Crystal Renn takes on the critics

If folks didn’t put such an emphasis on weight, we may doubt so many folks would be overweight. The more you make of it, the less adequate people feel. At some point many folks just give up and figure they will never be able to meet society’s standards.

First of all, if Crystal Renn is a size 10, she would be far from being a plus size model. Secondly, She was barely retouched. She did not look shockingly thin in the after photo. If anything, they took her from a size 10 to a size 8. I don’t see the big deal about all of this.

Crystal Renn was returning from a photo shoot in Paris for French Vogue earlier this month while she got some upsetting news. Retouched photos of the plus size model, who famously overcame anorexia and exercise bulimia seven years before rising to the top of her profession, had been released showing the size 9 beauty looking shockingly thin.

“You want to laugh because you know it’s not you, but then you realize everyone out there seeing these images thinks it is,” Renn tells PEOPLE. “I was clearly upset and concerned. I don’t want some girl who’s recovering from anorexia to see the picture and think I don’t think that you can be any size and be beautiful. That’s completely not what I’m about.”

But Renn, 24, is the first to admit that she is slimmer at the present than when she first relaunched her career as a plus size model at 5′9″ and 175 lbs.
“Over the years I had made my way down to 164 lbs. and a size 11,” says Renn, who has walked the runway for Jean Paul Gaultier and Chanel and booked campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana. In the last year, she slimmed down to 149 lbs. and a size 9 when she finally began exercising again after 7 years during which she avoided all workouts.

But discovering “fun” activities like hiking and yoga helped her take a more balanced approach to fitness in the past year, she says. “I used to workout obsessively for 8 hours a day,” she admits. “at the present, I want to do something fun that’s fine for my body.” For more information on Crystal Renn’s body controversy, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE on stands now.

I think everything depends upon where one is plus size. Geometry and angulation are the true markers for attractiveness. Like laws of physics, they can’t be fudged.