The 'GLOW' star gets candid about mental health and how she still battles with body image issues.
Just like many others, Alison Brie has learned to love herself and her body.
The GLOW star opens up about continuing to grapple with body dysmorphia and how her husband, Dave Franco, helped her work through her mental health issues in May's issue of Women's Health.
"[I] still do," Brie, 37, confesses about having issues with her body. "I go back to red carpet photos where I thought I looked so horrible, and there are some where I now think, God, I looked beautiful. And I’ll remember: An hour before that I was in tears; I thought I was so disgusting. I think it’s something I’ll probably be working through my whole life. And depression too."
With mental illness running in her family, which includes her maternal grandmother dealing with schizophrenia and homelessness, Brie says she has had to deal with the sadness that comes "out of nowhere and really blindsides me."
"When I’ve been in a really serious depression, I’ll drag myself to a yoga class – even if I don’t want to be around people – tears streaming down my face. But, Get in class, get out of your head, get blood flowing. It ends up helping eventually," she explains.
Through it all, however, her marriage has helped her in more ways than one.
"I’m so lucky I’m married to a really wonderful, open person. We have great lines of communication, and I can talk often about my feelings," Brie expresses, adding that Franco gives her a fresh perspective when she's self-loathing about her body.
"It’s been funny talking to him about it. He said, 'Before I knew you, I’m not sure I believed body dysmorphia was a real thing. It’s so interesting to me what you see – and what I’m seeing when I’m looking at you – and the frank discussions we have about it,'" she says.
And thanks to GLOW, she's also become more comfortable in her own skin. “It helped with my relationship to my body times a million,” she says. “Before, I always felt at odds with it; I wanted it to be something it wasn’t. But I didn’t have the tools to do that in a healthy way.”
Brie previously opened up to ET about how her Netflix series and her trainers changed her mindset on her body confidence.
"More than anything, I think, [with] my trainers, we honed in on healthy eating and not considering food the enemy. Not that I was dealing with very intense anorexia before, but certainly some body dysmorphia and things like that and I think just, you know, probably mild anorexia working in this business and waves of that, which I've never been very successful at, to be honest," she shared. "So it's much better for me to do something, have a lifestyle where I live in a healthy way and I work out in a way that makes me feel strong and powerful and I eat food. But I eat healthy food and sometimes I eat unhealthy food and it's fine."
See more of what she shared in the video below.
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