Body image, the 1950s, and Henry Fonda: “I was raised in the ’50s,” she explains. “I was taught by my father that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly. He was a good man, and I was mad for him, but he sent messages to me that fathers should not send: Unless you look perfect, you’re not going to be loved.”
She was a fanatic for exercise, and she battled bulimia for decades: “I wasn’t very happy from, I would say, puberty to 50? It took me a long time. It was in my 40s, and if you suffer from bulimia, the older you get, the worse it gets. It takes longer to recover from a bout. I had a career, I was winning awards, I was supporting nonprofits, I had a family.” One day she just stopped. “I had to make a choice: I live or I die.” She refocused, trying to “fill that empty space with something.” Then came the workouts. “Gloria Steinem said empowerment begins in the muscles.”
Vanities: “I’m vain. My arms are thin, but I’m vain about loose flesh. And so I’m careful that what I wear will show off my best parts, which are my waist and my butt.” That said, “I have people in my life who will say, ‘Honey, you’re trying too hard.’ I like being saucy, but I’m 73 and a half. I’m still trying to find my way between matronly and coltishness. Colt, not cult: C-O-L-T.”
… says Jane.
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aus einem anderen Interview mit Oprah Winfrey:
When did you stop the bulimia? I read that you stopped at age 36.
JF: Yeah.
O: What was that like?
JF: It was like hell. No one quite understands what causes it. And I think some people are more prone to it than others, but it had something to do with living a lie. Not being authentic. Faking it. It's like becoming a woman and then rejecting it. Like alcoholism, it's a disease of denial. And the problem - which you don't realize in the beginning - it that it's just as addictive as a drug.
O: Which is hard for people to understand. We al think that you can stop yourself from throwing up.
JF: It's very difficult. I saw myself going down a dark hole, and I had two children, and I was making a difference in the world, and I had to make a choice between the light and the dark. Life and death. And I chose life. I stopped cold turkey. I don't advice everybody to do that, but I did.But it was years before I could sit at a meal without feeling anxious.
O: I would imagine that every time you saw food, you would feel anxious. Because how could you do this and keep it a secret?
JF: I think I liked on apple peels and the crust of bread, because if I went any further into the food, there'd be no stopping. So that's what caused the anxiety - I preferred to not even be around food.
O: This started when you were 12?
JF: No, I learned it in boarding school, the way a lot of girls did. But it was mostly when I became an actress at 21. There was the pressure to be thin - and I was a model.
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Hab das grad eher zufällig gefunden, wusste gar nicht, dass sie Bulimie hatte.
