Gigi Hadid may be one of the hottest supermodels of the moment, but she says her body wasn't always fit for modeling.
"Growing up I was really athletic and I had a very athletic body," she told the Daily Mail Australia in a new interview. "I had like crazy muscles and I [ate] like a man - more than the man that I eat like now, like a bigger man - and it was crazy but at the time I didn't care what my body looked like, I just wanted to be the best volleyball player I could be so it didn't really matter to me."
In fact, the 20-year-old beauty was asked to lose weight at the start of her career. "When I first went to visit different agencies in New York, a lot of them were like, you have to lose a lot of weight," she explained.
The pressure to be thin was so overwhelming, Gigi admits that she would "cry at night and my mom [Yolanda Foster], she would be like, 'We're going to find the [right] people.''
And she did!
After making a splash in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, Hadid quickly became a household name.
"I'm kind of the model that everyone thought would always be the Guess, Sports Illustrated girl, then when I started to do high fashion stuff... people were like, 'Oh so we can have a girl with like thighs and a butt in a Tom Ford campaign, cool,'" she told the publication. "And then all of a sudden the high fashion people wanted to work with me and that's kind of how it works. If you just embrace yourself other people accept you in the same way."
As she started booking more gigs, Gigi realized that she didn't have to adhere to those super skinny modeling standards.
"Once I started modelling one of my things was like yeah, I don't need to be a man volleyball player but I also don't want to be like [holds up her little finger] two pounds soaking wet," she declared. "And that's always something that I was very strong minded about, I just want to be a healthy role model and I haven't swayed from that at all."
The blonde bombshell continues to land one campaign after another, and she also recently added music video vixen to her resume!
She stars in Calvin Harris' new video for "How Deep Is Your Love" -- check it out above.
Guess it pays to be a part of Taylor Swift's fashionable squad, right?!
