Full-Figured Celebrities Proud Of Their Stature

Who says you have to be pencil-thin to be considered attractive or successful? While women who wear a size 5 might be favored in the world, full-figured women are taking charge and showing that big is and can be beautiful.

In the land of Hollywood, where image is everything, full-figured celebrities such as Star Jones, Queen Latifah and Loretta Devine are among those who have risen to lofty ranks in their respected careers through their phenomenal talent while they have demonstrated to the world how much they've learned to love their body image just as it is.

Star Jones first made a name for herself as a sought-after lawyer in Brooklyn, NY, where she was renowned for her successful prosecution of high-profile homicide cases and community-sensitive trials. Jones has expanded her horizons and has since become a household name thanks to her role as a co-host on the Emmy Award-winning talk show "The View."

Jones revealed in her book You Have to Stand for Something, or You'll Fall for Anything that she's never given her size a second thought.

"Looks come and go. If I've thought about it at all, I've always thought about myself as an attractive person, and I do like to dress up and strut, but I've never focused on the size of my butt or the fullness of my hips or any of those particulars ... My weight was never important to me. It wasn't even high enough on the list to be considered secondary," she said.

Jones, who's also a spokesperson for Saks Fifth Avenue's Salon Z, designer-label fashions for larger women, once told EBONY, "We have to give ourselves permission to reject Madison Avenue's idea of beautiful. I want women to get to the point where they are proud of who they are."

She was candid about explaining to Atlanta shoppers that they can't believe everything they see.

"Let me tell y'all something: I've sat next to these cover models and thought to myself, `Whoooo, girl, you're not looking so hot.' They don't really look like that in person. You see that poster of me back there? Sure, I look cute, but it's not me. It's airbrushed. That person doesn't really exist. They took a little off my chin and a little off other places as well," she said, according to the Atlanta Journal.

Statistics show that over 50% of women in the U. S. wear size 14 or larger. And large-size fashion manufacturers have increased from under 100 to over 1,000 in the past 15 years, says Radiance, a magazine for large women.

America must be taking notice because it appears to be re-evaluating its definition of beauty. People are criticizing Miss Americas as being too thin. Even researchers recently concluded that Miss America was getting skinnier.

The researchers used the height and weight figures to calculate a measure, called body mass index (BMI) and concluded that it has generally fallen over the years. The BMI is calculated using weight divided by the square of height.

In the 1920s, contestants had BMIs in the range now considered normal, which is 20 to 25, the researchers said. But an increasing number of winners since then have had BMIs under 18.5, which is the World Health Organization's standard for undernutrition!

"Beauty pageants, like the rest of our media-driven culture, give young women in particular a message, over and over again, that it's exceedingly important to be thin to be considered successful and attractive," said Dr. Harry Brandt, director of the Center for Eating Disorders at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, MD.

Miss America's BMI dropped markedly in the '70s and '80s, then it rose slightly in the '90s. Recent winners have had some of the highest BMI readings, which is a reflection of pageant officials' emphasis of brains over beauty, said Robert Renneisen Jr., CEO of the Miss America Organization.

Weight never stood in the way of Dana Owens being considered a queen. As Queen Latifah, she won fame as a hip-hop heavyweight who went on to form her own record label as well as nab a Grammy Award. Her talent has always gotten her noticed and allowed her entry to TV and movies. She starred on the smash sitcom "Living Single" for many years and then went on to generate more fans with her film roles in Set It Off, Living Out Loud and The Bone Collector. Lately her fans have been catching her each week as the host of her own talk show, "Queen Latifah," which recently was renewed for a second season.

Latifah is confident and comfortable with her plus-sized figure. She explained, in her book, Ladies First: Revelations of A Strong Woman, that it took time before she grew to accept her body image.

She wrote: "People look at me now and think, `Wow, there's a full-sized woman who has it together.' Puhlease!" she said in the book. "It took me years to get to the point where I love my body. And I do truly love my body. But I had to go through stages. I hated my breasts. I hated my butt. I even hated the way I walked ... I am not the prototypical 36-24-36. Never have been, never will be. And although society tells me I'm too big, what I try to keep in my head are the words from Maya Angelou [in her poem Phenomenal Woman]."