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Lena Dunham: 'I Can’t Just Pretend That Weight Is Not A Thing. It's A Thing'

The actor has spoken about dealing with her yo-yoing weight in an age of "body positivity".
Karwai Tang via Getty Images

In an age of body positivity, it feels almost outdated to worry about your weight.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.”

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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.

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