Lena Dunham has shared some before and after photos as a way to celebrate a recent weight gain. The star is embracing a 24-pound weight gain, admitting that when she was thinner she subsisted on “small amounts of sugar,” “a lot of caffeine” and a “purse pharmacy.”
Lena Dunham has opened up about her struggles with eating disorders in the past. She discussed this at length in her book Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned. The former writer/director/star of Girls said that it was actually doing nude scenes that provided her with more acceptance of her body. When she first started doing nude scenes she was highly criticized by people for not being a model type, but it was actually that criticism that gave her the freedom to accept herself.
“I think I radicalized my relationship to my own body in order to accept it. To make my body a prop in my work gave it a value I didn’t feel it had before. People called me fat and hideous, and I lived. And now I keep living.”
She has explained that it has been very hard for her to discuss her habits with food publicly, but that she feels that secrets are destructive so she’d rather feel vulnerable, than keep them inside. Naturally, her openness about her life on so many levels has been very relatable to women and men.
Dunham is also in the process of recovering from a hysterectomy that she had this year due to a battle with endometriosis. She had previously undergone surgeries to try and alleviate the pain but they didn’t work, so eventually, she had to turn to a more extreme surgery. The star has always been open about her thoughts and process along the way.