LITTLE ROCK — When she was a kid in Casper, Wyo., all Katie Halchishick asked of her body was that it take her out to play after school.
“I would eat when I was hungry and stop when I was full and play with my friends. I was happy. We lose that when people start telling us what’s wrong with us,” says the 26-year-old model, who appears nude in the November issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.
By the time she made the high-school basketball and volleyball teams, the tall, athletic Halchishick says she had absorbed all kinds of cruel comments from boys and girls alike about her body. She calls those her character-building years, and credits her smalltown childhood with keeping her grounded as she built a modeling career.
Attending college in New York, she put her size-14 curves to work in the fashion industry and earned six figures as a plus-size model.
But she didn’t feel good. And she wasn’t happy, despite being part of those “love your curves” messages. “I did not take care of my body and I didn’t love it, but it was making money.”
She began to study nutrition, learned how to cook, starting working out and lost 50 pounds. “And then I lost all my clients. I looked my best and was my healthiest but that was not valued at all.”
She was too big for regular fashion shoots and too small for plus-size assignments. “I had to choose between being healthy and doing this profession, where there’s no market at all for ‘normal.’”
So she started her own agency in Los Angeles, Natural Model Management, hoping to change the industry from the inside out. She created the “Healthy Is the New Skinny” campaign to change the minds of the girls on the receiving end of the fashion world’s “thin is in” messages.
But when the Oprah people called, she was just another model on a casting call.
“I’m not one to be like ‘let me get naked in the name of fashion,’” says the Kohl’s bra model, who was a bit uncomfortable with the topless portion of the interview.
It wasn’t until she got the job that she learned what the shoot was really about. The picture, by fashion photographer Matthew Rolston, illustrates a report on the magazine’s readers’ attitudes about their appearance.
Wearing nothing but dotted lines, Halchishick stands holding a Barbie doll on Page 182, facing the words “Better Than Beautiful?” The photo illustrates where she would have to be “taken in” to approximate the plastic doll.
“I had to stand there basically naked for six hours so they could draw the lines on me. Nothing makes you evaluate where your boobs are until someone draws them on with a marker,” says Halchishick, who at 5 feet, 9 inches tall weighs between 155 and 160 pounds and wears size 8-10.
The magazine makes no mention of Halchishick’s projects. It doesn’t give her name. The eight-page spread does include an essay by novelist Amy Bloom that offers this advice:
“You cannot be a healthy person, let alone hope for healthy children, if you sigh and moan every time you encounter your own image, eat a cookie, or see an airbrushed model on a billboard. ... So stop. Stop talking to the girls in your life about ‘healthy eating’ if what you actually mean is, ‘Your 11-year-old stomach isn’t flat and it freaks me out.’ ... Stop criticizing other women’s bodies for sport or to soothe yourself.”
ActiveStyle, Pages 27 on 10/31/2011