In an age of body positivity, it feels almost outdated to worry about your weight. But let’s get real for a minute: despite our best efforts to embody self love, weight is something that still preoccupies many people.
In a new article, actor Lena Dunham has broken the taboo of talking about it –and summed up our conflicting feelings.
“Yes, I am body positive but I am also a young, single woman working in Hollywood and I can’t just pretend that weight is not a thing. It’s a thing,” she writes in Elle.
The 33-year-old discusses her own experience of losing and gaining weight, and said for her, weight loss has been linked to periods of sadness, including the end of her six-year relationship with musician Jack Antonoff, as well as periods of ill health. Dunham had a hysterectomy at the age of 31 in the hopes of reducing her endometriosis pain, but has since required further treatment.
“I lost weight,” she says in the magazine. “Not a little weight. Not the kind of weight where your bras feel kind of generous and you marvel at your subtle but oh-wow-it’s-definitely-there-now clavicle. No, it was a lot of weight.
“It happened, like many things, at first slowly and then all at once.”
Dunham details how her weight loss started with a stomach infection that “necessitated a diet of basmati rice and bottles of Pedialyte [rehydration fluids],” then continued during the 2016 election “when we all either started or stopped eating en masse”.
“At the end of [my] relationship, the weight was falling off in double digits but, as I explained to my closest friends, I experienced none of the heady triumph of the women showing off their formerly huge jeans in a full page ad for weight-loss pills,” she adds.
The November issue of Elle UK is on sale from Thursday 3 October.