Tyra Says She's Not a Porkchop!

On her hit show America's Next Top Model, Tyra Banks has always stressed the importance of body confidence – but it still hurt when tabloids ran an unflattering photo of her in a bathing suit under headlines that screamed, "America's Next Top Waddle" and "Tyra Porkchop."

Now, for the first time in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Banks, 33, is publicly discussing her much-buzzed-about weight gain. "I get so much mail from young girls who say, 'I look up to you, you're not as skinny as everyone else, I think you're beautiful,' " she says. "So when they say that my body is 'ugly' and 'disgusting,' what does that make those girls feel like?" As for how Banks feels about her own 5'10" body – which she says is at 161 lbs. these days, about 30 lbs. heavier than when she landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue in 1997 – she says: "I still feel hot, but every day is different. It's when I put on the jeans that used to fit a year ago and don't fit now and give me the muffin top, that's when I say, 'Damn!' "

In other words, yes: She has put on weight, though not nearly as much as those recent tabloid stories suggested. (Banks believes the pix were snapped at an unflattering angle.) "She has a very womanly, gorgeous body that goes up and down," says her good friend Heidi Klum. Still, she isn't freaking out about wearing size 32-waist jeans or about "the fat roll" she claims to have on her back. (Her biggest source of figure angst is her size-DD breasts, which she says make it hard to find clothes that fit: "I would love for them to be a size and a half smaller.")

Besides, Banks is having a lot more fun these days eating the pancakes off a friend's plate at IHOP than trying to fit into designer sample sizes. Of course, if someone would come up with a miracle cure for cellulite, she's not above admitting she'd be first in line. "I think every woman," she says, "would want to do something about their cellulite!"

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