pain it brings. What she seemingly can't comprehend is the notion that many of her peers now consider her a legend.

''When you've been around as long as I have, you don't think of yourself in terms of [that],'' she says. The fact of the matter is, ``I'm the luckiest old broad on two feet.''

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