Last week I made my debut as a plus sized “model” walking the runway in New York’s Fashion Week. I was expecting the usual fat jabs from the usual outlets but imagine my surprise when it came from the designer whose clothes I wore in the form of a statement to the media from her stylist, claiming they would have been much happier if J.Lo wore her clothes than me, a real woman who refuses to hate on herself just because she doesn’t currently fit into her skinny jeans.

This is an email I just sent to Camilla Frank’s publicist in New York:

Dear Camilla,
Just wanted to touch base with you now I am back in LA after walking in New York Fashion Weeks’s official closing show! I wanted to send my heartfelt thanks to Camilla for her support of such a great cause – Bottomless Closet and Derek Warburton’s Real Fashion Real Women Runway Show. Over 30 women from disadvantaged backgrounds were given makeovers, new clothes and coaching to help rebuild their lives, much needed funds were raised and the general consensus from the public, a media standpoint and those in Fashion Week was that it was a beautiful and worthy way to end Fashion Week, not to mention give real women including curvy girls the respect they deserve away from what can be a brutal, hurtful and judgmental world.…

Here I am in New York at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week contemplating walking the catwalk in a few short days as a curvy girl in a world overflowing with skinny twiglets (and in the interest of full disclosure I am eating a Cadbury chocolate Creme egg as we speak). I have not starved to get here and I am far from a supermodel but my mom who has passed was a model and given today is National Suicide Prevention Day, I will be walking the catwalk in honor of her – a woman who passed in lonely and difficult times and had she had more support available to her she may well be here with me to cheer me on this Wednesday night during the Real Fashion Real Women Runway Show.

I have done a lot of things in my life but none so terrifying as this. First of all I have to make sure I wear at least 3 pairs of spanks just as Melissa McCarthy admits she did at The Emmys. Then I have to make sure I do not fall over on the catwalk. I have never been great in heels and I have images of the girls in America’s Next Top Model toppling over and subsequently becoming YouTube sensations in the single tip of a heel.…

I have spent most of my life either stuffing my face to near death or starving myself to near extinction. The only time I truly remember living like a healthy person was when I was writing my first book “Confessions of a Reformed Dieter” when I lost 40 kilos in a year but even then I was officially on a diet.

People have called me the queen of weight loss but I am not. I am simply a girl, who has either been really fat or really thin and everything in between and have struggled to love myself regardless.

I certainly know how to lose a lot of weight fast – I witnessed four years of contestants do it on The Biggest Loser Australia when I was hosting it. I did it myself as I bowed to the pressure of the network to get thinner and thinner every year succumbing also to the endless fat bashing in the media that just never seems to end no matter how big or small I am at any given time. I look at footage of myself in the final year of Loser and remember how hungry I was and how I had abused my body with diet pills, laxatives, dehydration and brutal exercise sessions after working 20 hour days AND surviving as a single mom.…