AITAH for telling my girlfriend “whatever helps you sleep at night” when she was in denial about how much weight she had gained?

My girlfriend and I have been together for 5 years now. She’s currently unemployed and is very stressed. I can imagine things are very hard for her. She’s turned to food for comfort and obviously has gained weight. This isn’t my concern at all, I’m still very attracted to her and it doesn’t bother me that much.

However one day she needed to get some headshots done and went to CVS. We were on a video call one day and I asked her to show those photos. Well yep, totally poker face. her face looked very puffy, she had no makeup on, her cheeks looked very round and you could clearly see the sheer impact of the weight she’s carrying on her body. In person, I try not to pay too much attention to this fact but I could clearly see the difference from last time I saw her. Probably because I’ve been on a project myself and haven’t seen her for 2 months now.

So she continues to deny that this photo looks like her because she feels like she looks too ugly, and that camera angle was off etc etc. she kept asking me for reassurances on whether I think she actually looks like those photos. I don’t feel comfortable answer that and said to her she shouldn’t think too much and if she isn’t happy with her photos I would recommend her to get professional headshots done with her makeup all done nicely as well.

I honestly wanted to move on from her back and forth, and she kept saying how she doesn’t look like the person she was in the photo and it frustrated me after some point because she had been ranting for a solid 20 minutes now. I just blurted out “whatever helps you sleep at night”. Maybe she needed to know she does look like the photo she literally got clicked that day. Or maybe she’ll stop talking about it altogether.

Yes ideally I’ll want her to lose weight and get more confident in her appearance but I understand that couldn’t be a priority right now.

Next morning when I woke up I woke up to a barrage of texts from her telling me she was hurt over what I said, then claiming she might just be overthinking things and didn’t mean to tell me she was hurt and we should move on. There were also a bunch of deleted texts in between, which probably indicates ( from how much I’ve known about her) are a code for her spiralling for me she gets on some nights night. For example when she feels irrationally upset at me she will send me texts and then delete them later before I see. It can be confusing and exhausting for me so I know last night wasn’t easy on her emotionally.

What do I do? Should I apologise or not?

AITAH?