Lili Reinhart said she experienced a recent mental health “spiral” fromdealing with body dysmorphia while filming the latest season of Riverdale.
The 26-year-old actress has been open about her struggle with body imagethroughout her career. However, she shared in conversation with Dr. DanielAmen for his interview series Scan My Brain that she had recently been in a”negative headspace” as she witnessed her figure changing on camera.
“I’m constantly exposed to pictures of myself all the time on social media,> on my show, pictures of me on my show, which started when I was 19. So I’m> sort of constantly comparing what I look like now to what I looked like when> I was 19, a child,” she said. “So I’m comparing my body to my own body,> basically, and afraid of the changes that have been happening.”
Reinhart went on to say that she’s been in “a battle” with herself as a resultof that comparison to her younger self. “It’s me vs. me. Me from a coupleyears ago vs. me now and thinking how do I get back to that? How can I looklike that again?” she explained.
As she gets older and faces more changes with her body, it becomes moredifficult for her to deal with.
“It has been really hard the last couple months, specifically dealing withmore noticeable weight gain than I ever have in my life while also being onfilm while it was happening. So shooting my show [ Riverdale ] and havingthat weight gain basically documented on camera, episode by episode, week byweek of my life, my weight fluctuation,” she said. “It felt very much likethis massive problem, this thing that was taking up truly 90% of my braincapacity, I was barely thinking about anything else. Every thought was aboutmy weight, was about what I was eating, how I could lose weight, how I don’tlook how I used to look, how everyone looks around me, how I don’t look likethem. All of my thoughts were about my body and it was very overwhelming and avery negative headspace that I was in.”
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Reinhart said that although she’s “coming out” of that most difficult time,she continues to deal with negative body image on a regular basis afterdeveloping body dysmorphia by the time that she was 13 years old.
“My skin was really bad so I started to deal with it, not about my body, butvery much focused on my skin. I was doing my makeup in the dark, like I didn’twant to wake up and turn on the fluorescent lights in my bathroom and stare atmy acne, so I would do it in very dim lighting. at the acne at differentangles and its kind of like a ‘I hate looking in the mirror but I have to’obsessive sort of component there,” she said, explaining that even today if”something’s wrong cosmetically, I’m very attached to it, obsessed with it,have to look at it all the time.”
She also admitted to “obsessively looking in the mirror at my body” throughthe past few months as she gained weight and feeling uncomfortable with thepublic nature of her job.
“My point was that in being in film while that was happening, it’s verydifficult because it was one of the hardest little chapters of my life that Iwasn’t able to experience in private,” she said. “It was just a veryvulnerable, vulnerable thing to go through something so personal in a verypublic way. It was really hard.”
It has also become difficult for Reinhart to feel confident in her efforts tospread positivity on her platform as she experiences such a negative mindsettoward her body.
“It’s hard when I very much try to preach the idea of loving yourself andaccepting yourself, and you don’t have to fit a one-size-fits-all image inyour life, especially as an actor,” she said. “Like it’s OK that I don’t looklike all these other people. And then on the inside feeling like I do need tolook like those people, so it’s a bit of a hypocrisy feeling. Feelingsometimes like a fraud or that I’ m lying to myself or lying to my fans wholook up to me because I am trying to promote these body-positive messages butI’m also still learning them myself.”
While Reinhart is a body-positivity advocate, she has remained honest abouther struggles, speaking out when she has bad body image days and even holdingother celebrities accountable for how they contribute to the conversation.Ultimately, she hopes to normalize those human emotions while being in thespotlight.
“[Body positivity is] not something that I’ve mastered and I don’t wake upevery day feeling like, ‘Oh it’s OK that I don’t look like that.’ There arevery brief moments where I feel that and when I do feel that, I feel empoweredto talk about them and be vocal about them. But the other 90% of the time,it’s the struggling part,” she said. “I want it to happen and I want to fullybelieve it but I’m also still on a daily basis struggling with it.”
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