From a size two to a size 16, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, Hunter McGrady used to spend hours sweating away at the gym and starving herself to maintain her small frame.
But she was unhappy, and didn’t book any modelling gigs, “My hips were always the bigger part of my body, and I was already so thin that I couldn’t keep shaving them down. I physically could not. And everyone was telling me that I could,” McGrady, now 23, tells People Magazine. “At that time I thought my dreams of becoming a model were crushed.”
But even when she did book a job, it wouldn’t go well, “I walked into one of my first modelling jobs as a size four. They looked at me and said, ‘We didn’t realize you were this big,’ and they sent me home,” she recalled. “And I was so upset, and so livid, that I was getting picked at, already, at just a young 16-years-old.”
After all those years of struggling the model decided to accept her body, “I love my body now. I love everything about it,” she says. “I’ve been an 18, I’ve been a 10/12, and I’ve been everything in between. Right now I sit at a 16, and I love it, because this is my God-given body.”
When McGrady heard about “curve modelling” about four years ago, she went to Wilhelmina Models and they signed her on the spot. Since then she has modelled for Lucky Brand, Bare Necessities and Lane Bryant. But her dream was the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, and for this year’s issue she made it.
“I always told myself that one way or another I was going to get in there,” she confessed.
The issue came out Feb. 15 featuring McGrady in a stunning tie-die one piece, “It’s a moment – not just for me, but for women in history – to be in this issue. Finally, we’re being heard,” she said.
