The 51-year-old actress starred in the long-running series as the titular Grace Adler, and has said she struggled with her weight after landing the role in 1998, because at a size 8 she was too big to fit into the costumes provided by the wardrobe department.
“When I started Will & Grace I was a size 8, and what happened was, every time I would go in for a fitting, I couldn’t fit into clothes. Eighty per cent of it I couldn’t fit into, and I would just leave hating my body and hating myself,” Messing said.
“I loved my costume designer, she would always say, ‘Don’t worry,’ and she would talk to her assistant and say, ‘OK, can you call over and get a larger size?’ And that was sort of the thing that was always on repeat all the time.”
Messing began to think her “life would be so much easier” if she lost weight.
She added: “So of course, I thought, ‘My life would be so much easier, and it would be easier on everybody trying to do their job, if I just lost weight. So I started doing yoga every single day and I did one of those meal delivery services. I started to get smaller and then I was a 6, and they were like, ‘You’re losing weight, you look amazing!'”
The actress was happy at a size 6, but after attending award shows and meeting other actresses, she recalled feeling “fat” and “ugly”, which prompted her to lose even more weight until she was a size 2.
She told Jameela Jamil for her I Weigh podcast: “I was way too skinny. But, you know, going in for those fittings, I fit into everything. And all of a sudden, I literally could fit into anything that was high fashion. So all of a sudden, everything seemed to open up for me, because I was a 2.
“For a while there, I was maintaining that, and then I got sick. My body just could not hold out. My adrenals crashed, I was exhausted and it just became clear to me that I couldn’t be healthy and a size 2 at the same time.”
