Another beautiful example of body and size acceptance

Velvet D'Amour is the "plus-sized" model who made international headlines last month when she walked the runway at Jean-Paul Gaultier's fashion show in lacy black lingerie. She gave an interview shortly afterwards where she talked about her desire to help promote the diversity of beauty.

She also dispelled notions that fat people aren’t active or healthy. Fat women, however, face obstacles and ridicule when they go to a gym or appear in a swimsuit. “Come with me swimming some time [she swims 120 laps three times a week] and you’ll see that people will obviously laugh out loud when you walk right by. I can take it because I am very happy in my own body but there are so many women who can’t.”

“The reality is there’s going to be fat people... there always have been fat people, there always will be fat people.”

She appeared on Entertainment Tonight again last Monday and in her interview said: “If I’m fat or if I’m thin, I feel like I’m beautiful. I think that is more about confidence than how one looks physically.”

Her lovely body is naturally fat. It’s her genetic body type. In order to have the thin body that our culture currently believes is “healthy,” she had to starve to lose the weight and starve even more to keep it off — which is not nutritionally healthy for any body.

Velvet wasn't always so accepting of her body. When she was a teen...“In order to stay thin, one avoided eating for all necessity," she tells Kevin. “I would have jello, and I would mix it with hot water, and I would drink it before it was set so that I would feel a sensation of being full, when I was quite hungry, in fact.”

But it didn't quite work like she expected. “I was literally so hungry that I was obsessed by food," she says. “There was a time when I very much hated my body, when I started gaining weight after I had tried so very much to lose weight," she explains. “In that cycle I would starve myself to death and I would eat tons of food."

But now, Velvet has a healthier body image and confidence to spare, and it's something she exudes for photographer Pascal Boissier as she poses for a photo shoot....

Velvet has found the positive in being big instead of the negative of not being stick thin. “If you want to spend your life hating yourself and being with people who don't like you, that's an option," she says. "But certainly you have the option to love yourself and to live in the moment.”