Lena Dunham was hospitalised for drinking too much laxative tea

Los Angeles - Lena Dunham was hospitalised after embarking on an extreme diet.

The Girls creator resorted to desperate measures to lose weight ahead of the first season of the show but her shocking eating habits "messed" her up and left her with stomach pains.

She said: "I forced myself to attempt to rejigger (sic) my body. I couldn't even do it. I ended up hospitalised for drinking too much laxative tea and not taking care of myself.

"I had crazy stomach pains. It was basically revealed that I'd been just drinking laxative tea and coffee and smoking cigarettes and then eating weird foods at weird hours. I really messed myself up."

In her forthcoming new book, Not That Kind of Girl, Lena talked about the obsessive food journal she kept at the time and admits it was "painful" to address her problem in public.

She said: "My food intake was a hard thing to share publicly. A lot of my life and work is sort of about not succumbing to [those pressures], so it's a little painful to go, 'Oh but look, there was a time where this dominated every moment of every day.'"

Lena shared an illustration of her book on Instagram:



Despite her past struggles, Lena, 28, insists she has changed her attitude to food, thanks in part to her "incredibly supportive boyfriend" Fun's Jack Antonoff, and is now content with her shape.

She told People magazine: "I really feel good with my size now. I know when I say that people are like, 'mm hmm', but I just do! It used to be when I went into a room with all thin women I felt like, what's wrong with me? Now I just feel special."