Lena Dunham was pretty pissed off to find herself on a recent cover of Us Weekly, and we honestly can't blame her.
Next to a headline offering "20 Slimdown diet tips stars are using," Us Weekly ran a photo of the "Girls" star with the caption "Lena: how she gets motivated."
But here's the thing: Dunham didn't give the magazine any "slimdown" tips nor did she let them know how she gets motivated.
In a searing response on Instagram, Dunham dropped some brutal honesty about weight and health:
The caption reads:
"20 slimdown diet tips! 1. anxiety disorder * 2. resultant constant nausea 3. an election that reveals the true depths of American misogyny 4. constant sweaty dreams of dystopian future 5. abdominal adhesions pinning ovary below uterus * 6. baseless but still harrowing threats to physical safety online and through smail mail 7. watching institutions you love from Planned Parenthood to PBS be threatened by cartoon mustache-twirling villains 8. finally realizing superheroes aren't real (specifically the X-Factor, really thought they'd handle this) 9. marching your ass off 10. a quiet rage that replaces need for food with need for revenge 11. sleeping 19 hours a day 12. realizing that even the liberal media wants dem clicks no matter whut 13. worrying ceaselessly about the health and safety of women you know and women you don't 14. realizing who ya real friends are 15. having to switch from Uber to Lyft (lots of calories burned trying to understand a new app, then even more trying to understand if the conflict was resolved) 16. bladder spasms, urinary frequency and urgency * 17. having your phone number leaked and violent images texted to your phone by randos under names like VERYFATCHUCKYBOY@creepz.com 18. keeping your back arched against the wind 19. um, who the fuck cares? 20. I have no tips I give no tips I don't want to be on this cover cuz it's diametrically opposed to everything I've fought my whole career for and it's not a compliment to me because it's not an achievement thanx * Star indicates a pre-existing condition"
"[Weight loss is] diametrically opposed to everything I've fought my whole career for and it's not a compliment to me because it's not an achievement," she wrote as the 20th and final "tip."
Listing everything from an anxiety disorder to being stalked by strangers online, Dunham touches on a bunch of factors that may have affected her weight in one way or another. The most important point here, though, is that weight simply shouldn't matter. And in Dunham's case, this is something she's talked about over and over — c'mon, people!
Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
"I feel I've made it pretty clear over the years that I don't give even the tiniest of shits what anyone else feels about my body," she wrote on Instagram back in March.
"I've accepted that my body is an ever changing organism, not a fixed entity — what goes up must come down and vice versa. I smile just as wide no matter my current size because I'm proud of what this body has seen and done and represented."
A person's weight or weight loss don't automatically correlate with a person's health — and that's something worth keeping in mind the next time you're tempted to say, "You look great; did you lose weight?"
Illustrator Miriam Caldwell opened up about the extremely awkward situation she was put in as friends congratulated her on losing weight — not knowing that the weight loss was brought on by an illness. And in Dunham's case, she's recently lost some weight as the result of taking steps to try and manage her endometriosis.
The point is that you don't know what someone's situation is, and sometimes these "compliments" can actually be painful and embarrassing.
Being skinny doesn't automatically make you a spokesperson for all things healthy, just as being fat doesn't mean mean you're unhealthy. Health can't be measured on a scale, and it's not something any of us can see just by looking at another person. So don't let magazines mislead you by only telling you half the story. Health and happiness is possible at any size.