BAFTAs: Renée Zellweger presents Best Leading Actor award
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Zellweger kick-started her career with the film Jerry Maguire as a fresh faced 27-year-old in 1996. The Oscar winner has since played dozens of roles, such as Pam Hupp in the series The Thing About Pam, and Bridget Jones. It was during her earlier roles that her health became jeopardised. Zellweger, now 53, gained over 2 stone for her role in Bridget Jones in 2001 and then rapidly lost the weight, which affected her mental and physical health. In a throwback interview, she said: “I had a panic attack with all the specialists talking about how bad this is for you, long term, putting on that much weight in short periods of time. They’re all saying, ‘You must stop this now or you’re going to die’.”
She also reached burnout due to the stress of her career and ended up having a six-year hiatus from Hollywood.
But today, Zellweger has a far healthier approach to her career which can highlight some important health lessons that might be key to her own ageing success.
She told InStyle she emphasises the importance of being a “healthy, productive woman” and slowing down as part of her work.
Today, she is less keen to sacrifice longevity for her work. Whereas during Bridget Jones she was reportedly pressured into putting on the weight, she now refuses and won’t be “apologetic”.
For the filming of the NBC series The Thing About Pam in which she plays a prisoner who is doing a life sentence for murder she wore a fat suit instead of laying on the pounds.
And her decision is a good one, health-wise. Rapidly losing weight and putting on weight can both have disastrous health consequences.
Rapid weight loss can cause weakened bones and compromise the immune system, cause extreme fatigue and osteoporosis.
Weight gain, on the other hand, is linked with coronary heart disease, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.
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“I’d rather celebrate each phase of my life and be present in it than mourn something that’s passed,” she said in 2019.
“I don’t want to miss this moment to be something that I used to be.
“I’m not saying I’m canceling my gym membership anytime soon, because I’m not.
“I’d rather be a healthy, productive woman in each stage of my life than apologetic,” she added.
The star’s fight against stress over the years will also have contributed positively to her ageing over the years.
Part of the reason she took a hiatus was because of the buildup of stress and an unhealthy lifestyle.
“You’re really unhealthy and unbalanced and, you know, about to die. And then you look back on it and wonder what happened,” the star told New York Magazine in 2019 about why she took a long break.
“I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was the last thing on my list of priorities.
“I needed to not have something to do all the time, to not know what I’m going to be doing for the next two years in advance. I wanted to allow for some accidents. There had to be some quiet for the ideas to slip in.”
Stress is a seriously negative factor when it comes to ageing. Research has found chronic stress is linked with higher inflammation that itself causes skin ageing and wrinkles.
It causes changes in the proteins in your skin that lower its elasticity.
Another study from 2020 found that high levels of the stress response in the nervous system is linked to the disappearance of the stem cells involved in creating melanocytes which produce melanin that gives your hair its colour.
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