Photo: Lena Dunham/Instagram
Lena Dunhamthought that she was pasther body image issues, but over themany months of the pandemicshe says she’s starting to feel that “self-loathing” return.
The actress and writer, 34, opened upon Instagramabout struggling with the pressure to lose weight during quarantine.
“You know I’ve been thinking a lot about my pot belly in quarantine — especially as I notice an unusual amount of articles with titles like ‘how I lost the weight’ and ‘diet is everything.’ Are there more of them or do I just have more time to notice?” she asked. “Somehow, headlines that used to roll off my flesh rolls sting in a new way — not because I think that’s the body I’m meant to have, but because it feels like it’s adding yet another item to the epic to-do list we are all creating for ourselves in COVID.”
Dunham said that the focus on losing weight “somehow feels like a personal assault.”
Though theGirlsstar had moved past some ofthose body worriesfrom her youth, she said they started to pop back up in recent months.
“Over the years, as my body guided me through my career and illness and disability, I started to appreciate what it was capable of. But somehow, this pandemic time has brought back some of those old feelings of self-loathing and I think it all comes back to that damned to-do list, the one that started when we went into lockdown,” she said.
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Dunham said that she feels like she should be clearing out her fridge for healthier foods and “emerging from quarantine with a revenge body.”
“Why, after all these years spent fostering self-love, do I still feel like weight loss is an item for my to-do?”
She then asked her followers to chime in on if they’re feeling the same pressure to lose weight.
However, she learned in May that her eggs were not viable, and it would not be possible for her to have biological children.
“This journey has forced me to rethink what motherhood will look like,” Dunham told PEOPLE. “IVF destroyed my body — as a woman who tends towards rampant endometriosis, filling my body with estrogen … and because of what my body has been through, subjecting it to such excruciating pain, only to come to the endand learn those eggs were not viableafter working so hard through illness and discomfort and going through anxiety anddepression, it is just clearly not something I can ever repeat.”
Instead, Dunham is going to try to adopt.
“Whether it’s adoption or foster-to-adopt, I love the idea of becoming a mother in the way that’s right for me, and I’m committed to it,” she said.
source: people.com
