Swimwear model and self-professed body activist Ashley Graham has opened up about being bullied during her school years.
"Girls would call me 'cottage-cheese thighs' and 'thunder thighs,'" the 29-year-old tells Harper's Bazaar. "They'd be like, 'Wide load coming through. Beep, beep!' I hated school."
Even when Ashley - who posed naked on the front cover of Grazia last year - started her career as an international model, the jibes did not stop.
"As a model, people are telling you you're beautiful, and at school, people are telling you you're ugly," she says.
"They would say, 'You're not really a model, you're a fat model.' It was humiliating. I just put my head down and internalised it."
Ashley has dedicated her working life to being a role model for curvy women - and she's on a mission to make women of all shapes and sizes feel good about themselves.
"As a curvy girl you get the feeling that you're a second-class citizen," she says.
"I want women to accept themselves. I have so many friends, skinny, really heavy and in between, who all have the same insecurities."
Ashley explains that, like many models, she attempted to diet early on. "But it never worked," she says. "So I was like, screw this, I'm just going to be me.
"I still wake up some mornings and feel fat, of course I do. But I've come to a place where I'm like, the cellulite's not leaving and I'm not going to beat myself up about it, I'll embrace it."
At 5ft 9, Ashley is US size 18, which is a UK size 22.
When Grazia met her last year, we were struck by her larger-than-life personality, describing her "booming, dirty laugh, oodles of energy, and a habit of clicking her fingers in approval of things".
"Sexy is a state of mind and it can come in all shapes and sizes," Ashley told us. "It is different for every person. It could be full hair and make-up; no hair and make-up. Just out of the shower or going to a red carpet event. All those things to me embody sexy.
"I just don't live my life in a world where I am not feeling my best and feeling my best is feeling sexy."
We couldn't have said it better ourselves.
*Photos: Ashley Graham/Instagram*
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