Model Happily Moves to Plus-Size Gigs
N E W Y O R K, Sept. 7, 2001 -- Model Carré Otis was on a charity mission to Nepal, surrounded by people who were poor and starving, when she realized how crazy it was to starve herself just to stay thin.
After the trip, Otis gained 30 pounds in less than a year. Now, at size 12, she is considered a "plus-size" model, a label that would strike terror in most models' hearts. But she couldn't be happier.
"It's so much fun to be on a shoot, and to stop for a lunch break and actually see the models eat," said Otis on Good Morning America. Otis, at 5 feet 10 inches and 155 pounds, is still slimmer than the average American woman, who wears a size 14. Among models, however, she is in the plus-sized realm.
A Fast 15 Minutes
It has been a long road for Otis. In her teens she was living the supposedly glamorous life of a size 4 supermodel. But she said that "15-minute moment," where your 17-year-old body is naturally at that weight, passes pretty fast.
To stay skinny, she would go on crash diets before modeling assignments.
"I'd stop eating completely, drink water, coffee," Otis said. "When we talk about diet, it wasn't with any kind of understanding about health and nutrition. It was just with the obsession of staying really, really small, and so much was at stake and depended on me fitting into a certain size."
Otis also took cocaine and diet pills to keep her weight down. But as she got older, her old tricks weren't working, and it became harder to lose the weight.
Otis wrestled with eating disorders and drug addiction for years. She even tried to kill herself at one point. The end of her troubled marriage to actor Mickey Rourke only added more emotional problems to the pile.
The Turning Point
Otis finally hit a turning point while on a trip to Nepal. She has been a Tibetan Buddhist since she was 17 and always dreamed of trekking the Himalayas. A year ago, she joined a humanitarian group, Medicine for Nepal, which was delivering food and medical supplies to Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital.
Otis saw dying women with babies at their breasts, whom they were unable to feed. She saw maimed children, beggars, and orphaned handicapped kids who had nothing to eat.
And at that moment, her 32nd birthday, she realized that she had been self-obsessed all her life, and that it was insane to purposely starve herself when others would do anything for food. Her charity work made her feel like, at last, she was giving something back to the world, Otis said.
She plans to continue the trips to Nepal, and is also speaking out publicly against eating disorders. Now, Otis is back at work. She is drug-free, healthy, and gracing magazine covers once again. She is on the cover of this month's Mode, a fashion and beauty magazine aimed at American women who wear size 12 and up.