Hunter McGrady Is the *Sports Illustrated* Swimsuit Issue Body Image Hero We Need

The Swimsuit Edition of Sports Illustrated always makes a splash (sorry), and 2017’s is no different. This year you can find Kate Upton on the cover for the third time, along with model Hunter McGrady, a rookie SI model—and the curviest model ever to appear in the magazine.

It’s a welcome addition to what’s already a game-changing issue, featuring both perennial BAMF Serena Williams and 63-year-old supermodel Christie Brinkley. McGrady, 23, initially began her career as a straight-size model but never got a lot of work.

“I remember being 16 years old, and I drove down with my mom to a T-shirt line that had booked me for the day,” McGrady tells Glamour.com. “I showed up, and they told me I had to go home because I was too big, or I was bigger than they thought. They didn’t even give me a chance to try on any of the T-shirts; they just had already made up their minds that I was too big for them,” she says. “I remember being sad, upset, embarrassed, but, more important, angry, because they had judged me without even letting me try anything on. I felt very sad for them, not for me. Because they missed out on that opportunity.”

So McGrady decided to change her attitude. “I just decided I’m not going to live my life for people to criticize my body, because I have only one of these—and I’m going to make it count, and I’m going to love it,” she says. “As I started getting taller and my hips started coming in, I started getting stretch marks, and I fell in love with them, because that meant that I was growing, and it meant that I was becoming a woman. That was OK with me. I started getting cellulite, just like every other woman in the world. And I started to accept those things because to me that was beautiful. I was becoming a woman! That was so glamorous to me.”

When McGrady saw plus-size peers like Robin Lawley and Candice Huffine on the cover of Vogue Italia, a lightbulb went on. “By that time I had gained some weight, and I was about a size 10-12. And that’s what kind of opened my eyes to the plus-size world,” she told Sports Illustrated. Clearly, she’s been successful.

When she learned she was going to be in SI‘s swimsuit edition, McGrady burst into tears. “I knew not only what it meant for me, which was a huge success in my career and a dream of mine coming true, but also what it would and what it will continue to mean for other women when they see the issue,” she says. “This is a time when we need diversity and acceptance.…I’ve even had men message me and say thank you for shedding a light on the way they look at women. It’s so important. I feel so proud of this issue and to be in it with these women.”

Now McGrady is quickly making a name for herself as a body-image activist, and we’re here for it. “Beauty is not a number. It has no limits. I have never felt sexier than I did in this shoot,” she wrote on her Instagram. “Women, for anyone who has ever felt uncomfortable or insecure because of rolls, or stretch marks, or cellulite, or acne, or felt like you didn’t measure up because you weren’t represented in the magazines—THIS IS FOR YOU!”

If that didn’t hit you right in your feels, no worries. There’s more: “You are beautiful,” McGrady continued. “You are STRONG. You are powerful and together we need to lift each other up and inspire one another. There’s too much going on on this world to let each other fall by the wayside.”

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Besides her powerful words, what we also love about McGrady is how proud she is of her body. It’s obvious in the issue—plus that swimsuit is painted onto her body. (Yup.) She has nothing to hide, and why should she? Our hope is that while this may be the first time she appears in the pages of Sports Illustrated, it will definitely not be the last—because we need more body-positive (role) models like her in our lives.

McGrady is grounded, too, and doesn’t see herself or her fellow models as being that different from the people looking at them in magazines. “I want women and men to realize that at the end of the day, we all take off our masks and we lay down and go to sleep,” she says, “Even the people you see in the media, they have a team of hair and makeup and lighting behind them. And they lay their head down at night like you and me and everybody else. They take their makeup off and their eyelashes off. And that’s something to keep in the back of your mind. We are all human, we all have ‘flaws’—or what society deems as flaws. We’re supposed to enjoy life and have fun and not be so caught up in what our image is.”

Preach.

—Reporting by Elizabeth Logan

Now that you’ve gotten to know Hunter McGrady, check out:
-How the Body-Positive Movement Changed Red-Carpet Fashion
-Ashley Graham on Authenticity and Being a Body Image Activist
-I Didn’t Love My Body Until I Posed Unretouched