Lena Dunham (Now) Refuses to Obsess Over Her Weight

With Lena Dunham (constantly) stripping down in her TV show, Girls, you might be surprised to learn that she has had her fair share of serious hang-ups about her weight. In her new book, Not That Kind of Girl, she wrote an entire chapter about her obsessive attempts to lose weight. At one point, Lena took things way too far.

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She recently told People that at one time, her eating was so extreme and restrictive that she ended up "in the hospital with crazy stomach pains. It was basically revealed that I'd been just drinking laxative tea and coffee and smoking cigarettes and then eating weird foods at weird hours. I really messed myself up," she says.

With that said, she's come a long way from those days. In addition to her "incredibly supportive boyfriend," something finally clicked inside for Lena. Eventually, she grasped the concept that "food is fuel" — an aha moment that offers real freedom to anyone who has struggled with extreme eating. Now, Lena says she "really feel[s] good with my size now . . . I know when I say that people are like, 'mm hmm', but I just do! It used to be when I went into a room with all thin women I felt like, what's wrong with me? Now I just feel special." Regardless of being in the public eye, we can all take a page from Lena's attitude of self-love.