"I had terrible bulimia for about a year," the actress, 34, tells the U.K.'s Easy Living magazine in its September issue. "I've still got the scars on my knuckles from where I put my fingers down my throat."

"I'd been involved with this guy for a long time, he was much older than me and I felt a lot of shame about my sexual relationship with him," she tells the magazine. "I would have these dinners with him and then go back to the flat and I'd throw up. Then I went out with someone who was emotionally abusive, criticizing me the whole time."

Eventually Newton sought help while in Los Angeles to shoot a film. "I saw a therapist for the first time," she says. "After that first session, I never threw up again. I had made the connection between shame and self abuse."