Charli Howard has never been scared to share her body or her mind with her fans, and this week was no exception. The British model shared a photo on her Instagram this week of her cellulite, and she had a strong message to go with it.
Along with the black and white photo, Charli writes, "They say do something each day that scares you, so re-posting this is mine for the day. Despite the fact I speed walk everywhere, squat, run and occasionally do @pure_barre, I'm still left with cellulite."
Charli goes on to say that when she was younger, she felt jealous of the girls at her boarding school "whose bodies looked, to me, nothing less than perfect", and could never find any girls that looked like her in the pages of her magazines: "Whenever I opened magazines, the models and celebrities I saw didn't have cellulite either - and if they did, they were shamed in the tabloids because of it."
As a result of never seeing anyone like her in the media, Charli said she felt different from everyone else. "I felt like my cellulite was shameful, or an oddity. It wasn't until I got older and saw other women's bodies that I realised HOW BLOODY NATURAL IT IS. It's nothing to be ashamed of." We hear ya, Charli!
This isn't the first we've heard of Charli. Back in 2015, she wrote an open letter to her agency after she was dropped for being too big. "I refuse to feel ashamed and upset on a daily basis for not meeting your ridiculous, unobtainable beauty standards…The more you force us to lose weight and be small, the more designers have to make clothes to fit our sizes, and the more young girls are being made ill.
"In case you hadn't realised, I am a woman. I am human. I cannot miraculously shave my hip bones down, just to fit into a sample size piece of clothing or to meet 'agency standards'. I have fought nature for a long time, because you've deemed my body shape too "curvaceous", but I have recently began to love my shape."
Charli also started the All Woman Project with fellow model Clementine Desseauxe, a foundation that aims to help girls and women feel comfortable in their own skin by displaying body-positive and un-retouched images of women in photo and video campaigns. They also organise events and workshops for school students, in order to provide them with positive role models and the self-esteem they need to become confident in themselves.
What do you think of Charli's body positive Insta? Let us know! @sofeminineUK
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