I had no idea that Diane Keaton was bulimic

On October 11, news broke that the Oscar winner had died at age 79 but offered limited details about how she died. Now, details are emerging about Keaton’s final days.

Longtime friend Carole Bayer Sager told People that when she saw Keaton recently, she was shocked by her appearance. “I saw her two or three weeks ago, and she was very thin,” the award-winning singer-songwriter said. “She had lost so much weight.”

Sager added that she hadn’t seen Keaton often over the past year after the actress left Los Angeles following the wildfires earlier this year.

“She had to go to Palm Springs because her house had been damaged inside, and they had to clean everything,” said Sager. “She was down there for a while, and when she came back, I was kind of stunned by how much weight she’d lost.”

Another pal told People that the Annie Hall star’s health took a turn quickly in recent months, leaving some of her closest friends in the dark about what was happening. “She declined very suddenly, which was heartbreaking for everyone who loved her,” the friend said. “It was so unexpected, especially for someone with such strength and spirit.”

The source added, “In her final months, she was surrounded only by her closest family, who chose to keep things very private. Even longtime friends weren’t fully aware of what was happening.”

No official cause of death has been revealed after Keaton’s passing. A recording of a 911 call obtained by TMZ reveals that the Los Angles Fire Department was called to Keaton’s LA home at around 8am on Saturday, October 11, responding to reports of a “person down.”

Keaton is survived by her two children, daughter Dexter, 29, and son Duke, 25, who she welcomed through adoption when she was in her 50s.

I recall reading years ago that her parents escaped Bulimia during the Nazi-occupation. But Diane was born in the U.S., so she was American.

Bulimia is the worst, don’t wish it on anyone. Every day without it is a victory.

Joking about bulimia makes me sick to my stomach.

She wrote about it in one of her books. She had it bad. On matinee days of "Hair" she'd go and binge on a steak dinner by herself. She wrote she barely knew anyone in the cast since all her free time was spent gathering and eating food.

It also made her feel like a fraud. Part of the reason Woody Allen liked her was she seemed independent. She wasn't clingy like some other women he had dated/married. She really wasn't independent like he thought instead she was busy with her bulimia so she never minded if he was busy or broke a date or something.

I'm shocked that anyone didn't. She spoke incredibly openly of it for decades. Her binges were the stuff of bulima legend--like 15,000 calories in one night. I think she first spoke of it in the late 80s. She shared an example menu at some point of her typical binge, and it would be like, two Sara Lee poundcakes, a gallon of ice cream smothered in hot fudge, a dozen feshly baked cookies, a gallon of milk, two 24oz porter house steaks, 1/2 a pound of mashed potatoes, an entire loaf of white bread with butter, etc. It made me sick just reading it. And this was every single night. I have no idea how she'd fit all that in her body at one time without busting her gut.

Lorraine Newman and Gilda Radnder's bulimic binges could famously rival Keaton's.

This is from a 2011 Daily Mail article after her autobiography was published:

"...in the privacy of her New York studio flat, she'd mutate into a kind of primitive being, ravenously munching her way through barely imaginable quantities of food.

Afterwards, she'd make herself sick. 'The demands of bulimia,' she says, 'outshone the power of my desire for Woody. Pathetic, but true.'

Even now, at the age of 65, she can remember with a former addict's precision the content of the stupendous meals that she ate during her five years as a bulimic.

For breakfast each day, she'd shovel down a dozen buttered corn muffins, three fried eggs with bacon, pancakes and four glasses of chocolate milk. For lunch: three buttered steaks with charbroiled fat on the side, two-and-a-half baked potatoes with sour cream, apple pie and two chocolate sundaes with extra nuts.

Dinner almost defied belief: a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, several orders of chips with blue cheese and ketchup, a couple of TV dinners, chocolate-covered almonds, a large bottle of 7Up, a pound of peanut brittle, M&Ms, mango juice, one Sara Lee pound cake, and three frozen banana-cream pies.

...eating and purging around 20,000 calories a day gave Diane heartburn, indigestion, irregular periods, low blood pressure and 26 cavities in her teeth. The psychological effects were arguably worse: she was using food to escape reality. Woody suspected nothing, though he often marvelled at her extraordinary appetite. Assuming she was just desperately insecure, he packed her off to a psychoanalyst, whom she saw daily for 18 months. Then, at 25, for no apparent reason, she suddenly began eating normally again."

(con't)

Why did she do it? Many mental health experts cite lack of parental affection as one of the main reasons that bulimics try to soothe themselves with food. But Diane's parents — a civil engineer and a housewife — were nothing if not affectionate.

Attempting to find an answer, Diane recalls her resentment as a child that money and treats were always in short supply. By the age of 11, she was also developing a complex about her looks.

Her body, she was dismayed to discover, looked big in the bathtub and her features failed to measure up to those of Audrey Hepburn, the radiant subject of a feature in Life magazine.

To help matters along, Diane slept with a hair-grip on her nose, hoping to reshape it into a straight line.

By the time she landed one of her first acting jobs — in the rock musical Hair — she was a bag of insecurities and a furtive glutton. While other cast members got stoned, she'd be down at Tad's steakhouse, where you could eat as many steaks as you liked for $1.29.

Her weight soared to 10st — dangerously wobbly for a musical that required actors to shed their clothes. Then, one day, she overheard an actress talking about a woman who made herself throw up in order to remain slim. Was this the answer?

I didn’t know about the extent of her eating disorder, but I suspected because her teeth showed signs of extensive work.

It was very obvious to me that she had an eating disorder. I'm surprised other people didn't notice.