Dangerous Curves in the June issue of France’s Marie Clair magazine.

“I see a ripe fecundity, the deliciousness of bodies in balance, meaning they enjoy eating, sensuality and pleasure — but not without restraint. These women are healthy and ripe with vitality, but also restraint and self-love,” says L. Anne Enke, an expert in woman’s fashion and body image and former Fashion Director for Victoria’s Secret. Enke, founder of Sensualitynews.com, expressed her views in reference to the June Issue of France’s Marie Claire.

The magazine’s photo spread (see slideshow) of the statuesque and natural beauties is sexually and aesthetically stunning. “There is a beauty that comes — not from denial — but from their lusciousness,” says Enke. “I believe both women have a BMI of about 25, making them healthy by any medical standard, but also womanly.”

The Dangerous Curves models (formerly known as Plus Size), Hayley Morley and Laura Catteral, strip down to swimwear and lingerie by Princesse Tam-Tam, American Vintage and others. They also pose naked and bare breasted; their vitality, sensuality and confidence captured in film by photographers, Thierry Lebraly and Bruno Juminer.

“In Europe women are photographed with their breasts and bodies bare.” Enke explains. American “magazines like Glamour and Allure are beginning to show some real-woman skin in an effort to get us to connect with our bodies holistically.” It’s the first step towards accepting the double-edge sword that split us from healthy bodies and healthy eating, according to Enke.

She’s written about women’s love/hate affair with their bodies, determined to steer a more realistic course, in AnneofCarversville.com, the companion website to Sensualitynews.com. Her sites are intelligent, visually rich, and defiant; indicative of the maverick vamp behind the camera and pen.

“We’re stuck in the swamp on this weight topic”
Enke knows the difficulty of being overweight in a culture that places increasing value on a woman’s decreasing size. “We drown in good girl/bad girl guilt in America — endless versions and varieties over sexuality and size. Food is our salvation. Shopping, too.”

At her heaviest, she wore size 16, but a crisis of consciousness forced her to recognize an unpleasant, socially-unpopular truth.

We want to blame the food industry, our sedentary lifestyles, even the media and fashion industry for the pressure to look a certain way, she explained to Modern Love.

Enke, who is now a healthy size 8, realized that the power to look and feel her sensual best lies within. “The challenge is about one woman, her fork, and the food she puts in her mouth. Take all the other explanations and excuses and swoosh them off the table. Bang! There, the table is empty. Those excuses will make you miserable for years, then kill you. Now what?”

She admits that she now looks “at the problem with simplicity,’ because woman are “not totally-defenseless hamsters in cages against the food industry.”

Nor is Enke without mercy. Her background in the fashion industry means she understands the pressures today’s women feel; it’s tough to accept one’s body compared to the airbrushed, photo shopped, falsified images we see in the media.

Striking this balance required that she face her fears and photograph herself naked – “every bulge and imperfection.” After a lot of weeping, she started a food journal, a companion to her tough love approach.

“Every woman should go on a retreat alone with no TV or cell phone.” Take a good, hard look at what they eat, and why they eat, and also at every angle of their bodies, she recommends. “Take a digital camera and your computer for self-examination. Bring plenty of Kleenex and no alcohol.”

“When we’re finished with the anguish and self-loathing — much of it not our fault, but still parked in our psyches as our private garbage– the majority of American women will have a more self-nurturing relationship with their forks.”

L Anne Enke is a women’s lifestyle and trends expert, with a special focus on sexuality in American culture. During her 10 years with Victoria’s Secret, Anne had four assignments, including Fashion Director.