Jane Fonda says she feels healthy at age 86, but in her 20s, she was struggling. While it's possible that she looked like she was doing OK at the time, she revealed that life was really hard for her when she was 25 years old because she was struggling with an eating disorder. On an episode of the L'Oréal Paris Lights On Women podcast, she said the eating disorder "lasted a long time and it was very hard to heal."
She spoke about some of the negative messaging she received about her body when she was growing up.
"'If I’m not perfect, nobody is going to love me' is the message that I received," she said, adding that the messaging impacted her in multiple ways, but because she felt she had to do "anything not to be fat," she ended up becoming unhealthily skinny.
Since then, she has thought a lot about her eating disorder.
"I’ve thought about it a lot and I think the eating disorder comes from when you’re living a life that’s not authentic, like if I was in relationships that were not democratic, when they weren’t authentic, the anxiety that that would cause me would make me eat in a damaging way," she said during the podcast.
More from LittleThings: Jane Fonda Opens Up On Mental Health: 'I Have To Work Hard To Not Go Down A Rabbit Hole'
In 2023, Jane said that at one point, she thought she "wouldn't live past 30." On the Call Her Daddy podcast, Jane revealed that she eventually reached a point where she thought, "'If I keep on like this, I'm gonna die'" because of her eating disorder.
At the time, she didn't even know the name for what she was struggling with, and she didn't realize that support was available, she recalled.
"I didn't realize that there were groups that you could join — I didn't know anything about that yet," Jane said at the time. "And nobody talked about it. I didn't even know there was a word for it."
What she was struggling with was bulimia. Bulimia is a serious eating disorder that involves binge eating followed by "purging," or trying to get rid of the food through methods like vomiting, and trying to lose weight in unhealthy ways.
Bulimia is a mental health condition that can be life-threatening. It is not a choice.
Disordered eating can seem "so innocent" at first, Jane said, but "what you don't realize is, it becomes a terrible addiction that takes over your life."
Struggling with an eating disorder was also a lonely and isolating experience for Jane, as "it becomes impossible to have an authentic relationship when you're doing this secretly."
"Your day becomes organized around getting food and then eating it, which requires that you're by yourself and that no one knows what you're doing," she said.
In Jane's case, taking medication for anxiety helped her during her eating disorder recovery.
"A lot of the cause of it was anxiety-driven, and Prozac helped me deal with anxiety," she said.
