I am not naturally that thin, so I had to go through everything from using drugs to diet pills to laxatives to fasting. Those were my main ways of controlling my weight.

Motherhood has brought me many joys and insights, but the new perspective it granted me on the role I had inadvertently played in young women's lives for the 2 decades I spent in the modeling industry was downright sobering.

I was born in 1968, just eighteen months after my sister Chrisse and just one year after Dad passed the bar exam.

I delight in my family obligations, but they leave little time for breaks let alone quick trips across the country.

Life is full of change and uncertainty. We know this. We experience it on a daily basis.

I think that we can't deny the public's want for balancing out the images that are out there depicting women. Not all of us are 17 and a size two.

Just as young people absorb all kinds of messages from the media, young girls learn what it means to be a woman by watching the older women in their lives.