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Models are already responsible for being examples to the rest of the world for how to wear clothes.
For Elizabeth Holland, the pressure was just too much.
She was first scouted as a model when she was sixteen years old, and said that working with local agencies has always made her feel good about herself.
It’s big, top agencies, she says, that are responsible for the damaging body culture we see worldwide.
“I got scouted by a huge agency a couple of years ago,” says Elizabeth on Facebook, “And they said they wanted me, I was going to be an icon and travel the world.
"I did exactly what they said because what naïve girl wouldn’t wanna live that life? They told me my hip measurements were too big and I needed to shrink over all. I’m 5’9” nearly 5’10” size 8…And they wanted me to be smaller?
“I was really tired, in fact no exhausted. I got too ill and very thin, even when I was at my worst I was still not good enough.”
Sbe said it took an enormous toll on her mental health, and made her relationship to food extremely unhealthy. She recovered, but then disaster struck again.
“Middle of this year I was scouted again,” she says. “I stood my ground, and they said they liked me. However, I went to a workshop not long ago, and they told me yet again…I’m too big. This has hit me with one of my worst relapses yet. That bad that I am struggling to do anything right now. I’ve got to the point where I don’t deserve to eat sometimes, there’s no point in me being around because I’m such a burden…When I feel really bad, I’ll just eat carrots or when I try to eat normal it’ll make me feel extremely guilty. I’ve even tried smoling to see if it cuts my appetite.”
She says a sample diet from the big agencies started out with porridges and salad, and ended with “less and less food.”
Her message? Don’t compare yourself to all the high fashion models. And she believes something in the industry has to change, too.
She says the modeling agencies “don’t care about how it makes you feel up in your head, as long as you look ill and skinny enough behind the camera. They’ve got a huge queue of girls lining up chasing the same dream anyway, so what’s it to them if a couple of girls drop dead?”
“We have to stop comparing ourselves to this pretend world. But how can we when we are completely surrounded by it?"
