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Lili Reinhart has revealed that she developed an eating disorder while filming Riverdale, which ended in 2023 after seven seasons.
The 28-year-old actor recently reflected on filming the sixth season of the hit CW program in 2022. She shared that while she was struggling with Crohn’s (an autoimmune disease), she also had an eating disorder.
“I really don’t like looking at season six imagery or pictures, because I know that 99 percent of my thoughts were about my body,” she said during an interview with Self, published on Wednesday (January 22). “I was a thousand percent just disassociated through that entire day or scene because my entire inner dialogue is just… ‘Your body’s changing.’”
The Look Both Ways star has previously opened up about her body dysmorphia and how it was difficult for her to accept the size of her arms.
“I wish there were more average-sized arms represented in mainstream media for women,” she wrote on X/Twitter in September 2023. “My body dysmorphia has been going crazy because I feel like my arms need to be half the size they are currently?”
“We’ve glamorized these skinny arms that, for most of us, can only be achieved if you’re a literal adolescent,” she added. “I truly wonder how anyone survives or gets through this life without having severe BD. Maybe it’s a cruel amplified version in combination with my OCD, but damn. The amount of time I’ve wasted thinking about my arms in the last few months is insane.”
Reinhart said that she wanted to “throw [her] own thoughts out there” in order to help other women realize that they aren’t the only ones to feel this way.
Elsewhere in her interview with Self, Reinhart opened up about her recent diagnosis with a bladder condition, interstitial cystitis. Her symptoms first emerged last summer when she was filming her forthcoming thriller, American Sweatshop, in Germany.
“The third night I’m there, I developed symptoms of a UTI,” she said. “I’m like, ‘I’ve had UTIs before. I’m a woman. We all know how it feels.’” After a urinalysis, a “slight infection” was detected and the actor was sent home with antibiotics. However, she was forced to make two more hospital visits after she still felt the urgency to pee.
“The second I’m done peeing, I still feel like I have to pee, but my pee is showing up with no infection,” she explained.
After returning to LA, she sought out specialists before finally being diagnosed with interstitial cystitis, a condition causing an irritated and inflamed bladder, in October 2024. “No tumors, no cysts, just a lot of inflammation,” she recalled.
During the interview, she shared how her hair began falling out last year and revealed that she was diagnosed with alopecia in January 2024.
“I went to my dermatologist because my scalp was also getting kind of itchy. She was like, ‘Yes, it’s alopecia,’” she said.
