Jane Fonda Didn't Think She Would Live Past 30 While Battling Eating Disorder

Jane Fonda is speaking candidly about her past eating disorder battle.

While appearing on the latest episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, the 85-year-old actress looked back at how much battling bulimia impacted her life, revealing she didn’t think she would live past the age of 30.

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“In my 20s I was starting to be a movie actor. I suffered from bulimia very, very bad. I led a secret life,” Jane explained, adding that her secret life was due to her eating disorder.

“I was very, very unhappy. I assumed I wouldn’t live past 30,” Jane continued. “I didn’t go out. I didn’t hardly date ’cause I was unhappy and I had this eating disorder. And then I was also making movies that I didn’t very much like.”

Jane noted that in her case, bulimia seemed “so innocent” and “so innocuous” at first, but it quickly became a “terrible addiction” that took over her life.

“It harms the way you look. You end up looking tired. It becomes impossible to have an authentic relationship when you’re doing this secretly,” Jane explained. “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 added, “It’s a very lonely thing. And you’re addicted. If you put any food in you, you want to get rid of it.”

Jane later said that she thought she could “get away with it” when she was young, however, “as you get older, the toll that it takes on you, it becomes worse and worse.”

“It takes days and then at least a week to get over one single binge. It’s not just the fatigue. You become angry. You become hostile,” Jane said. “All of the trouble that I got in was because of that anger and that hostility.”

Once she was in her 40s, Jane got to a place when she realized, “If I keep on like this, I’m going to die.”

“I was living a very full life. I had children, I had a husband — I’d had two husbands by then — I was doing political work, I was doing all of these things,” Jane recalled. “My life was important, but I was becoming less and less able to continue it.”

With that realization, Jane quit “cold turkey.”

“I didn’t realize there were groups you could join. I didn’t know anything about that. Nobody talked about it! I didn’t even know there was a word for it,” Jane admitted. “And so I just went cold turkey and it was really hard. But the fact is, the more distance you can put between you and the last binge, then the better it is. It becomes easier and easier.”

Jane said that getting on the right medication, for her it was Prozac, helped her recovery.

“A lot of the cause of it was anxiety-driven, and Prozac helped me deal with anxiety,” Jane explained. “And then, gradually, I just stopped doing it.”

Jane also recently shared an update amid her cancer recovery.