Victoria's_Secret,_Dublin_Airport,_Ireland_-_August_2014
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Kylie Bisutti was at the height of her career as a Victoria’s Secret model. Then she decided to walk away from it all for her faith.

Bisutti began to feel torn over her lifestyle with Victoria’s Secret and how it fit into her Christian views. She felt conflicted about baring so much skin and realized she wasn’t being a role model for younger girls.

Bisutti knew she needed to change her career when she had an eye-opening encounter with a little girl.

“I was doing my makeup in the mirror one day and she was just watching me. I was like ‘What’s going on?’ and she just looked at me and [said] ‘I think I want to stop eating so I can look like you.'” .

Bisutti said this broke her heart. She didn’t want her platform to promote the idea that any girl needs to change in order to be beautiful.

Bisutti also got married a few months before her break as a Victoria’s Secret model. This also caused some distress, because she felt uncomfortable posing for men’s magazines and showing her body for people other than her husband.

“Victoria’s Secret was my absolutely biggest goal in life, and it was all I ever wanted career-wise. I actually loved it while I was there, it was so much fun and I had a blast. But the more I was modeling lingerie, and lingerie isn’t clothing, I just started becoming more uncomfortable with it because of my faith,” she said in an interview with FOX411. “I’m Christian and reading the Bible more, I was becoming more convicted about it.”

Bisutti isn’t the only Victoria’s Secret model that has left due to a conflict with their faith. Nicole Weider also left the industry, and started “Project Inspired”, the largest online community for teen girls. Through her work, Weider wanted to point girls toward inner beauty.

“I realized that being a model was truly not what it was cracked up to be. I felt degraded, that I was never ‘perfect’ enough, and being judged only on my appearance was hurting my self-esteem,” Weider explained.

“I really believe the enemy attacks us as women. He’s that negative voice,” she added. “I started feeling really anxious on set. My heart was giving me warning signs. After I posed in these magazines, it led me to a crisis about who I was. I didn’t want to model, but I placed my identity, for so long, in modeling.”

Weider’s lifelong friend helped her make the change from a Victoria’s Secret model to an active Christian.

“My best friend Christina, she’s the one who planted seeds in my heart and told me ‘God has a purpose for you, he loves you,’” explained Weider. “She said that I can use my past as a testimony for my future. She really was planting the seeds of God’s love and hope in my heart.”

“I realized I wanted more for my life. I rediscovered my faith that I had as a little girl, and it changed my life because I was passionate about using my gifts for God instead of the empty modeling industry.”

The former model said that she has a strong desire to help young girls understand that “they are beautiful just the way God made them” and has used her platform to get that message across. She wants the girls to free themselves from the cultural pressure of striving for perfection in their appearance.

“It is too easy on social media to feel like you need to compare yourself to other people. What I do often is, I just make a post about Jesus, and many times I just sign out and not scroll through a lot,” she explained.

 

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