Just before the Pearl Harbor actress wiped her Instagram account of all posts, she addressed ongoing criticisms she's faced online about her weight, alongside screenshots of comments about her appearance.

"You take a break from Instagram for several months following the death of your mother," Beckinsale wrote in an Aug. 8 Instagram Story, per People, "delete all of your posts and explain in some considerable detail about what you may have lost weight, including the fact that weight loss is one of the very first physical signs of bereavement… I think people might be broken."

She shared a screenshot in another Instagram Story with one user telling her she "must" eat, to which she pointed to her now-deleted 13-part post discussing her mast cell activation syndrome diagnosis (MCAS), a disease in which the immune system releases too many naturally produced chemicals that cause allergy-like attacks.

"Having just made a several slides post about how eating could actually kill me," the 53-year-old wrote alongside the comment, "this is a little beyond."

Beckinsale—mom to 29-year-old daughter Lily Mo Sheen with ex Michael Sheen—attributed her weight loss to two major factors: her autoimmune disease and the grief she's experienced since her mom Judy Loe died in July 2025 following a battle with stage 4 cancer.

"As I'm sure you're aware, anytime I post a photo of myself, I receive an enormous amount of comments telling me how disgusting I look," she began in the Aug. 8 video seen by Metro, "and I'm anorexic or I'm on meth or that I've lost so much weight."

"First off, I've lost my entire family, except my precious daughter, in a short amount of time," the Underworld star—whose stepdad Roy Battersby died over a year before Loe—emphasized before explaining her MCAS diagnosis. "This is something that I was diagnosed with 16 years ago, and I was really, really lucky that I had an amazing GP in London who called it." 

She went on to point to celebrities like Chadwick Boseman, whose dramatic weight loss prompted online speculation before his 2020 death following a private battle with colon cancer.

"You don't know what's going on in people's lives," Beckinsale emphasized. "Treat people just how you'd like to be treated yourself, give people a little grace. If you don't have anything nice to say, maybe don't say anything."