You know when you go through a bad breakup, can only subsist on half a chocolate bar and a vodka tonic, lose weight and everybody comments on how great you look despite the fact your insides are a raging inferno of sorrow and indigestion?
Lena Dunham is there right now. Except the reason for her "break up diet/revenge body" (an important aside, both of these are not things to celebrate!) is Donald Trump.
Dunham revealed this to Howard Stern when she visited his radio show SiriusXM on Tuesday to promote the final season of Girls, and in response to his compliments on her weight loss said, "Donald Trump became president and I stopped being able to eat food. Everyone's been asking like, 'What have you been doing?" And I'm like, 'Try soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness and you, too, will lose weight'."
Of course this is the kind of flippant Lena Dunham comment guaranteed to send people into a spin, including inspiring some kindly Trump supporters to add a dollop of fat shaming into the mix.
Lena Dunham went a step further this morning, sharing her Trump diet since people were so curious (surely a weight loss company can harness this golden opportunity given that it already has a celebrity endorsement!). She captioned the pic of her "food diary" which included a meal of "squeezy baby food" so that she didn't faint during a press conference, "for those begging me for answers."
And truly, it's not that hard to imagine the praise and curiosity that Lena Dunham would have received for her more slimline figure since she has long enraged people by daring to show her average body naked on-screen.
As Lena Dunham said to Jane Fonda in Paper magazine last year, "I knew that I wanted my characters to have a similar relationship to their own physicality that I do, which is that, despite a knowledge that my body didn't necessarily meet a perfect norm, I've also always felt [comfortable]".
But that's not to say that's always been easy. Even Lena Dunham, who so often feeds the trolls, gets affected by them. She told The Guardian how she feels about being criticised (spoiler alert, she, like all of us, thinks it "sucks"),
"I'm glad for the dialogue the show [Girls] created around issues of representation and issues of feminism, but no one likes being constantly called out. Even if you don't think it's affecting you – like I really don't care if a guy in the midwest calls me fat, or a Republican tells me what an idiot I am – you can't have that much negative energy directed at you without there being some cost to your emotional and personal life. I am public about that because I think it's important to say."
So that's probably where the baby food comes in. The lack of self-care. The not eating a proper dinner. It's weird that Howard Stern complimented Dunham on her weight loss. But it's not surprising. It's not surprising that Lena Dunham was candid about the way Donald Trump's presidency has affected her personally.
The Instagram post of her Trump diet follows the release of Dunham's 73 questions video for American Vogue.
In the video she shares some very interesting, very Lena Dunham tidbits (quick summation: she never wears a bra, Chandler was her favourite cast member of Friends, she has a room in her totally beautiful home dedicated to the "queer and feminist resistance in our important foremothers and forefathers" or the "lady room" and she believes her biggest fashion faux pas was "formal shorts"). However she also said that she is most afraid of being "misunderstood."
As Dunham wrote in her letter for this week's edition of Lenny, it's tricky to reconcile all sides of ourselves and to be vulnerable, but also to do good, do the right thing.
"You can imagine that the current state of the world would make me even more prone to horizontal living, which is a problem for two reasons. First, part of resistance is showing up physically to protest and organise. And second, Jenni and I happen to be in the heat of promoting the final season of Girls. Press makes me feel raw, stupid, and crazy in the best of times. How do we lend relevance to fashion, hair doodads, and self-promotion in our horrifying political reality?"
It's no wonder that Lena Dunham wants to lie down and eat baby food. But she knows she won't be able to do that forever. The path to her slimmer body is not something to celebrate, but it is a physical reminder that there is more to be done. And not to sound like your mother, but you need to fuel up properly for the resistance and baby food and half a croissant just ain't going to cut it.