Forgoing Sex 'The Best Thing I've Ever Done': Model Ashley Graham

Plus-sized model Ashley Graham has vowed not to have sex before marriage. The 27-year-old appears in the latest issue of Elle UK magazine, where she talks about why she loves her curves and is never going to hide them.

"I had to reclaim my body, my sexuality and my image. It [giving up sex] was the best thing I've ever done," she told Elle. "You don't wake up with regrets. I'm not having a man decide what he's going to do with my body; I'll decide." The model wears a black bikini in the magazine photos and says she does not want to be called a “plus-sized” model.

Graham wants to be called “my-sized" as women can be healthy at any size. Today, when most women are in the race to get “thinner and thinner," Graham thinks differently. When people called her plus-sized, she felt like an outsider in the fashion world. But the moment she embraced her real size, she started to feel “free.” She does not promote “anorexia or obesity” but promotes health. “And healthy at whatever size your body needs to be,” she told the magazine.

The lingerie model, who has also appeared in Sports Illustrated magazine, hopes that women see her embracing her curves in her bikini and “feel empowered to do the same.” The brunette beauty feels that she does not have any reason to hide her curves and neither should any woman do so. “Curves and confidence make a sexy combination," she believes. Despite severe criticism on her obesity, she does not want to get thinner any day. She only wants to be “firmer and stronger” as she love “her curves and only want to enhance them."

The Nebraska-born woman also said that she was termed as a “fat girl” in the initial days of her modeling career. Her body and confidence were “picked apart, manipulated and controlled by others who didn’t necessarily understand it.” But Graham has come a long way. She is also launching her very own "Fifty Shades of Grey"-inspired lingerie for plus-sized women.