My days are jam-packed with carpools, classroom assistance, tending to chickens, dogs and seven acres of olive trees!

My parents were both from the East and had moved to San Francisco only so my father could go to law school there.

My weight fluctuated when I was 30, and I did the unthinkable - I stepped out as a plus-sized model.

The doctor asked what my diet was like and I had to sit down and realize it's not normal, and hadn't been normal for about 20 years.

The pressure was if I didn't get into that dress size someone else would - someone else would get the job.

There comes a moment as a parent when you realize you will no longer be the center of your child's universe.

Though my parents assured me over and over again that I wasn't stupid or slow, I sensed that my dyslexia was now a stigma on all of us.

When I consider the deeper meaning of yoga, I realize it's about a lot more than simply performing a variety of postures on a mat.

You have to find a balance with food in your life - you can't take out food. It can be absolutely terrifying.

Being born and raised as a Californian, I somewhat ignorantly had taken for granted the diversity and liberal mindset that shaped my childhood and adult life.

But I would assert that despite the wide variety of yoga options and individual preferences, there is one universal element: the union of consciousness and movement, breath and awareness.

I am not naturally that thin, so I had to go through everything from using drugs to diet pills to laxatives to fasting. Those were my main ways of controlling my weight.

I believe that as women, we must commit ourselves to sustaining the progress made by our foremothers who fought so hard for women's equality and liberation.

I did some great work with my Calvin Klein ads on the motorcycle. It was really groundbreaking because people hadn't seen a woman actually riding a motorcycle before.

I feel like it's my responsibility to honestly cover a lot of subjects in part because I have two little girls and I really want them when they grow up to have a voice.

I had dropped out of school and was a runaway, so I didn't have family to fall back on if I didn't work. I didn't have a lot of other options of making money other than modeling.

In the past, I often found that when I reached out for a fast cure it led me down a slippery slope of more medications, hopeful dependence on the next prescription and ultimately a much longer drawn-out illness.

Just as young people absorb all kinds of messages from the media, young girls learn what it means to be a woman by watching the older women in their lives.

Motherhood has brought me many joys and insights, but the new perspective it granted me on the role I had inadvertently played in young women's lives for the 2 decades I spent in the modeling industry was downright sobering.

My daughters, your daughters, our daughters deserve safety, protection, and the freedom to make their own choices about their personal lives and their physical selves.